Reflections on Refugees During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“This work has the potential to transform us, to broaden our understanding of our own lives, to give our experience greater depth and meaning.”

One of the most striking elements of the pandemic has been the experiences that are analogous to those of refugees. I am exhausted by uncertainty and maddened by isolation, both of which conflicts with my personal mythology of independence. I am gripped by anxiety in public places that, as a White person, reminds me of conversations with friends about their hypervigilance in enduring systemic racism. I am a small step closer to being able to imagine living with the constant fear that a stranger could casually end my life.

The current state of the world and our own neighborhoods invite us to consider and imagine the experiences of refugees as well as other displaced, marginalized, and vulnerable people. Perhaps, more accurately, it points to our glaring inability to imagine their experiences and the limitations of our own values. It would not be difficult to argue that the extent of the impact of the pandemic is due in no small part to a failure of our imaginations.

In what would end up being our last class together, I tried to assuage my adult English as a Second Language (ESL) students’ fears about the spread of COVID-19. I was sure, I told them, that we would all be fine—that the American health care system is top-notch and ready for any challenge. Looking back, I believe I was blithely patronizing and couldn’t have been more exactly wrong. I didn’t have the imagination to envision that, a month later, my partner would head to work wearing a face shield made in my high school physics teacher’s garage and a mask made in my sister-in-law’s upcycling handbag workshop because neither would be otherwise available.

We are in the grip of a climate crisis that lives in the paradoxes of the complex and unimaginable. As scientists and activists push us toward understanding the impact of climate change, those impacts become easier to imagine and, ironically, we are comforted by imagining that they are, therefore, easy to solve. The existential threat of climate change, however, is change that occurs so quickly and unpredictably that it precludes any response. We can be sure, however, that many more people will be displaced. The spread of COVID-19 is an example of this confounding complexity—even as the pandemic touches every corner of the globe, marshaling the world’s resources toward a coherent response appears next to impossible.

As we sink deeper into an ocean of complexity and uncertainty, we could imagine the myriad of catastrophes that may befall us so that we might better prepare. But perhaps more importantly, we could exercise our moral imaginations and consider how we might respond as greater and more frequent catastrophes visit our communities. When our uncertainty is greatest, we crave secure belonging the most. We are hewn together not so much by the problems we face but by the moral logic we marshal in response. How we decide the right and just course of action and how we tell the story of facing these challenges is the glue that binds us together.

Several years ago, leading a workshop for a group of teachers in India about project-based learning, I showed a video made by students in California about their efforts to combat gun violence in their community. The video was provocative and powerful, and illustrated all the components of a successful, student-driven project. But the group of 70 teachers stared blankly at me until one politely asked, “Do you have anything more relevant to our experience? You see, we don’t have gun violence in India . . . ” I had not considered that my American identity was something I would be responsible for and something that needed to be negotiated and explained. It never occurred to me that I might seem wholly disingenuous, or complicit, or out of touch with the real and pressing social issues of their lives.

This experience helped me think about the way we delineate our identities through a shared imagination of our problems. Just as “we are what we eat,” as a community we are what we gossip about, wring our hands over, and, essentially, moralize together. We gain comfort from a shared sense of right and wrong, and the soothing subtext of being good people, together.

Determining the deeper moral logic of one’s story is, perhaps, even more important than authoring it. When I taught at an international high school in Houston, a student told me the story of leaving everyone he knew in a refugee camp and traveling to America where he started a successful business. Every month, he met with his friends and they all pooled their money so they could pay teachers and buy supplies for the children in the camps in Uganda. I was so impressed with his story and told him that I wanted to help share it with others so he could raise more money. He smiled patiently and politely declined. Another teacher had also been impressed with his story and helped him give talks to different groups about his work, but he found that it wasn’t worth the difficulty and his time was better spent running his business. My own moralizing of his story was not helpful to him and would have become a burden.

As educators, we carry the risk of reactivating trauma and we must contend with never being able to do enough. The work will always be unfinished, but we cannot pretend that the work was not always really ours. We might struggle to glimpse what is in the heart of a displaced person arriving in our classrooms, but they have already seen clearly into ours. They carry the weight of our collective failure—both directly by contending for survival within all our broken systems and more subtly by enduring our racism and xenophobia, being forced to enact our projections of otherness and our unconscious fears. Refugees in our communities arrive unaware of the hidden codes of systemic racism, codes that White people like me are uncomfortable addressing and mostly wish would remain hidden. As leaders and educators, we must contend with the real danger and possibility that our work could do little more than usher refugees neatly and quietly into crushing systemic racism.

Growing up and living with White people for most of my life, the most wholehearted love and appreciation of the American Dream I have ever encountered has been among refugees and immigrants. They believe, more than anyone, in the mythology of American salvation. What would it mean if the people who were most worthy of the task of safeguarding our national ideals were the same people who many of us shun and who risk death to arrive here? What if we were not their saviors, but they ours? What if they possess gifts of strength and resilience that we would struggle to imagine? What if instead of talking about how or whether refugees might be a burden, we talked about how much help we need? What if their grace and wisdom saved us?

This work has the potential to transform us, to broaden our understanding of our own lives, to give our experience greater depth and meaning. It is possible that the social and political beliefs we hold to most dearly, the beliefs we cherish most viscerally, are not wrong or incorrect, but crude and reductive, that they create a prison that places limitations on our experience and identity. In the face of potential global catastrophe, or perhaps our unifying, collective salvation, the art of understanding ourselves, the breadth and richness of each moment, is the only thing we truly control.

We can think about how to support refugees as they settle in our communities, and we should. But the group of people who will struggle most to adapt are people like me—White and privileged. I have worked in many failing schools and educational institutions and one thing that almost never gets addressed is how their failures are due in large part to the inability of their privileged, White staff to accommodate changes in their student demographics. There is a crucial difference to note here, in that working to serve the needs of non-White families is entirely different from helping White teachers think about themselves and their relationship to race and culture.

If our current task is to fashion some guiding moral understanding together then the only real resource we have is in our beating hearts. The images and metaphors we carry with us and the distinct, perhaps transcendent, moments that punctuate our lives with pain and wonder are the tools we will use to build it. We can understand each other more deeply by sharing them and they can energize and guide our work. These moments in our classrooms and the moments our students share with us will teach us what we can’t now imagine. They will become who we are.