The Impact of the Pandemic and the “Racial Reckoning” on Health Outcomes and American Democracy

Robert Tsai will speak as a panelist on “The Impact of the Pandemic and the ‘Racial Reckoning’ on Health Outcomes and American Democracy” on Wednesday, February 1, 2023. The discussion, put on by the Institute for Common Power in partnership with the University of Washington Department of Medicine, will run from 3:30 to 5:00 pm.

In this panel discussion, three of the editors/contributors (Merritt, Williams, Tsai) to the anthology, Afterlife: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America will join Minnesota Community Care executive officer, Rueben Moore, to discuss the impact of the Pandemic and the “Racial Reckoning “on everything from healthcare to the health of American democracy.

After Life is a collective history of how Americans experienced, navigated, commemorated, and ignored mass death and loss during the global COVID-19 pandemic, mass uprisings for racial justice, and the near presidential coup in 2021 following the 2020 election. Inspired by the writers who documented American life during the Great Depression and World War II for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the editors asked twenty-first-century historians and legal experts to focus on the parallels, convergences, and differences between the exceptional “long 2020”, while it unfolds, and earlier eras in U.S. History.

The title (After Life) is an affirmation that even in our suspended half-living during lockdowns and quarantines, we are a nation of survivors—with an unprecedented chance to rebuild society in a more equitable way.