We often describe change as this revolutionary event, where a person enters into said event as one person and exits as a completely new person. My experience is that, for most folks, including me, change is far more gradual.

June 28 will always be my anniversary. I won’t get the chance to go on vacations to Canada or Europe on future June 28s. I won’t have the space to retell the story of my marriage with the person who has more historical knowledge of me than anyone else.

But I still want to use my anniversary as an annual check-in, where I ask myself: What are my values? What are the characteristics that I want to be in my relationship? How am I doing at being the person that I want to be? How do I communicate this with the important people in my life? “With” is the key word here, as I hope that engaging others in dialogue around my values allows me to hear the experiences of others.

My entire childhood was about convincing other people that I belonged in a community that wasn’t designed for people who looked like me. COVID-19 and racism intersect for me because my entire life, I’ve been wearing a mask. A white one.

In this blog post, I discuss how do groups, specifically Christianity, gain power. As I mentioned in the last post, folks have created ingroups and outgroups for millennia. I look at ways that Christianity has moved toward the discrimination of bodies. We also recognize that this is not new—the particular brand of discrimination—white, Eurocentric bodies and discourses dictating trends, expectations, and physical expectations for non-White bodies—goes back before the start of our country.

For now, it seems like enough folks (at least in Massachusetts) have bought into the idea that wearing a mask is a sign of public health and compassion toward others.

But regardless of what value you put on wearing a mask (such as “I’m doing this to flatten the curve and help out hospital workers”), when I am wearing a mask, I am othering the folks that walk by me:

I am safe. I don’t know if you’re safe, so I assume that you’re not.

Schrodinger’s Effect.

This process, especially when played out over a long time, has devastating relational consequences. These relational consequences are actually the result of complex physiological processes that impact how we engage with other people.