Readers and Viewers:

Welcome to the first digital edition of Labor Writes. In this 2020 issue, subtitled The COVID-19 Project, our writers and artists and musician consider what do workers have to say about the global pandemic that we have come to know as COVID-19? How is this issue relevant to Black Lives Matter? Why is it important for there to be writing, art and music published by and about workers and students, as well as their rights and experiences? We were in late production with a tight deadline; unfortunately, we couldn’t gather more images of our students and alumni who masked up and out in the streets.

Writing, observing through a lens, and making music are practices that people decide that they are good at or not good at, based on feedback from teachers, parents and mentors. If we receive good feedback, we think we are good; if we don’t receive good feedback, then we don’t think we are good. We think maybe we should stop. We think maybe writing or photography or music isn’t for us. Well, the truth is, we need your work, we need your words and your vision. We need work from people of all aspects of society to be published, read, and distributed. In order for us to know the experience of another, we need to be able to interact with their minds and hearts directly. That’s what the Labor Writes 2020: The COVID-19 Project edition is about. Workers walk through the world with a particular perspective, and this edition captures the diversity of experiences that Van Arsdale students are having while surviving this global pandemic and just encountering another.

For we cannot publish this edition without acknowledging the uprising against the deep-seated racial injustice that has defined our country since its beginning. This edition is released just when millions of people of color and allies are taking to the streets around the world demanding justice for the lives of innocent black people who have been murdered by the police. This is a historic moment for us as individuals and as a collective. We have the honor to live at the crux of these two co-existing realities that may not seem correlated, but they are. The forces that undermine the rights of workers are the same forces that reinforce racial injustice in this country. The fact that black and brown communities have been disproportionately affected by the effects of COVID-19 is evidence of the white supremacy that millions have taken to the streets to protest. The struggle of workers is the struggle for minority groups to have our piece of the pie, to have equal access to economic stability and freedom.

I hope you allow these pieces of music, art and writing to open your minds, to open your hearts, to allow you to see things in a way you never have before. We believe the voices of the worker-students featured have the power to do that.

Keep taking pictures and making music.

Keep writing. Keep giving back.

Summer Minerva, Associate Editor
Rebecca Fraser, Editor in Chief
Barrie Cline, Art Editor
Emily Lawless Taffe, Contributing Editor