Listen to Brooklyn-New-York-native Dr. Travis J. Bristol, PhD in Education — parents from Guyana — who identifies as Black American and who lives in Oakland, California talk about living and working during the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2020 as an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkley he was able to work from home and have all of his meals with his wife – a U.C. Berkeley professor – and his two kids each day during the pandemic. He began homeschooling his 3rd grader and 7th grader when schools transitioned to remote-learning in 2020, which he said was challenging.
He knew three people who transitioned: two relatives and a close family friend. They were all Black men in their late 50s and early 60s. His wife’s aunt was sick with Covid-19 in the ICU for many weeks in the Jacob Javits Center emergency hospital set up by Governor Cuomo in New York City, and she pulled through. He had a close cousin in the ICU with Covid-19.
He acknowledges how his class privilege created a bubble for him. He has a family member who worked for the NYC MTA which caused him to work in person, contract Covid-19, and transition after succumbing to it. He is aware of how historic and systemic racism creates limited opportunities for Black Americans to earn at-home, which effected Black people who worked in-person during the pandemic.
“I think that as someone whose work is to think about the inequity in public schools, what the pandemic did was underscore how inequities continue to be reproduced, just in terms of how students did not have access to technology to reliable internet…It was also heartbreaking because so much of my professional work examines these types of inequities and to see them was quite hard…” Dr. Bristol shared.
