Rahn, though, isn’t a firefighter who was called into duty to help battle what became one of the biggest and most destructive fires in California history. Rather, he’s a wildfire researcher at Cal State San Marcos who, in 2019, created a unique degree program called Wildfire Science and the Urban Interface. He’s also the executive director of the Wildfire Conservancy, a nonprofit research foundation dedicated to serving the state’s firefighters and protecting its communities.

The wildfires that devastated the L.A. area, and even caused minor damage in pockets of San Diego County, have been contained. But the significant problem of grappling with ever larger and more dangerous fires fueled by climate change is only growing worse, and Rahn can be found permanently stationed on the front lines of that fight.

Question: What was the nature of the work you were doing during the L.A. fires last month?

Matt Rahn: I and my team at the Wildfire Conservancy have been doing research related to firefighter health and safety. Specifically, we have been conducting an exposure study related to the toxic, hazardous and carcinogenic materials firefighters are exposed to in a wildland urban interface fire. We are collecting data on exposures using silicon wrist bands (as a passive sampling device that is extremely good at absorbing all the contaminants firefighters are exposed to). We compare these to urine and blood samples taken from firefighters to track exposure to substances like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (or PAHs), volatile organic compounds (or VOCs), heavy metals and other compounds. We use a variety of techniques, including micro RNA analysis that can measure the change in gene expression, particularly those responsible for either causing (or suppressing) cancer. 

Q: What was your reaction when you first heard about the fires? Could you have imagined that it would ever get that bad in the nation’s second-most-populous city?

MR: Sadly, I wasn’t shocked. For over 10 years now, we have been saying what is now common vernacular: We no longer have a “fire season,” we have a year-round fire risk. And we no longer have “wildfires” but rather fires in the wildland urban interface (or WUI), which is the area where human development and infrastructure meet undeveloped wildland or natural areas. But this change began much longer ago. 

In 1991, in a remarkable and singularly cataclysmic event, the Oakland Hills became engulfed by a devastating fire that resulted in 3,280 homes lost, 25 fatalities and 1,520 acres burned. At that time, the loss was unthinkable; by today’s standards, the Oakland Hills fire, while still tragic, is certainly not the largest of its kind. That resulted in renewed recognition of the dangers posed by fires in the WUI and prompted new research and development into improved prevention and suppression methods, policy, and procedure of these kinds of fires. Unfortunately, that focus was short-lived, and over a decade would pass until California experienced another devastating wildfire, this time in San Diego County, that would grab national attention. 

Engulfing more than 280,000 acres, destroying 3,241 homes and causing the loss of 16 lives, the 2003 Cedar fire surpassed all records and became the most devastating fire in California’s history. With a total economic loss of nearly $2.5 billion, we realized that the devastation was not contained to acres burned; the fiscal impacts to our communities far outweighed the actual cost of fighting this megafire. Even with a peak of 6,635 firefighters battling the blaze, suppression was less than 2% of the total cost of that wildfire incident.

For more context, since 1970, the U.S. has witnessed a roughly 300% increase in acres burned each year. Fifty years ago, wildfires would burn about 3 million acres per year across the entire U.S.; today, a single fire in California can consume one-third of that historic national acreage. So, fast forward to the fires in Paradise, California in 2018 and the 2023 fires in Maui, where over 100 people lost their lives. Sadly, we all should have seen this coming.

Q: Do you think there’s any merit to the criticism that city officials could have done more to keep the fires from getting so out of control? Or was this strictly a scenario of worst-case environmental conditions?

MR: Persistent drought, hot and dry temperatures, and extremely high winds in a community not built to modern standards for wildfire-prone areas were dangerous starting conditions for any fire event. The high winds provided an extremely short opportunity to prevent a conflagration. These winds also prevented the use of aerial attacks in the early stages of the fire. Fire agencies were left with ground resources, battling one of the most difficult and hazardous fire storms in U.S. history. Given the extreme fire behavior and conditions, the ultimate suppression and containment of the fires and prevention of additional losses was due in large part to the remarkable firefighter staffing and surge capacity that was mobilized. 

It’s easy, if not dangerous, for folks so quickly to criticize agencies and municipalities, and make a tragic incident like this a political talking point. Organizations like Cal Fire, L.A. City and County Fire, and even the National Institute of Standards and Technology are all working to recreate the mobilization of resources and try to understand how response impacted outcomes. This is a very complicated and labor-intensive process that needs to be completed. 

 

Q: If I’m remembering correctly, the worst fires in the state over the last decade or so have been in Northern California, including the Camp fire in 2018. Do you think Southern Californians had acquired a false sense of security and complacency?

MR: Unfortunately, many communities acquire a false sense of security and complacency. We see this year after year. When there is smoke in the air and a major incident that galvanizes our communities, state and nation, all the attention is given to that fire, with a collective promise that we will not forget and will work to keep our communities safe. But as time passes (and in some cases, not much time can pass), communities become lax in their collective efforts for fuel reduction programs, maintaining defensible space or other factors that can significantly contribute to community resilience. We cannot allow this to occur. 

In fact, the Wildfire Conservancy along with some of our instructors in the Wildfire Science and the Urban Interface degree at CSUSM have teamed up to address this exact issue. We were awarded a grant from the FEMA Fire Prevention and Safety program in support of community resilience and advanced training support for Maui. Together with the County of Maui and Maui’s fire department, emergency operations and community associations, the Wildfire Conservancy will build on existing programs with the Responding to the Interface (RTI) program (from Cal Fire and the International Association of Fire Fighters) as the foundation for working with high-risk communities to develop a comprehensive and customized WUI firefighter training tailored to Maui and its communities, and create an annual event that is designed to improve community resilience, awareness, outreach and education. We are working to bring this effort to a national stage starting with Maui and continuing to California and beyond. 

Q: What have you heard from the fire crews that were battling the blazes in L.A.?

MR: We have so far connected with hundreds of firefighters from Cal Fire, L.A. Fire Department, L.A. County Fire Department and other departments like Santa Barbara, Ventura, Fillmore, Oxnard and Pasadena. They are just now beginning to catch their collective breath and recover from these incidents. They are keenly aware of the exposures they have experienced in these fires. The success won by those “boots on the ground” may come at a significant personal and societal cost. The fires resulted in extreme high-level exposures for responding firefighters, at a scale not seen since Sept. 11, 2001. Many of us in the scientific community are speculating that these fires may well constitute an exposure incident that far exceeds that momentous day. The full impact has yet to be realized. 

 

Q: How long have you been a scholar and researcher of wildfire science? How did you first get involved in it as a discipline?

MR: I began working on wildfire issues shortly after the Cedar fire in 2003 and became more fully engaged in research after the Witch and Guejito fires in 2007. My first projects were focused on things like fire sensors to provide early detection of wildfires in remote areas and economic impact studies related to the Cedar fire. I then moved quickly into research on attack effectiveness, completing the seminal study on wildland firefighter staffing that is still used to this day as the standard for helping advocate for proper state firefighter staffing. We then moved quickly into firefighter health and safety, given the impacts we were seeing related to cardiac events, dehydration and heat illness, and cancer. Since then, my time and effort on wildfire and urban interface fires has increased dramatically, culminating in the new degree program at CSUSM in 2019 and the launch the same year of the Wildfire Conservancy.  

 

Q: How has the field evolved over the years as wildfires have gotten bigger and more destructive?

MR: We have been ringing the bell on wildfires and the WUI since the early 2000s. Back then, we were using terms like “the new normal.” Today, everyone is keenly aware of the risks, and the number of agencies, organizations and individuals involved in answering the call has increased significantly. Our first symposium on these issues was held a little over a decade ago in Sacramento, in partnership with Cal Fire and Cal Fire Local 2881. Experts from around California and the nation gathered and agreed that wildland firefighting was easily a decade behind structural/urban firefighting. The recommendation was to increase research and education programs in response to this. CSUSM has helped lead that effort with the new degree program, and organizations like the Wildfire Conservancy have formed to prioritize some of the most pressing issues facing our communities and first responders. 

 

Q: How would you describe CSUSM’s wildfire science program and what it does?

MR: The degree program is unique. It’s focused on the WUI as its primary mission, educating our next generation of firefighters to deal with the unique issues related to these kinds of incidents. Clearly there is a need, and that need is growing. It is no longer just a California issue or something that is particular to the western U.S. Nearly every community in the nation has some kind of risk related to WUI fires. Providing the training and education for that growing risk is critically important. 

What makes this program unique is that it was designed with firefighters and key agencies, including Cal Fire, the fire departments of San Diego and L.A., the U.S. Forest Service, NIST, and many other departments from around the country. We designed our curriculum based on their input, and it includes coursework in community planning and resilience, firefighter health and safety, wildfire law and economics, kinesiology and fitness, and even emerging tools and technologies. Our program also offers a course in firefighter mental and behavioral health, the first of its kind in the nation. The program is designed for working professionals, is fully online and has the ability to put a pause on coursework for students who may be deployed to major incidents during the semester. And yes, several of our own students were working on the L.A. fires. 

We are lucky to have some of the foremost experts as instructors for some of the more specialized courses, and several remarkable faculty members at CSUSM also are teaching in this program. One last thing I should mention is that each student, at the end of their last semester, works with us to conduct their own “senior thesis” and research project focused on WUI issues. I’m happy to say that three of our former students will publish their research papers in the new Journal of the Wildfire Conservancy, a new science journal produced through the CSU system.

Q: CalMatters did an award-winning investigative series called “Trial by Fire” in 2022 about the traumatic toll of wildfires on firefighters, almost akin to being in war. How concerned are you about that, and what are some steps you’d recommend to deal with it?

MR: Modern firefighters are responding to some of the most horrific, toxic, hazardous and carcinogenic incidents ever imagined, working in environments where the human body was never meant to be. They are sleep-deprived and regularly experience potentially traumatic events that can affect their mental health. We are seeing the results of this today through rising rates of cancer (far higher than the general population), increased rates of suicide and suicidal ideations, and high rates of heart attack and stroke. We can and must do better for those who are sacrificing themselves (and their families) in service to our communities. This is why we started the degree program and launched the research foundation. I know this is the thing that motivates so many of our fantastic researchers, faculty, instructors and students who have dedicated their careers to helping. 

 

Q: I know funding, and the lack thereof, is a big part of this, but how would you like to see firefighting improve to confront the threat posed by bigger wildfires fueled by climate change?

MR: We need to give our fire agencies the resources, staffing and technology they need to respond to these events. We absolutely do need more boots on the ground, air attack resources and access to new tools and technologies. We also need a significant investment in personal protective equipment and advanced technologies that can reduce occupational exposures and risk. Fire prevention is also a big piece of the puzzle. We need to take the commitment to fuel management and defensible space seriously, and dedicate the resources needed to create long-term, large-scale sustainable efforts. We also need to rethink our laws, codes and regulations related to housing, businesses and infrastructure, and invest in programs that can better inform future decision-making, land-use planning and community-wide wildfire protection plans. 

 

Q: What lessons are you taking away from the L.A. fires? Should we be rebuilding in these fire-devastated areas? How can we make such communities more resilient?

MR: We as humans tend to build in high-risk areas, whether they are fire-prone or at risk from floods, earthquakes, tornadoes or hurricanes. We have made remarkable strides in addressing community resilience and facility-hardening across many of these high-risk areas, including wildfires. We know what can and does work, and considerable investments are being made to develop new materials, designs and strategies to increase protection. However, none of this works if we continue to allow for poor planning and fail to provide for programs to help improve and retrofit existing communities. It will continue to fail if we don’t take our commitment to fuel management and defensible space seriously. And it will fail if we don’t take immediate action finally to fund a full-time, year-round fire service through Cal Fire and provide our struggling fire agencies the staffing and resources they need to do their job. In addition, we desperately need a significant overhaul to California’s insurance laws and regulations. Each of these issues by itself is not a solution and can easily fail when handled alone. However, if we think of each issue as a separate stick, when they are bundled together, they form a stronger and more resilient unit. We are all in this together. 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Alarming signs of drought are everywhere, from the early loss of snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains to fields of crops lying fallow to mandates imposed by water agencies throughout California. And there’s no end in sight: Initial forecasts are that the state could see a third straight year of La Niña conditions, in which desperately needed precipitation is scarce.  

What sometimes feels like permanent drought is perhaps the most visible manifestation of the ravages of climate change on California, but there are plenty of others – heat waves, more frequent and intense wildfires, even (paradoxically, given the overall lack of rain) flooding.  

To delve into this new normal, we turned to Tihomir Kostadinov and Elizabeth Ridder, two Cal State San Marcos geography professors. They specialize in different areas – Kostadinov in marine science and Ridder in human-environment relationships – but they both spend much of their time thinking about the effects of drought and climate change on the place they now call home.  

Question: I've lived in the San Diego area for more than two decades, and in that time I’ve experienced many years of drought and other years where we got a lot of rain and snow to make up for previous shortfalls. But now, the sense I have is that drought is becoming kind of a permanent condition of life here. Do you have a similar sense of what we're facing? 

Elizabeth Ridder: Drought tends to be a temporary condition. And there are different ways of defining what we mean by drought and whether it's short-term or long-term – it can be short but very intense, or it can be prolonged and not quite as stressful on the ecosystem. It does seem that California, in general, is shifting toward changing precipitation type. In the Sierras, for example, the timing of precipitation is changing as well as the form, so instead of snowfall, more rainfall, which has knock-on effects later in the year. When rivers and ecosystems and people rely on that snowmelt, well, the water is already gone to the ocean.  

We’ve had quite a few droughts; Mediterranean environments have them. But they are becoming slightly more severe. We had that one from 2015 to 2018 that was a 1,200-year record. So, yes, it's been dry before, but we're seeing it be dry more frequently. We're seeing it not just as meteorological drought, where there's a lack of precipitation, but also as an agricultural drought, where soil moisture is lost and has impacts on vegetation. And, of course, with California being really reliant on its agriculture, we're seeing a lot of politics around that change in water.  

Tihomir Kostadinov: We’re in what you might call a megadrought. This is the 22^nd year of it, going back to 2000. The last two years were really bad, and this year is proving to be not good so far. It started off OK – the Sierra Nevada had some record snowfalls in December, then later during the normal times when it snows, we didn't get that much. So the snowpack was low at the end of the year and it was very erratic, which brings me to this: Variability is expected to increase with climate change – bringing both big droughts and big floods, and general variability of what's called the water cycle. Increases in climate extremes are the general pattern coming with climate change, and observations in the news lately are consistent with that. 

ER: To that point about variability, Death Valley received almost all of its annual rainfall over a period of 48 hours in August. All the roads were washed out, a lot of the park was closed down. It doesn't get much rain, but when it gets it all at once, we see things like flash flooding that goes along with more intense thunderstorms and the soil not being able to soak it all up fast enough. Those kinds of disasters could be more frequent in the future.  

Q: On that subject, there was a study released in August with dire predictions about a megaflood that could hit the entire state and cause unimaginable damage. Did you read about that? 

TK: Yes, and the chances of it are increasing. Something that occurs only once in 100 years normally, with climate change is expected to occur maybe once every 20 or 30 years. Instead of once in a human lifetime, it might occur three times and destroy properties, agricultural fields and other infrastructure. These are the atmospheric rivers that affect us in the winter, that can dump a lot of rain over a short period of time and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography has a special team that’s studying just those. So yes, ironically, at the same time we’re dealing with a megadrought, we might get a megaflood as well. Everything in the Earth system is interconnected. That's what we teach in our classes – everything on our planet, including the human system and the economy, is interconnected with each other. 

Q: Liz, you mentioned earlier the threat of drought to agriculture. I saw a story recently that, in terms of major crops, California is expecting 30% lower yields in the next year than even a couple of years ago. What will that mean long term? What will it do to the availability of food? 

ER: As it gets warmer, plants aren't as efficient, just like people. They have these little pores on the underside of their leaves, and they shut those to prevent water loss. But that also means they can't cool off because it's that evaporation of water that helps cool down plants, similar to our evaporation of sweat. So they reach this threshold, and you start to see plants dropping leaves earlier than you would expect, because that internal water is not enough.  

Our agricultural industry is $50 billion per year, and about 80% of our water is allocated to agriculture. When we’re in droughts, they start to shunt water around our state in different ways, which diverts it from things like marshlands, other ecosystem services, maybe restoration sites. In terms of agriculture, California's economy is going to slow as we're experiencing water shortages, variable precipitation, lack of reliance on Sierra snowmelt. The citrus will probably stay, but we’re going to have to start growing things that are less water intensive but also can handle the increased heat. When you're both limited by water and have increased temperatures, then there are some serious issues in terms of the vegetation. 

Megadroughts and megafloods are going to have serious impacts on agriculture production and on people's livelihoods at the industry scale. But also, day to day, the jobs of agricultural workers are going to become riskier in terms of the conditions under which they work. There are health impacts to those sorts of changes as well. 

Q: What do you think are some ways that Californians need to change to develop water resiliency in the face of persistent drought conditions? 

ER: People hate it, but lawns. We spend a lot of money and a lot of time and effort maintaining these green fields. Grasses here don't grow like that. If you look around, the native grasses are brown and dry in the summertime. So using all that water to maintain lawns is wasteful. That said, households aren’t the major user in our state. It's going to have to be at the industry, agricultural level in terms of how we reduce our water consumption.  

TK: Humanity as a whole needs to learn not to waste things – water, energy and everything else really. I'm not an expert on agriculture. I can't tell you whether they can or how they will adapt to drought on the agricultural side. But in terms of households, we need to look at things like lawns and other ways to conserve water.  

The other way to adapt would be desalination. Our area has a desalination plant, and we get a third of our water from it. But it has its own host of issues, which teaches us a lesson: There's no free lunch. Everything that we do on the scale that we want to do it to achieve the comfort that we want to achieve for eight to 10 billion people is going to be challenging, and it's going to have global effects. Something has to give, and maybe we have to give up some lifestyles. Just as an example, I'm from Europe and I miss certain foods, so I eat imported food, and a lot of it comes from somewhere half a world away. California has to reconsider all these exports that are water heavy. We grow a lot of alfalfa that is watered with California water, but it is exported somewhere else. That means exporting water in some sense as well. These things need to be reconsidered, just like everything else around climate change. 

Q: I'm glad you mentioned desalination. For years, there has been a big push to build another one of those plants in Huntington Beach, but this summer the proposal was rejected. Do you think more of those facilities should be built in California? 

TK: After several global events in the last two or three years, I saw how important it is to be independent locally, to the extent feasible and reasonable, with the basics, which include medicine and food and energy. My opinion is that it’s better to produce your own medicine and food and have water locally, too. So unless we all want to move from here, I think we need to desalinate some water in Southern California and carefully assess how to deal with the salt that's left behind. The very salty water that is left is called brine, and that brine can wreak havoc on local ecosystems when it's released in large quantities. But in the larger scheme of things, this sounds like a solvable issue to me – you can probably figure out more easily what to do with this extra saltwater than what to do with the CO₂ in the atmosphere.  

Plus, only certain areas of the planet will need desalination. Some areas will get wetter, actually. The outlook in Southern California is uncertain long term, until 2100. It probably will be drier, but predicting rainfall is much harder and less certain than temperatures. 

Q: But however long this current drought lasts, it will have an end date? 

ER: Based on how drought is defined, yes. We'll either have multiple years of precipitation or it will recharge groundwater or streams to counter the hydrological drought or the soil pores will again become saturated so then we’re out of agricultural drought. It depends on which scale you're looking at. But at some point, we can say, ‘OK, this drought is over because we've met whatever conditions that term it so.’ That doesn't mean it's wetter; it just means that we've managed to go over that threshold of not being in lack of precipitation.  

Going back to desalination, the other thing that we have in San Diego that I don't know if people know about is the Pure Water recycling system. I know it freaks people out, but it is sewage recycling. I got to tour the facility before the pandemic, and Pure Water has this crazy set of filters and different ways that they treat the water that it basically meets drinking water quality. But then they dump it back into one of our reservoirs, and it goes through the reservoir system. And then they treat it again before they send it out to people. That recycling can be improved. The water that comes out of your dishwasher, your tub, your kitchen sink – that all can be used to water other things, like your grass. The hard part is getting the permits that allow you to recycle this water on your own property. But it would be a great use, because not only is it watering your plants, it's helping keep that soil moisture and all those other hydrological functions up without just sending it down the sewer system. Yes, it eventually goes back to the ocean, but you can use it in multiple stages, which would reduce how much water we're using from the reservoirs and how much water we need to desalinate. So it lessens the stress on other systems.  

TK: Everybody would like to drink mountain water instead of recycled water. But we need to learn how to recycle water more and perhaps capture more of it. Maybe we should have better dams to collect the local rains, from atmospheric rivers when they come by and other rainfall, instead of letting the water run out to the ocean and then worrying about how to desalinate it. Things in nature recycle, and the ecosystems provide these things for us. If we mess them up or we go to a place where they are not sufficient for our population, then we run into issues, a little bit like trying to send people to Mars. 

Q: Tiho, what did you make of the recent report that the melting of the ice sheet in Greenland will cause almost a foot of sea level rise? 

TK: I'm not a specialist in that area, but glacial science is very complicated. What’s important to understand is that this issue has many nonlinearities, just like a lot of things in climate analysis. If, say, 100 tons of ice have melted over the last decade somewhere, it definitely does not mean that another 100 will melt over the next decade. There can be an explosive tipping point, and the system can rapidly accelerate its change. There are many factors involved. The thing that few people think about but is really critical for ice on our planet is that it affects how mirror-like our planet is, how reflective it is. The more ice and snow we have, the more reflective the planet is, keeping it cooler than it otherwise would be. Once we start melting areas in Greenland or Antarctica, the whole planet is going to warm more on top of what it already is doing by virtue of the fact that ice is replaced by something darker. That's called the ice-albedo feedback. Albedo is the reflectivity of the planet, meaning how much of solar light that hits our planet is reflected back to space as a mirror and doesn't participate in the warming of the planet. Imagine Earth covered completely in a perfect mirror. Then it would not warm at all; it would be at absolute zero, like space. Instead, the planet is using 70% of the solar energy that falls on it; the rest is reflected. 

Q: You're painting a pretty frightening picture of additional warming on top of the already dire warming. 

TK: I was impressed and also a little bit scared when I learned about student climate anxiety. Our students get genuinely concerned and even depressed, I believe more so than I do. I think the planet as a whole is fine. It has had severe climates in the past multiple times; the dinosaurs lived in a very different climate than we do, and CO₂ then was much higher than what it is now. But when the planet has changed a lot, species have disappeared a lot. And in the end, the concern is about humans. The planet as a physical entity will be fine. Some species will survive, some will not, as it has always been that way in the past. But human suffering and the inequalities behind it are a big concern. For me, I'm more concerned about the effects on agriculture, probably because I like food a lot. In addition, there is of course the big concern of unnecessary animal suffering and species extinctions and biodiversity loss caused by the actions of humans. 

ER: Tiho and I see a lot of environmental studies students who think about environmental problems a lot already. They're thinking about justice questions – who has access to what, who will be able to weather the storm or not, who has more capacity. Living in California, they already are seeing themselves as being priced out of a place, having to choose maybe between owning a home or having a family. On top of all the injustice issues, they’re thinking about, “Is this all going to collapse around me? How are we going to feed 8 billion people on the planet? How do we address these inequalities?” Climate anxiety, justice issues – our students are really thinking hard about these things, how to address them and what kinds of decisions are coming at them in the next five to 10 years. 

Q: I can only imagine because I feel that kind of anxiety, too. I assume you feel really sympathetic to what they're going through. 

TK: It's more intense with them, which I understand better now that I've been here more years and I understand my students better. But at first, I was surprised that they seem more concerned about these things than I am as an environmental scientist who studies these things and is deeply concerned about them. But they are more directly anxious about it – which is good and bad at the same time. 

Q: Good that they're conscious of the problem, but bad for their mental health, right? 

TK: I have to think harder about what to tell them. Something along the lines of what I said earlier: The planet is fine, but we have to be concerned about human well-being and many other species. It’s very hard to stay positive, but good changes are coming, even if it doesn't look like they're coming fast enough at this stage of affairs, the way I see it. For example, 30% to 40% of electricity in California is now made by renewables, and if we can move farther in that direction, that's a big win. Plus the news that only electric vehicles will be sold here starting in 2035, which is not that far away.  

ER: I teach a climate change course, and I'm a little sarcastic and grim in general. I tell my students, “The planet will be fine until the sun burns out or the interior of the earth completely solidifies and stops rotating.” In thinking about climate change or droughts, humans haven't been on the planet that long. We have huge capacity for change, huge capacity for innovation, for all kinds of generosity. Very few organisms have engineered their environments to the degree that we have in such a short time and been so successful. The human footprint is everywhere. So I guess that makes me hopeful that, in such a short time, we've come to a certain place and we can look back and say, “Shoot, we did a bunch of stuff wrong, but what can we do moving forward is far more fascinating than thinking we just messed everything up.” 

In the past, technological changes and scientific endeavors really didn’t put human inequities and justice questions at the center. But I think we're putting those at the center now, which will change a lot of different ways of organizing ourselves on the planet. 

Q: What are some ways that climate change is affecting the landscape and vegetation of San Diego County? 

ER: It's mostly in invasive species. Some of the vegetation here, like chaparral, generally has very shallow root systems. It can capture water quickly, even small amounts of water, should we have any rainfall. But when there is prolonged drought, those plants don't have a deep tap root to get into some of that deeper soil moisture or water resources. So they tend to die out and get replaced by things that can deal with that over time. It's mainly the transition from shrub lands to grass lands, and that increases fire vulnerability to have non-native grasses that are browning and helping carry fuel loads. Getting rid of invasive species can do a lot of fire hardening.  

Q: Let’s say you were appointed U.S. climate czar for a day. What’s the first thing you would do?  

TK: I know it's not very popular to say this, but it would be something like a nationwide ban on leaf blowers, for example. First, because I hate them; they're completely useless machines. Second, because their kind of engine is worse than many cars because cars have a lot of cleaning systems. Leaf blowers are very dirty and very sound-polluting, though at least the electrical ones are much better. That's a small thing. A bigger one is everyone driving more efficient cars or switching to electric, like is happening in California but nationwide. Or some kind of regulation that existing power plants have to capture their CO₂ in some way, even if it costs more and we as a nation absorb the cost. But I don't know if there's one silver bullet. 

ER: I would upgrade our transportation system. Funding things like high-speed trains is expensive, but it's more expensive to do nothing in the long run. You might think, “How can we afford all that?” We can't afford not to. You'd need a really savvy PR individual to convince people that the cost of delaying is much greater than the cost of making our communities the communities we want. Lots of us want public transportation, lots of us want cleaner air and water, lots of us want these societal goods. Is it going to be expensive? Yeah. Does it mean some of us might have to change? Oh yeah.  

TK: Inertia is a huge problem. How can we change existing infrastructure? It's very, very difficult and costly and hard to convince people to do things. And of course, we all enjoy the positive sides of suburbia. But sometimes I wish there was a place I could walk out and get a snack. 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Monkeypox, of course, has not spread with anything close to the speed or ferocity of COVID, but more than three months after it first appeared in the United States, there remains a good deal of confusion (and even ignorance) among the public about the disease.  

At Cal State San Marcos, there’s no better person to clear that up than James Jancovich. The biological sciences professor has almost 15 years of experience working in a lab dedicated to poxviruses, a family of double-stranded DNA viruses that includes smallpox and, yes, monkeypox.

Question: How does monkeypox compare with other viruses that people might be familiar with, such as chickenpox and smallpox? 

James Jancovich: Monkeypox is a member of the genus Orthopoxvirus, family Poxviridae, a group of poxviruses that can infect vertebrate animals. Monkeypox is closely related to smallpox, the primary pathogen of humans. But they are each a unique virus in the genus. Poxviruses, like monkeypox and smallpox, are not closely related to chickenpox viruses. Chickenpox is caused by the varicella zoster virus – an alphaherpes virus (also known as human herpesvirus 3) and not by a poxvirus. 

Q: Have there been spikes of monkeypox before, and why is it spiking now? 

JJ: Monkeypox is a zoonotic disease. That is, it is a virus that occasionally jumps from animals to humans. Contrary to the name, monkeypox infections usually jump from rodents to humans, not monkeys to humans. Typically, zoonotic diseases are difficult to transmit from human to human after jumping from animals. However, occasionally, zoonotic pathogens have the ability to cause person-to-person transmission after a jump, and the current monkeypox seems to be this type of pathogen.  

That said, previous outbreaks of monkeypox have occurred in humans, and the virus is considered to be endemic in Africa. However, most of the previous outbreaks were limited regarding the spread of the virus; the reason for this is unclear. Our current situation may be the result of infected individuals unknowingly having the disease – or maybe not knowing what it was – and transmitting the virus. If signs and symptoms were not that severe, but the virus was still present and transmissible, this would make it difficult to identify infected individuals and thus increase disease transmission. 

Q: How does monkeypox spread? What is the risk of catching it? 

JJ: The monkeypox that is currently spreading throughout the world appears to be transmitted primarily via direct contact with an infected individual.  The virus also can be spread by direct contact with fabrics such as clothing, bedding or towels, and other surfaces that have been used by an infected individual. Poxviruses are very stable outside of a host, unlike other viral pathogens like HIV, for example. This property most likely helps spread the pathogen to new hosts. 

Immunocompromised individuals are typically more susceptible to virus infections, but this monkeypox outbreak appears to infect primarily healthy individuals. That said, in this situation, sexual activities seem to drive disease transmission – reducing these activities when one is infected and/or covering a rash and cleaning items touched by an infected individual can significantly reduce the spread of the virus. The monkeypox outbreak has an extremely low fatality rate – actually, I do not think anyone has yet died because of the viral infection – so even if someone catches the disease, the probability of surviving the infection is extremely high. 

Q: Are there any precautions that people should be taking? 

JJ: This outbreak does not appear to be transmitted via aerosolization, a mode of transmission that is difficult to contain, so the best precautions to take are limiting close interactions with someone infected with the virus or exposure to items used by an infected individual. Eliminating these interactions is the best approach to reduce the spread of the virus. Again, this outbreak seems to be disseminating because of sexual activities. Limiting these activities when someone is showing signs of infection would help prevent disease spread. 

Q: How would someone know if they had monkeypox? What are the most common symptoms? 

JJ: A monkeypox virus infection typically begins with the presence of a rash that can be painful and itchy – the rash looks like small blisters or pimples on the skin. The rash/pustule/pox/blister (I see a lot of different terminology used for a “pox,” the classical term and the reason for the virus’ name) grows and becomes filled with virus particles before drying out and becoming a scab that falls off once new skin has grown underneath. Individuals are typically considered infectious once the rash is observed until after the scab has fallen off. 

Symptoms of a monkeypox infection also can include fever, chills, muscle/back aches, headache, etc. – typical signs of being infected with something (i.e. being sick) – also known as flu-like symptoms. Symptoms can start within three weeks of exposure to the virus. Sometimes infected individuals show a rash first before the flu-like symptoms. Other individuals have flu-like symptoms before the rash is present. Others experience only a rash and no other symptoms. The reason for this variation in symptoms is unknown and currently being investigated. This variation in the timing and presentation of symptoms also may explain how the virus was able to spread so quickly. 

Q: Do you think it can still be contained, and how long might that take? 

JJ: The virus can be contained, especially if the primary mode of transmission is direct person-to-person contact. Avoiding interactions with infected individuals can be the difference in eliminating the spread of the virus. My guess is it would take a month or so to contain the spread if infected individuals changed their habits. 

One unique aspect about poxvirus infections is that post-exposure vaccination has been shown to help protect individuals from the disease. There are currently two vaccines being used for monkeypox, and it will be interesting to see if post-exposure vaccination also will work in this situation. ACAM2000 is a vaccina virus vaccine originally developed/used for smallpox vaccinations. The second vaccine is based on a highly attenuated modified vaccinia virus Ankara strain called MVA (the name of vaccine is JYNNEOS). ACAM2000 is a single dose vaccine while JYNNEOS is a two-dose vaccine regime. There also is a treatment, recently approved through emergency use authorization, called TPOX that appears to help monkeypox infections. This treatment was initially developed to fight against smallpox, but since monkeypox viruses are related, it can be used to treat those infections as well. 

Poxvirus infections also have been treated with viral immunoglobulins – antibodies that help fight the infection. These are typically used in the most severe cases, and since monkeypox is not causing high mortality rates in infected individuals, this treatment may not be necessary. 

Q: How do you think the nation’s ongoing experience with COVID-19 has changed the way we’re reacting to this crisis? 

JJ: The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic caused a lot of fear and anxiety in society – in some cases, family and friends turned against each other because of differences of opinion or belief about the virus and the best way to deal with it. These wounds are hard to mend, but I believe our collective experience with this pandemic has helped calm society regarding disease outbreaks while educating them about viral infections and host immunity.  

Recent data suggest that some of the initial responses to COVID-19 could have been better to help reduce fear and anxiety in society. For example, natural immunity to a viral infection, the gold standard for over a century, was initially dismissed during the COVID-19 pandemic (we now know that natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is helpful to fight against infection). Again, regardless of one’s opinion, I believe society collectively has learned a lot about viral pandemics that will help if this ever happens again in the future. 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

That was when the number of confirmed U.S. cases was only in the hundreds, and the number of deaths was fewer than 25. Almost two years later, of course, more than 900,000 Americans have perished from COVID-19, and the cases total is roughly a quarter of the U.S. population.

With the latest variant, Omicron, clearly on the wane and daily life returning to some version of normalcy, we decided to check in again with Mothé to talk about where the pandemic stands now and the endemic phase that could soon be our reality.

Question: What do you think about the current situation with Omicron? Case numbers are declining rapidly, though hospitalizations and deaths remain distressingly high.

Bianca Mothé: The overall numbers will continue to decrease. But I think there's a cautionary tale in that there are still lot of unvaccinated individuals. In the U.S., we have about 35% of the population who are still unvaccinated, but that doesn't represent what's happening internationally. In African countries, there still are places where only one in 10 people have been vaccinated. Those are places where a variant like Omicron can really take hold. Unvaccinated adults have a 15 times higher risk of dying from COVID than those who are vaccinated. We have all the tools, but we haven't distributed them equally. So while we may take comfort that, in San Diego, we've definitely hit the peak and are coming out on the other side, there's still potential for this particular variant to take hold in other places, and lead to much more death, because there's greater unvaccinated rates in some of these countries.

Q: And that can also go for parts of the U.S. where the vaccination rate remains low?

BM: Correct. I think we're pretty lucky here in California with the vaccination rates that we have, close to 70%. That definitely doesn't represent the entire country. We're probably going to continue to see, even with Omicron, these outbreaks that are regionally-serving just based on vaccination rates, or lack thereof.

Q: You mentioned countries where only one of 10 people is vaccinated. What is the specific threat to the U.S. of vaccines still not achieving a global spread?

BM: I think Omicron is a cautionary tale of that. It emerged in Botswana, but it was really detected in South Africa, where it was first reported. Then it progressed super quickly in terms of being able to spread to other countries. So I think what you're creating in these countries that have low vaccination rates is an opportunity for this particular virus to continue to create variants that might have an even more rapid rate of transmission. We can't take comfort in the U.S., even though we may have higher rates of vaccination. We might be threatened by a new variant that is emerging from somewhere that has a low rate of vaccination.

Q: When you first heard about Omicron late last year, could you have imagined that it would turn into the beast that it has?

BM: It was interesting because, at that point, we were all really concerned about Delta. Delta is much more dangerous in its ability to cause disease. When Omicron first emerged, we didn't know a whole lot. Scientists were sequencing it and identifying which mutations it had. The Omicron variant has over 60 mutations compared to some of the original strains, and it was surprising at that time to realize there was a specific variant that could carry as many mutations as it had and still be fit. When I say fit, I mean it's a virus that can still infect effectively and transmit, because ultimately that's what the virus wants. The virus wants to be able to go through a replication cycle in a new host. Omicron is unique in that it multiplies 70 times faster than what we were worried about, Delta, and especially in the upper airways. The way it does this is it has specific mutations at a cleavage site that allows for this particular SARS-CoV-2 variant to get swallowed up by the cell instead of having to fuse in a step-by-step manner. This variant can effectively infect cells in the upper airways. We had seen other variants with other mutations, but in the spike protein, which is what it uses to attach and get into the cell. That was new. Omicron also has additional mutations that allow it to escape immunity created by previous infection and/or vaccination.  So that's what was surprising about Omicron, that you could have a variant with as many mutations that gave it an ability to become more fit.

Q: What new information do you think scientists have learned about COVID and its many variations from the encounter with Omicron that will help us going forward?

BM: I think Omicron was a great tale of international collaborations. South Africa was very forthcoming in saying they had identified a new variant. And while they didn't know all the details, they were able to share with the international community information about the virus and give it to people who would be able to model and see, based on these mutations, that this was what we would predict would happen. I think that's a real evolution, countries deciding that collaboration is going to be one of the best ways to deal with this. Now there's heightened surveillance in most countries so that as a new variant emerges, it's rapidly detected and the international scientific community can tackle it and determine the situation with those specific mutations. Is it leading to something that's more infectious or can transmit better? We're probably going to continue to see new variants coming from some of these countries that don't have the vaccination rates of others. But we have gotten better at surveying those and distributing that information internationally.

Q: What is your perspective on the variants out there right now? How would you sum it up?

BM: When we talk about Omicron, everybody is thinking about the original Omicron sequence, which is called BA.1 and has been studied pretty intensely at this point. There are two more variations of Omicron. One of them is called BA.2, and then there's another new one that's emerging that's BA.3. BA.2 is less prolific, but in some countries, it has overtaken BA.1. The specific countries that we can point to are Denmark, Nepal and the Philippines, and it has a minor presence in India. If you look at India, for example, with its lower vaccination rates, that is a place where BA.2 could continue to mutate into a new strand. The third one, BA.3, has yet to take off; there are only a few hundred cases where it's been detected. But that's something where people are beginning to monitor and look at the sequence to see how different it is from BA.1 and BA.2 and whether it’s giving the virus any additional advantage based on mutations.

Q: BA.2 has been discovered in California, right?

BM: Yes, we already have BA.2 here. But it hasn't taken over BA.1, which is the original Omicron.

Q: Is it too early to say how BA.2 might affect the population here?

BM: There's a lot of investigation right now to determine the extent that people can get reinfected. Can someone who has had the original Omicron get reinfected with the original Omicron or BA.2? If someone has been infected with BA.1, the original Omicron, can they even catch BA.2 or BA.3? There's some indication that reinfection can occur, but we don't know what these additional variants will represent in terms of reinfection. I think that's one of the big questions right now: Can you keep getting it over and over and over again, because the immune response that you'd get from infection maybe isn't that strong or that durable.

Q: What about the question of whether vaccines and boosters are as protective against BA.2 and BA.3 as BA.1?

BM: That's still to be determined. We're still working on getting more booster shots into people. You don't want to have a false sense of security just because you've had two shots. That booster shot really does help your immunity, even in the context of something like Omicron that isn't as severe. We have a tool out there in vaccination, and that will protect you from severe disease.

Q: We’ve been discussing two new variants in the Omicron family. Could something still come along that's entirely different?

BM: Yes. Omicron has taken over in terms of numbers, but Delta is still out there. There's still a possibility of going back to some of those original sequences, like Alpha or Delta, and something mutating from that. Given the ability that Omicron has to infect new people, most of the infections are coming from Omicron, but that doesn't mean you still couldn't get mutations from Delta.

Q: There was a time not too ago when the general public didn't think about the word “pandemic” and maybe didn't even know what it means. Now, of course, it's fundamental to daily discourse. These days, we’re beginning to hear the word “endemic” more and more often, and some people might not have a clear grasp of it. How do you define it, and how does it differ from pandemic?

BM: Pandemic is the introduction of something new, a new pathogen into the population and the ability that it has to spike and get a lot of infections. Once something becomes endemic, it is really in our population. A good analogy is that influenza is endemic, but in a seasonal way, meaning that we can all anticipate that there's going to be a flu season and roughly how many individuals are going to get infected and how the flu is spreading throughout regions based on the time of year. I think what we’ll get with COVID-19 is that it's going to be around and we have the tools now to control it more effectively. We've got vaccines, we know that masks are protective. We're going to have to learn how to deal with it, and hopefully we’ll see in the next couple of months that some of the indoor mask mandates might go away. But we're introducing new public health tools like sewer water testing that will determine regional locations where there might be increases in numbers of infection. And then some of the usual public health tools can be reintroduced. So when we think of it being endemic, it's going to be around. It's not going to go away tomorrow or next month or even in six months or a year. But now we have the tools to better control it and even predict what's going to happen next.

Q: Will it go away in our lifetimes?

BM: Well, coronaviruses have been around. Some of them are responsible for common colds. So I don't think so. This has really taken hold, and I don't see it going away. I think the way that we're going to be able to interact with it, we probably won't go back to our previous normal. We'll just be using public health tools more effectively to be able to monitor it.

Q: Regarding the comparison to influenza, do you think COVID will turn into a seasonal thing?

BM: The goal originally was that it would be seasonal. In the winter, people are indoors, and that would lead to increased transmission rates. That didn't happen in our first two seasons with COVID, though there were some peaks. I think it’s still to be determined whether there will be increases and decreases in infection based on season. I haven't seen any data that will clarify that for us at this point.

Q: What do you think about the increasingly expressed idea of learning to live with COVID and how our society might deal with that?

BM: In thinking of how to live with COVID, there's a flu vaccine that is available to everyone every year, and it's pretty successful at preventing severe flu outbreaks. That's a tool we now have with COVID, and we've had to implement booster shots, so it could turn into something where you're just going to have to get a vaccine periodically. I think that's one way we're going to live with it, by boosting our immune system with a periodic COVID vaccine. And if we can, as a society, increase those vaccination rates, hopefully we would hit herd immunity and protect those individuals who can't be vaccinated. That would ultimately be the goal. Are we headed in that direction? Well, we're seeing a moderate increase in vaccination rates. If we can continue with that philosophy, these vaccines are what we’re going to need to continue to live with COVID.

Q: Reflecting on when we first talked in March 2020 to where we are now, what has surprised you most about the arc of COVID?

BM: This virus has thrown out all the models that anybody would have had for a new virus being introduced into the human population. But as several of my colleagues have said, this has really tested scientists. And ultimately, it's probably going to go down in history as one of the greatest accomplishments of science and medicine in being able to introduce a vaccine in nine or 10 months after the discovery of a new pathogen. So while it has really tested us in terms of not being able to predict what was going to happen next, it did provide an opportunity for a new vaccine generation. And now taking those tools that have come through in terms of COVID and applying them to other pathogens that we’ve been dealing with for a long time, like HIV, that's exciting.

I think this is also an opportunity for us to realize that, as scientists, we have to do much better in terms of communicating with the public and utilizing platforms that are much more accessible. For me, it's exciting to have a whole science Twitter section that I can go to where there are multiple papers every day in peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed literature that are really moving science forward. Even for scientists, you can't keep up with all the new information that's coming through.

What surprised me most is that there was a pathogen that was introduced into the human population that no one could have predicted would have taken hold and replicated so effectively, and from an optimistic perspective, scientists were able to respond to it in a way that has never happened before. I think if this was 10 or 15 years ago, we still wouldn't have a vaccine for it; we wouldn't have had the platforms that we have now to generate new vaccines. And that's really exciting to see. The virus evolved, and our tools to deal with it had to evolve even faster.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

These days, the once-obscure academic term is almost inescapable, on the lips of politicians, TV news hosts, public school officials and social media users far and wide. Several states have passed laws banning the teaching of critical race theory in K-12 schools. 

To learn what CRT is and why it has become so embedded in the national conversation, we turned to two professors in the Department of Sociology at Cal State San Marcos: Mohamed Abumaye and Lori Walkington. 

Question: The term critical race theory is inescapable these days, but a lot of people still don’t know what it means. What exactly is critical race theory? 

Mohamed Abumaye: Critical race theory is a theoretical framework developed by legal scholars to analyze and address institutional racism in the U.S. legal system. CRT is derived from critical legal studies, a field developed by legal specialists such as Kimberle Crenshaw to interrogate racial inequities in the criminal justice system. The scholarship and data produced by critical legal studies scholars revealed that Black people were disproportionally harmed by the criminal justice system. Scholars drew from the work of critical legal studies to reveal racial inequities in education, health care, employment and other sectors of life. This created what is known as critical race theory and was utilized in curriculum in college classrooms. Moreover, CRT shows through rigorous research that racism is not a relic of the past but a pernicious force that seeps into every institution.  

Q: How long have you been studying CRT? How did you first come to it, and is there a specific lens that you research it through? 

MA: I have been studying critical race theory for the past 15 years. I was first introduced to CRT in a sociology of race class during my first year in community college. This class provided a lens to understand the intersection between institutional racism and my individual biography. In graduate school, I focused on utilizing CRT to study police violence and its disproportionate impact on Black communities. I also utilize a global and diasporic approach to CRT to highlight the ways in which institutional racism operates through U.S. imperialism. I look at the ways in which racist discourses that Somalis are terrorists and pirates is utilized to justify U.S. military drone strikes on Somalia and its people. I look at the ways in which popular culture is deployed to legitimatize state violence against Black people domestically and globally.  

Q: What has it been like for you to see your field of study enter the popular lexicon to such an extreme degree?  

MA: It has been quite surprising to see critical race theory enter the lexicon as conservative politicians use the word without understanding it. CRT entered the popular lexicon as a term that is derided by some and defended by others. I hope that the emergence of CRT results in renewed public interest in learning about the ways in which systemic racism penetrates every institution in the United States. I hope that the publicity of CRT will result in more curriculum in university settings that highlight the histories and experiences of people of color. Moreover, the emergence of CRT as a point of contention for politicians in the South regarding school curriculum intersects with the emergence of ethnic studies in school curriculum in California. On one hand is a push to center curriculum in schools that highlight the experiences and histories of marginalized communities, and on the other is a resistance to any classes that tackle race and racism. Therefore, classrooms have become political epicenters of ideological conversations around whitewashed history disguised as patriotism and reckoning with the historical, contemporary and cumulative effects of intuitional racism. 

Q: Why do you think CRT has become this all-encompassing umbrella term that covers seemingly any racial issue? 

MA: CRT has become an umbrella term to capture any issues relating to race due to conservative critiques of higher education as a bastion of liberal indoctrination. In the last decade, there have been conservative students filming professors on college campuses throughout the country and accusing them of indoctrinating students to a “liberal agenda.” This has coincided with the resurgence of white nationalists during the Trump administration. On one end, you have the rise of white nationalism manifesting when the Capitol was stormed by Trump supporters and the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement during the summer of 2020. Therefore, to white nationalists, critical race theory represents everything that is wrong with America.  

Q: A lot of the criticism in political circles of CRT mentions the New York Times’ 1619 Project. What did you think about that project? 

Lori Walkington: Nicole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project was a well-researched and written, engaging piece of journalism. Hannah-Jones is a remarkable journalist. I am a sociologist who has a framework informed by CRT. For me, the conflation of Hannah-Jones’ piece with CRT is much more interesting. First a truth surfaces, then folks get to talking about the impact of that truth on their material realities, and once power and privilege are threatened, they strike with misinformation. In justice studies, we look at what is at stake for people/communities. What is the base fear? Usually this comes down to loss of power. The power related to the 1619 Project is clear – the truth about the mid-Atlantic slave trade was a source of intergenerational wealth for some, and a loss of personhood, worship, knowledge, histories, education and access to power for others. As a sociologist, I theorize that fear is rooted in the belief that all people function in the same ways; therefore, when any other racial group is in power, it will function similarly to the privileged and powerful elite do now. That group understands the power of knowledge, narrative and rhetoric very well. CRT has been packaged in some media recently as a method by which white children learn to hate themselves. We hear the dog-whistle refrain “not our babies!” when politicians and parents conflate ethnic studies for critical race theory. CRT is a theoretical perspective born from critical legal studies in the 1980s. It looks at how laws are used as tools of power and privilege, with the basic assumption that racism is institutionalized and normal to American society. There are no CRT mandates at any level of education. It is a complex theoretical framework usually taught in graduate school. So my answer is that I think it provided excellent data for sociological analysis of the public response it garnered. 

Q: How dangerous do you consider this spate of anti-CRT laws across the country to be to the ideas of liberal education and academic freedom? 

LW: I consider these laws as nothing new. The powerful have always tried to silence the voices of the oppressed. They are dangerous in the sense that they are fueling the anti-Black racism and white supremacist violence that has been raging in the U.S. since the colonists stole it and built it with stolen people. These laws serve as reactionary white fears on display that clearly show people in power cannot conceive any other way of existing than by the iron fist. Fears from the opposition to CRT harken back to fears of slave rebellions and laws that punished enslaved people from becoming educated. Knowledge is power. They knew this and still know this. These so-called fears are about maintaining power. 

Q: Do you have any concern about the CRT controversy coming to CSUSM? 

LW: It is already here in some form, although not at the national scale. Linking our history as a country to others allows us to see beyond our personal feelings, which helps move conversations forward. Over the past few years, our campus has been dealing with the same social issues as the rest of the nation. There are important institutional changes that reflect that our campus community is ready to address how systemic racism works and looks on our campus. If the CRT controversy bubbles up at CSUSM, I believe we as educators are ready to face it with compassion. 

Q: Is there anything you can do as a CRT expert to push back against some of the misinformation that you see out there? 

LW: I’m an educator. One of the connections that folks rarely make within a CRT framework is that it doesn’t teach hate. It explains our history from a different perspective. I can start right there. It is a tool in the box. CRT is simply an analytical tool, like Newton’s law or string theory. One of the muddier points for my students with theory is the misunderstanding that theories “do” something. A theory is a tinted lens that helps you recognize data relevant to a study that can replicate, improve and correct previous research. That’s it. So a more interesting point of entry for me is the pushback itself – what that represents and where it comes from. What can we do? We can talk about the fears with our students and colleagues. Keep our eyes on the prize. We must look at what reckoning with these truths means for people and understand that change rarely occurs without some resistance. This is a big shift in thinking for a lot of folks. The bootstrap mentality is real, and it can be difficult to see beyond our own and our community’s struggles, particularly for those who have privilege or proximity to it while struggling. We can be honest about our country’s history. We can be compassionate with one another. We can do what we do best – educate. 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

As an expert in global supply chains, Cal State San Marcos professor Robert Aboolian paid particular attention when many companies shut down their operations in the city of Wuhan, from which the virus originated. He knew that the disruption would have a ripple effect on the global economy, but he thought that the impact would be manageable. 

Two months later, though, when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic and Korean car companies such as Hyundai started to close their assembly plants around the world, “it became clear that global supply chains were in for a wild ride,” said Aboolian, chair of the Department of Operations and Supply Chain Management at CSUSM. 

The nature of the ride may have changed over the ensuing year and a half – from shortages of things like masks and disinfectant wipes to car computer chips and lumber – but it’s still a wild one, and uncertainty remains about how long it will last.  

Question: Was this global supply crunch an avoidable problem, or did the pandemic make it inevitable? What could nations or companies have done differently? 

Robert Aboolian: Pandemics and other major disruptions could cause havoc in global supply chains, but companies can be prepared and resilient, and proper preparations and resilience could reduce the impact of such disruptions. The impact is inevitable even when companies are prepared, but better preparations could reduce the level of impact and reduce the time to recover. So the important question for designing a resilient supply chain for companies is not whether a disruption would impact them, but rather what would be the level of impact and how fast they could recover after a major disruption.  

Q: Are you surprised that it’s still such an issue about 15 months into the crisis?  

RA: Although I foresaw that the issues in global supply chains would take some time to sort themselves out, the general increase in demand surprised me quite a bit. In fact, the increased demand has been the main catalyst that has exacerbated and dragged out this crisis. Companies did not forecast such an increase in demand and are having a hard time satisfying this surge. During the crisis, many who had steady jobs spent less on restaurants, travel and commuting, and translated that savings into spending more on other products that were mostly available for sale online.  

Q: Last month, the Biden administration announced the creation of a task force to address bottlenecks in construction, transportation, semiconductor production and agriculture. What was your reaction to that move? 

RA: The United States has a great demand outlook but has been having consistent shortages in supply. This combination is a recipe for price increases, so it is natural for the government to step in and solve the supply shortage issues before they result in out-of-hand inflation. Another reason for the study was to investigate the level of dependency on our rivals, most importantly China, when it comes to critical products such as semiconductors, large-capacity batteries, critical minerals and materials, and pharmaceuticals. 

Q: How big of an issue is the U.S. dependence on nations like China for imports in critical areas like semiconductors and high-capacity batteries? Do you see that changing anytime soon? 

RA: It is a very important issue. Our dependence on China for these critical products is quite concerning. In fact, it is a matter of national security. And I do see it changing, and apparently so does the Biden administration with its creation of the task force. If anything positive comes from COVID-19, it is the fact that it showed American supply chain security vulnerabilities. This, of course, will result in the continuation of the trade war between the U.S. and China. I would also hope that, in an effort to reduce our current level of dependence on rival countries, we will substantially increase our domestic capacity to manufacture these critical products. 

Q: The New York Times recently published an in-depth story about the history and influence of Just In Time manufacturing and the role it has played in our current situation. Are you familiar with the concept, and what do you think about its effects, both good and bad? 

RA: The idea of Just In Time and lean manufacturing is basically to minimize inventory and have it available just when you need it. The idea is to save inventory holding costs. This works well for companies that need to be efficient to compete, but it works well only when there is no uncertainty in supply and demand. On the other end of this spectrum and on the opposite side of efficiency is flexibility, where companies become responsive to consumer demand during times that supply and demand are uncertain. Companies could use different methods to become flexible. One way to achieve flexibility is through keeping additional inventory (also known as safety inventory) for when there is either a shortage in supply or an increase in demand. This contrasts with Just In Time manufacturing since it results in increased levels of inventory costs. Another way for companies to be flexible is to diversify their supply base, have multiple sources for their supply needs and use mostly low-risk suppliers. All in all, being flexible is a costly proposition and it must be considered when one decides to design a resilient supply chain. 

Q: When the giant container ship got stuck in the Suez Canal, causing delays that rippled across the global economy, it seemed to serve as a symbol of the precarious nature of global supply chains. Do you see it that way? 

RA: A supply disruption such as this has short-term effects and can sort itself out rather quickly, but events like pandemics have more long-term and far-reaching global effects. I agree, though, that it was another cursor to the interdependence of global supply chains, which could become vulnerable if they are not designed to be resilient.  

Q: Do you think companies have gotten too lean when it comes to inventory?  

RA: Smaller companies that are competing on small margins need to continue to be efficient and cannot really risk investing in flexibility, but I expect bigger companies to invest more in flexibility and being resilient.  

Q: How have supply chain shortages most affected you personally during the pandemic? 

RA: Overall, the supply chain shortages did not affect me much, except that in the beginning stages of the pandemic, we could hardly find any disinfectant, gloves, masks and of course toilet paper. 

Q: How long do you think it will take for things to begin to return to normal globally? 

RA: One of the reasons for the current shortages is companies underestimating demand for their products and not having enough inventory to satisfy this demand. I expect demand volatility to decrease and consequently allow suppliers to plan better and satisfy consumer demand. Another reason for the current shortages is shipping delays and logistical backlogs. There are many parts of the world where COVID-19 is still not properly controlled. For example, Yantian, China, which is one of the biggest ports in the world, was recently shut down because of a COVID-19 outbreak. Add in the fact that millions of people aren’t returning to work for various reasons, and there’s a lot to sort out to get back to a more reliable and steady flow of material in the global supply chain. All that said, I expect supply-and-demand issues stemming from the pandemic to resolve themselves within a year, assuming we do not see another wave of COVID variants. 

Q: Do you think any lasting lessons will be learned from the pandemic, causing fundamental change to global supply chains? Or will it be back to business as usual? 

RA: We could see many changes, but mostly in big companies. I expect that it will be business as usual for smaller companies that cannot invest in flexibility. On a more global scale, there would be an increase in product prices because of increased flexibility. I also expect companies to offer less customization and fewer product options to offset their increased cost of being flexible. But if we do not see a major disruption for an extended period and if the government does not regulate companies to have preparedness plans in case of disruptions, I also foresee that the competition will force even big companies to return to their old habits of cost-saving and business as usual. After all, companies, like people, have short-term memories. To avoid this, I strongly believe that the federal government must regulate companies to make sure their supply chains are resilient and prepared to respond properly in case of a major disruption such as the COVID pandemic. 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Like very few Americans, however, Sepinwall brought to the international incident a vast reservoir of knowledge about Haiti, its history and its people. The Cal State San Marcos history professor is a Haitian expert who has written two books on the Caribbean island nation: “Haitian History: New Perspectives” and “Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games,” the latter of which was published just two months ago.

Since the assassination, Sepinwall has been interviewed by several media outlets, including by The Guardian newspaper and RTVI, or Russian diaspora TV (scroll to the 1:11 mark for Sepinwall’s appearance). We spoke with her on Thursday afternoon, when developments in Haiti were still in a high degree of flux.

Question: What was your reaction to learning of the assassination? 

Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall: Jovenel Moïse was extremely unpopular and there were many protests in the last year calling his rule illegal, pushing for him to resign and demanding that the U.S. and United Nations withdraw their support for him. So it wasn't like I woke up and said, “Oh, look, this popular, wonderful person was killed.” I just said, “Wow, someone decided to do it.” Then it was just a matter of figuring out who. My first instinct was that this must be a Haitian patriot who was frustrated that all efforts to dislodge him had failed and that people were dying as a result of his misrule, and then decided to take the matter into their own hands. However, as the day went on last Thursday, the situation started to seem more complicated and maybe much sadder – it looked like the result was not going to be things improving and Haitians getting the real autonomy and democracy that they've been pushing for, because instead this was a power play by elites.

Q: What is the prevailing theory on who might be responsible for the killing and what their motivation was? 

AGS: In some ways, this is like Clue, where the deceased had so many enemies that it's hard to know which of them did it. Again, it seems that this was not someone from the grassroots. Whoever it was seems to have hired Spanish-speaking mercenaries who claimed they were Drug Enforcement Administration agents and who got into Moïse’s house without much trouble, with his equivalent of the Secret Service really doing nothing to protect him. There doesn’t seem to have been any kind of firefight to enter; they reportedly knew the layout of his house and had some cooperation from the inside.

There have been three main candidates. One is various members of the Haitian oligarchy, who often have tried to control the situation in the country and have financed coups d'état against leaders they don't like. Many had been allied with Moïse, but recently he had a falling out with some key members of the elite. A variation of this theory is that this was an internal struggle within Moïse’s party – he had fired his prime minister, Claude Joseph, only two days before he was murdered and announced a replacement (Ariel Henry). So there has been speculation that Joseph’s allies arranged the hit so he would not be eclipsed from power.

Another possibility that people were pointing to was the U.S. After all, the assassins said they were DEA. And, unfortunately, the U.S. has had a very long history of intervening and sometimes sending the Marines to Haiti. This would not be the first time that someone in the U.S. government, CIA or Department of State decided that a Haitian president had outlived their usefulness to us in terms of our policy objectives and tried to remove him. That possibility has not seemed the strongest to me because Moïse was wildly unpopular and was depending on the U.S. and UN to shore him up against his people. Haitians were protesting against him for the last few years and especially after Feb. 7, when his term was deemed to be over but he remained in power. It would be like if we did not end up having a presidential transition on Jan. 20. I think there are many other ways that the U.S. could have withdrawn support for Moïse, much simpler than staging a very dramatic assassination.

The third possibility that has been floated is that this was ordered by Colombian or Venezuelan narco-traffickers, who had had a falling out with Moïse and hired other Spanish-speaking mercenaries. This theory suggested that they wanted to be free and clear to keep using Haiti as a point for transferring drugs and money laundering. This idea was floated by many in Moïse’s party, which is called the PHTK. But as days have gone on, it has seemed increasingly unlikely, especially as Moïse’s party has remained in power, and Claude Joseph’s faction has used the supposed chaos to declare martial law and shore up its support. As my Haitian colleagues have pointed out, the fact that these assassins were speaking Spanish would help make it seem that this was a foreign attack. And under the Haitian constitution, that would give the president or whoever is leading the government the right to declare martial law. So that is lending credence to the idea that dissenting factions in Moïse’s party planned the assassination to give Joseph’s faction (or the PHTK in general) the upper hand in a situation in which they worried that they were finally going to lose power.

Q: In terms of Moïse’s rule over the last few years, was it already bad and then his decision to stay in power after the election was the last straw for people? 

AGS: First of all, many Haitians didn't want to elect him in the first place. The international community has been meddling in Haitian elections since the 2010 earthquake, and even before, by excluding candidates that they did not want to win. In many ways, the PHTK was handpicked by American diplomats, including not just Moïse but the president before him, whose name was Michel Martelly. Martelly is a popular Haitian music star who uses a lot of sexual innuendo – not the first person you’d imagine would become president of the country. But in this period of transition after the earthquake, he was allied with powerful forces and said he would be friendly to foreign business interests. His associates also included former supporters of the Duvalier dictatorship, which was very worrisome. Under Martelly, the PHTK seems to have begun stealing large amounts of money that were given to Haiti. For instance, Venezuela sold fuel to Haiti at a discount. The government was supposed to be able to sell it to citizens, and the difference between what they paid and what they were selling it for was supposed to be used to finance schools and roads. The government sent out glossy brochures showing things they were supposedly building, but they were never constructed. So PHTK officials seem to have been keeping the money and pocketing it. That became increasingly clear under Moïse’s rule after he succeeded Martelly, and there have been protests where people kept saying, “Where did the money go? Where are the stadiums and where are the schools?” That has been going on especially since 2018, and people were just waiting for his term to end so they could get someone different in office. When he didn't leave in February, the situation got so much worse, and the government began shooting at peaceful protesters. Who was keeping the PHTK in power? Essentially the U.S. and the UN, because otherwise they would have been toppled by a revolution, with all of these people in the streets.

Q: Did you consider Moïse to be a dictator? 

AGS: After Feb. 7, yes, many Haitians called him a dictator. The other thing I didn't mention is he was trying to get rid of the constitution. He was planning a referendum in which the constitution would be overturned and there would be a new constitution that removed any possibility of criminally prosecuting officials for wrongdoing in office. This is the kind of thing that many Haitians were appalled by, and made them say we need to get him out. There also was debate in the U.S. government over Moïse. Whereas the Biden administration continued the Trump administration’s support for Moïse after taking office on Jan. 20, the House Foreign Affairs Committee had been holding hearings and pushing the Biden Administration to stop supporting Moïse. They stressed his harmful effects on Haitians and the need for them to be able to choose their next government without our meddling. This possibly led people in the PHTK to feel threatened and then to sacrifice Moïse so that they could continue to rule. But if they get their wish, and foreign troops come whose task will be essentially to suppress the population in the name of keeping “order,” that's going to be very troubling. 

Q: Do you feel like the U.S. and international community could have done more to prevent the assassination from happening? 

AGS: Absolutely. Haitians have been crying out for us to stop supporting Moïse. If you look at the signs that people had in the streets in February, they asked us and the UN to stop supporting a president who had become a dictator and was trying to cancel their constitution. That, again, supports the idea that this is manufactured chaos to keep the PHTK in power, as opposed to drug traffickers being responsible, which is the narrative that was getting pushed at first. 

Q: Earlier, you mentioned the U.S. policy objectives in Haiti. How would you describe those?  

AGS: We like to talk about wanting to spread democracy, but unfortunately our record in Haiti has not supported that. I’d say our real policy objectives are two things. One is the promotion of U.S. business interests. While the rest of us are not always paying attention, we are often interfering with what Haitians want, like a minimum wage (which is especially needed for Haitians working in sweatshops owned by foreign companies). When Haitian leaders have tried to do that, American companies have complained that it will increase the cost of doing business in Haiti. And the State Department has then pressured to have those laws withdrawn or they've had presidents removed, by which I mean not assassinated, but the U.S. Embassy sends a limo and says “your time is up” to Haitian leaders. The amount the minimum wage was going to be raised by is embarrassing by our standards (for instance, we fought against raising the minimum wage to $0.61 an hour a few years ago). But American businesses did not want to pay even a little more, because to them the advantage of this country nearby is that labor is cheap, and it's so much less expensive to ship products from Haitian sweatshops to the U.S. than from China.  

The second U.S. policy objective, I'm sad to say, is often keeping things stable there so people don't try to come here. There has been particularly strong anti-immigrant sentiment about Haiti, even more so than, say, from Cuba. Many have said it's because of a kind of demonization of Black Haitian immigrants. In reality, Haitian Americans are wonderful, integral, brilliant parts of our country. Look just at the COVID epidemic; so many Haitians have been on the front lines as nurses, nursing home aids, doctors or scientists. But there are people who think, “Too many Haitians are coming.” We saw this in 2016 in San Diego, where you had Haitians arriving here after their post-earthquake refuge in Brazil turned hostile (they were invited to work constructing buildings for the 2016 Olympics, but once the construction was finished and there was a recession in Brazil, they were scapegoated and often violently chased from the country). There was a wealth of organizations here in San Diego willing to welcome Haitian refugees and help them resettle. But there were also voices who said, “No, there are too many of them coming.” 

Q: Would you say that Haiti is still suffering today from the effects of the 2010 earthquake? 

AGS: Yes, definitely. And not just the earthquake itself but the way the international community, which claimed it was going to help Haiti, actually made things worse (in the “manmade disaster” that followed the earthquake). One of the people I write about is a Haitian filmmaker named Raoul Peck, who was Oscar-nominated for his film on James Baldwin. He also made an earlier film called “Fatal Assistance” about the international response to the earthquake and how it made things worse. For instance, land was confiscated from Haitians, supposedly to “give them jobs.” But this meant that farmers were kicked off their land and being able to feed themselves, to give the land to South Korean garment manufacturers, which then didn't pay them livable wages. There are lots of stories like that, with money that was supposedly raised and not actually used to help Haitians. In general, the international community directed the reconstruction of Haiti more than the Haitian government did – and they did not listen to Haitians about what they needed. They often imposed policies that benefited foreigners and made things worse for Haitians.  

Q: Why do you think stable democracy has been so elusive for Haiti for so long?  

AGS: Foreign interventions are one big reason. Whenever there has been a ruler who wants to do things that foreigners don't like, there has been a risk that foreigners will invade and effect regime change. Many people don’t know that the U.S. occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. The U.S. problem with Haiti really goes back much longer, 200 years ago, when Haitians were the first people in the New World to free themselves from slavery and they had a revolution. There were definitely Americans who thought that was good; they saw the Haitian Revolution as being like the American Revolution and thought it was good for Haitians that they managed to free themselves from the French and to rule themselves. But keep in mind, when Haiti became independent in 1804, we had Thomas Jefferson, who was a slaveholder, as president. And Jefferson and other whites did not look at the Haitian Revolution favorably; they essentially said, “Look at those horrible savages who just killed their masters. We better punish them and keep them isolated or enslaved people here will have the same idea.” We've had this long history of demonizing and trying to isolate Haitians, and then seeking to invade them when they try to enact policies that we don't like. One example is the Duvalier dictatorship, which was so destructive in Haiti. The U.S. meddled in the election by which Duvalier first came to power because they did not like his opponent. And then, despite all the evil things that he did, we helped keep him in power for one big reason – he wasn't a Communist. There was this worry that Haiti might “fall” just like Cuba if we didn’t keep him in power. So yes, we've had a long history of meddling. That's something that people often fail to see when they say, “Oh, look at that country, it's so troubled! Why can’t they fix themselves?” I'm not saying Haitians would be without problems if they were left alone. But many problems happen because Haitians are not in fact permitted by the international community to make decisions for themselves. 

Q: What do you see as the path forward for Haiti in the wake of this tragedy? 

AGS: I would like to see the international community give support, and I'll stress the word support, to Haitian civil society and to the opposition parties to have a transition from this government, which so many Haitians see as illegitimate. What I don't want to see is people saying, “We need to go in there and send troops,” which is what Claude Joseph has been trying to do. Increasingly, his effort to get foreign troops to arrive to create “order” has seemed to be an attempt to make sure the PHTK retains power. And that would destroy real democracy and dash the hopes of Haitians. 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

“To those who perpetuate Asian hate, we now have people in the Justice Department dedicated to finding you, exposing you and prosecuting you,” Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader from New York, said at the rally. 

But as if to illustrate the pervasiveness of the problem these days, only hours later, an Asian woman walking in Manhattan was struck in the head with a hammer by a stranger who demanded that the victim remove her mask.  

That incident is part of a larger and disturbing trend nationwide. According to a study by researchers from Cal State San Bernardino, hate crimes, particularly against Asian-Americans, surged by 169% in 15 major cities from the first quarter of 2020 to the same time period this year. The shootings of eight Asian women at three separate spas across Atlanta in March was only the most egregious and shocking example.  

In response, the Senate last month overwhelmingly approved legislation aimed at strengthening federal efforts to address hate crimes directed at Asian-Americans.

The historic underpinnings of the prejudice and stereotyping that contribute to this wave of Asian hate has become the major scholarly thrust of Susie Lan Cassel, a longtime professor of literature and writing studies at Cal State San Marcos. Cassel participated last month in two virtual campus events focused on the topic: “Conversations That Matter: From Yellow Peril to COVID-19” and “The Hypersexualization of Asian Women in America: From Stereotype to Massacre.” (Additionally, the University Library has created a resource guide titled "Stop Asian Hate: Anti-Racism & Cultural Awareness.")

Question: How did you come to be interested in the field of Chinese American history and literature? 

Susie Lan Cassel: In graduate school, I was going to focus on feminist studies until I learned about a new field that was emerging based on texts such as “The Joy Luck Club” and, more importantly, “The Woman Warrior.” This new kind of literature was being used to help us think through bicultural tensions at every level, including language, moral values, family expectations, race, gender, ethnicity, food, personal identity, etc. I relished the opportunity to contribute to understanding these issues at cognitive and emotional levels since many of these tensions had been such integral and unspoken parts of my life … and I wanted to share those discussions with students in the classroom.  

After I arrived at CSUSM, a colleague at the San Diego Chinese Historical Museum introduced me to a local diary that was written by Ah Quin, a Chinese immigrant widely considered the first mayor of San Diego’s early Chinatown (in the Gaslamp Quarter). Helping us understand what life was like for Ah Quin and his wife, Ah Sue, during the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act has become my life’s work, and toward that goal, I’m editing his diary and writing an interpretive book about their lives. Though I knew the history of Chinese immigration before delving into this San Diego Chinese couple’s lives, I had to understand it in a personal way in order to grasp what it was like for them to live during those times. I am finding a lot of similarity between the anti-immigrant discourse of the present and what Chinese experienced in the late 19th century, such as the sense of economic threat, the fear of immigrating hordes, etc.  

Q: What was the main message you tried to convey in “From Yellow Peril to COVID-19?” 

SLC: In this panel, I wanted listeners to understand that “yellow peril” in America developed in response to the fear in the 19th century that “hordes from Asia” would invade America’s shores and take over this beautiful, newfound country. If we look at the big picture, we can understand how such a fear could develop. China was the biggest country in the world at the time, with something like 430 million people (compared to America’s 50 million or so). However, not all Chinese wanted to immigrate. This is a crucial fact. In the 19th century, only Chinese from the southern province of Guangdong came to America, and the vast majority of those came from just a few specific counties that were devastated by overpopulation combined with war, political and climate tragedies. By one estimate, only about 170,000 of the 12 million or so people who immigrated to America in the second half of the 19th century were Chinese. This bears repeating – millions came to America from Great Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia and elsewhere, but only a fraction came from China. The scope of immigration from China was nowhere near the level that was feared even before the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, but we were unable to accept this truth. 

The circumstances were made worse by America’s perception of Chinese as extreme “others,” such that fears in three additional domains arose. First, Chinese were considered an economic threat because some believed they took jobs away from white working men. Second, Chinese were often scapegoated and blamed disproportionally for disease spread (like we see now with COVID-19). Third, they were seen as a threat to the morals of a Victorian Christian culture because of their “heathen” beliefs and “hypersexualized” women (more on the latter below). In short, initial fears about massive waves of Chinese immigration were augmented by domestic beliefs that Chinese were so unassimilable that they threatened America’s Victorian, Christian framework. These fears compounded into a racial metaphor that viewed Chinese – and later other Asians – as a “yellow peril,” an existential threat to civilization itself.  

In the 20th and 21st centuries, the idea of “yellow peril” spread to Japanese and other Asians. The problem is that none of the fears mentioned above materialized. Again, in the 30 years that Chinese had open immigration to this country (before the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was passed), only about 150,000 arrived – a small fraction of the tens of millions of European settlers. History has shown time and time again that the threats associated with Asians in America have been exaggerated or misplaced, but they still have caused great harm. During World War II, for instance, the Munson Report (a U.S. government investigation issued in 1941) found that Japanese in America were basically loyal and of no great threat, but just three months later, America decided to imprison 117,000 people of Japanese descent anyway, the majority of them American citizens. Again, we have a history of ignoring facts when they don’t align with our anxieties, but we can do better than that. We must challenge ourselves to be more rigorous.  

Q: And what was your message in “The Hypersexualization of Asian Women in America”? 

SLC: In my mind, the hypersexualization of Asian women stems from laws and policies passed in the 19th century specifically to keep Chinese from becoming long-term settlers in America. In short, Chinese male laborers in 19th-century America were paid significantly less than white workers. As a result, few men were able to bring their wives (by 1860, fewer than 2,000 Chinese women were here, compared with about 35,000 Chinese men). Chinese generally planned to stay for only 3-5 years, but their depressed wages gave capitalists an incentive to continue to hire them. Conversely, tens of thousands of Chinese were willing to forego family reunification in order to work in America and support their families back in China. As a result, tens of thousands of Chinese men lived in America for decades and even lifetimes, developing the California swamplands, new railroad lines, some Napa Valley vineyards, fisheries, etc.  

Meanwhile, a very unfortunate sex disparity emerged within Chinatowns. Because Chinese men couldn’t support their wives on the low wages – and many thought they would head back to China sooner rather than later – very few Chinese women came to America. For the last half of the 19th century, on average, there was only one Chinese woman for 20 Chinese men in America. The few Chinese women who came as wives and servants were therefore often forced into prostitution. Furthermore, Chinese Tong gangsters began to kidnap, buy or trick women in China and smuggle them here for sexual service. About 10,000 Chinese women came to America in the 19th century, and it is possible that the majority of them were prostitutes – but not because Chinese women were inherently more licentious or immoral, as Americans often believed. Said differently, Americans had good reasons for believing that most Chinese women were working in the sex trade, but they didn’t understand that these women had been forced into prostitution, in part as a result of the economic discrimination against Chinese men. Because of these circumstances, Chinese women were soon stereotyped as “hypersexual,” and the Victorians began to pass laws to ban all Chinese women from coming to America in order to preserve American Christian morality (e.g., Page Law of 1875). The Victorians simply failed to grasp that the very economic discrimination they had perpetrated against Chinese men had fostered trafficking in Chinese women since Chinese men couldn’t afford to bring their wives and worked in America for decades at a time.  

In the 20th century, America’s involvement in multiple wars in Asia gave way to several “war bride acts” that allowed soldiers to bring women they had met in Asian countries to America. These women reinforced the 19th-century view that Asian women were obedient, hypersexual and poor. In short, in this panel, I wanted listeners to understand that the continued hypersexualization of Asian women is an unintended consequence of America’s immigration laws and discriminatory policies. This stereotype didn’t come out of nowhere. Fundamentally, Asian women are no more sexual than any other women, but the idea that they are came from policies that shaped how Americans and Westerners view(ed) these once strangers. 

Q: As someone with your research background, what was your reaction when you heard about the mass shooting in Atlanta? 

SLC: Like many others, I was deeply saddened and pained, but in an environment where Asian women have been the targets of 68% of nearly 4,000 acts against Asians in the last year, I was not surprised. There is a long history of violence against Chinese in this country and especially in this state. By one estimate, at the height of the violence against Chinese, between 1885-1886, there were 168 mob attacks that sought to drive Chinese out of various Chinatowns, most of them in California. In addition, 34 Chinese were murdered in a raid in Hells Canyon in Oregon. Twenty-eight were shot in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Closer to home, many people don’t know that in 1871, 19 Chinese men and one 14-year-old Chinese boy were lynched by a white mob in Los Angeles. Violence against Chinese in this country has a long and mostly silent history that it is time to acknowledge more fully.  

What has been striking to me now as I re-immerse myself in Chinese American history is the extent to which this violence suggests that America didn’t just want to stop additional Chinese from coming, but wanted to kick out all the Chinese who were here. It is common knowledge, I think/hope, that 15,000 Chinese men risked life and limb to help build the first transcontinental railroad; once it was done, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act banned working-class Chinese men from entering America. But even after 1882, laws like the Scott Act of 1888 prevented Chinese from being able to visit China and return to America (something like 20,000 Chinese were stranded, some on ships in the middle of the Pacific Ocean); the Geary Act in 1892 humiliated resident Chinese by forcing them to carry registration papers; and general immigration acts in the early 1900s were applied discriminately against Chinese women in a continued effort to deport them. The combined message is pretty clear: America did not want Chinese to establish homes and settlements in the U.S., unlike European counterparts who were welcomed to plant roots and came by the millions. 

Q: How does the bloodshed in Atlanta fit into a historical context of Asian stereotypes and violence against Asians? 

SLC: I believe that many of the stereotypes about Asians grow out of the anti-immigration laws that were passed against Chinese. I mentioned above the way the laws stereotyped Chinese women as “hypersexualized” and prevented them from immigrating. In addition, miscegenation laws prohibited Chinese from marrying out, so Chinese family formation was delayed in America for 100 years. This is one origin for the stereotype of Asians as “forever foreigners.”  

Also, because Chinese were discriminated against economically, the later generations of Asian immigrants understood that they would have to work extra hard in order to make a living in America, so they urged their kids into math and science fields to improve economic stability and taught them that the cards are stacked against them and they would have to sacrifice fun and work extra hard in order to succeed —thus the “model minority” stereotype and a focus in STEM fields. Yes, there were additional factors, like language issues, that helped to make some of these stereotypes persist, but I believe they began with conditions of systemic racism that can’t be ignored. 

Q: What are your thoughts about the debate taking place as to whether to charge the murders as a hate crime? 

SLC: We should understand well enough how racial stereotypes operate in our society such that words like “go back to China” need not be explicitly uttered in the moment of a violent act for it to qualify as a hate crime. Six of the eight people who were murdered in Atlanta on March 16 were Asian women. The shooter said he had a sex addiction and drove to three different spas in order to seek out those whom he considered “temptations.” As I discussed above, Asian women have been hypersexualized in America due to laws and policies embraced across the last two centuries. Furthermore, the women who were killed were working in an industry that is associated with sex work (which also has a historical legacy). In short, the Atlanta women were in double jeopardy. They were killed for no reason of their own making. Instead, they were triply disadvantaged, representatives at the nexus of misogyny, class and race. Again, I see this tragedy in terms of the legacy of structural racism, of policies that were passed decades ago that continue to render Asians and, in this case, Asian women vulnerable in Western society today. From a literary lens, this massacre can be seen as a cautionary tale about the unintended consequences of some immigration laws and policies. 

Q: As an Asian American, have you experienced any prejudice due to your background? 

SLC: Yes, I get it from three sides: from whites, Asians and Mexicans. My mother is ethnic Chinese born in Vietnam, and my father was a GI who met my mother in Vietnam. I am thus a product of America's 20th-century history with war brides. As a result, I've been asked whether my mother was a prostitute (no!); I've been called different versions of "half breed," stalked by a Sinophile for a few years, and treated like a monkey in a cage when I speak Cantonese. I grew up in Chula Vista, where I also have been regularly mistaken as Chicana and scolded by Mexican elders for not speaking Spanish better. 

Q: Do you have any friends or family who have felt prejudice? How damaging has the last year been for them? 

SLC: I live with my mother in a three-generation household, so out of caution for her, I honestly haven’t gone out much this year. We worry a lot about older people and women who are out walking or shopping alone.  

Q: Do you think there will be long-term effects in the Chinese American community from the use of derogatory terms like “China virus” and “kung flu”? 

SLC: As long as the U.S. has a taut relationship with China, and Asians in America are seen as “others,” moments like this simply reinforce an already extant history of “yellow peril.” Every time America has issues with China, Chinese restaurants will suffer. Until we can see each other as individuals and bond via our shared humanity, this kind of tribalism and violence will unfortunately persist.  

Q: What do you think can be done to combat Asian hate and Asian stereotyping? 

SLC: For me, the best antidote to both stereotypes and fear is good information. If we understand where stereotypes come from historically, they can lose some of their power today. So let’s start by opening our minds and trying to understand how we got here. Let’s agree that America is a great country for many reasons, among them the promise embedded in the Statue of Liberty and her creed to “give me your tired and poor.” But just as we are not perfect as individuals, America has not perfectly executed its promise. This land was not ours to take; our great fields and railroads were, in part, built on the backs of slave and immigrant laborers who suffered and were too often vanquished; America has played favorites, extending settlement rights to some immigrants while banning others. Let’s look honestly at our history so that we know our full selves. Ethnic studies classes can give helpful perspectives. In addition, let’s commit to trying to put our fears to rest by seeking good information and corroborating it. Let’s be rigorous in our thinking and vigilant in examining our sources (every faculty member on campus will be happy to help with this!). Let’s talk to one another and try to understand one another’s viewpoints and subject positions. Let’s be of good faith and remember that we are all in this together, trying to forge the best life and community possible … together.  

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Perhaps no person on the planet, however, is more responsible for the term “fake news” achieving worldwide ubiquity, with the meaning often depending on the perspective of the person using it. It can refer to an outright fabrication. It can refer to a story containing elements of misinformation. And, in the more recent twist, it can refer to a largely true media article that the subject simply doesn’t like. 

Fake news increasingly has become a topic ripe for academic research, and one of those scholars is Cal State San Marcos psychology professor Dustin Calvillo, whose interest in memory distortions has evolved into the study of misinformation that’s prevalent on social media.  

Question: How did you become interested in fake news as a subject?  

Dustin Calvillo: My background is in cognitive psychology. My primary research interest is in understanding how memories become distorted. One method that we use to create memory distortions in the lab is to provide participants with misinformation that contradicts details of an event that they just witnessed. We then measure participants’ memory for the event to determine if the misinformation has distorted it. This interest in the effects of misinformation led me to start investigating people’s susceptibility to the real-world misinformation that surged on social media in the months before the 2016 U.S. presidential election.  

Q: Is there an academic definition of fake news?  

DC: There are a few academic definitions of fake news. One characteristic of these definitions is that fake news involves a deliberate attempt to misinform people by including information that is untrue, only partially true, or out of context. Another characteristic is that the information is presented as though it is coming from a legitimate news source.  

Q: It seems to me that it’s impossible to talk about fake news without bringing up the influence of Trump and his co-opting of a term that historically has referred to something strictly false. Now it can be anything the accuser disagrees with or doesn’t like. What do you think about that evolution?  

DC: The term “fake news” has been co-opted by politicians. I think this is unfortunate for a couple of reasons. First, it diminishes the meaning of the term. News could be called fake because it is untrue or just because it is unflattering. More importantly, this co-opting decreases trust in news media. Technology has given people access to a plethora of information, and it can be difficult to know what to believe. Having reliable news sources helps with this problem, but when these sources are accused of peddling fake news, it becomes more difficult to know what to trust.  

Q: Who are the people most susceptible to fake news and why?  

DC: We’ve done several studies to identify who is most susceptible to fake news. We have found that people low in analytic ability, people with less relevant knowledge and people who score low on the personality factors conscientiousness and open-mindedness are most susceptible to fake news. These people may lack the critical thinking or knowledge necessary to discern between real and fake headlines. With fake news about politicized issues, such as COVID-19 and fraud in the 2020 election, greater political conservatism and more viewing of conservative-leaning news are related to greater susceptibility in believing fake news. Claims from conservative politicians and political pundits that COVID-19 was a hoax and that the election was stolen seem to play a role in these findings.  

Q: What types of stories are most likely to be spread as fake news?  

DC: People tend to spread fake news that aligns with their prior beliefs, particularly if it is negative. If they feel negatively about a person, group or policy issue, they will be more likely to spread fake news that highlights negative aspects of that topic. For example, if someone believes that vaccines are dangerous, they would be more likely to spread fake news that is consistent with that belief than more general news about vaccines. This is especially true when people experience strong emotions related to a topic. One of the recent studies in my lab shows that when people are induced to experience emotions, their belief in fake news increases.  

Q: It’s frequently argued that the proliferation of fake news is one of the biggest threats to our democracy. Do you agree with that?  

DC: I believe that fake news poses a serious threat because it interferes with the solutions to other important problems. People need to work together on issues such as the pandemic and climate change. Fake news misinforms people about these issues and hinders collaborative problem-solving. It is a problem that exacerbates other problems.  

Q: What steps can be taken to decrease susceptibility to fake news?  

DC: Information literacy training shows promise in decreasing susceptibility to fake news. Playing 30 minutes of a video game that teaches people about fake news reduces susceptibility to it. Additionally, a graduate student in my lab is currently testing if providing people feedback on their decisions about the truth of news increases their subsequent performance on this task. Finally, when people are getting their news on social media sites, encouraging them to critically evaluate the stories, to consider the sources and to search for fact checks of the stories reduces sharing of fake news. We have found, however, that people are biased not only in what news they believe and share; they are also biased in what news they fact check. Furthermore, people are not aware of their biases; they believe that they are less biased than average people. A current project examines whether making people aware of their biases can reduce susceptibility to fake news.  

Q: How important is it to hold social media companies accountable for the spread, and how could it be done?  

DC: I think social media companies bear some responsibility for the content on their platforms. Facebook and Twitter have made attempts to limit the spread of fake news by labeling and removing content and banning users. Some people may view these actions as censorship and may feel these companies are unfairly limiting certain viewpoints, leading them to seek other platforms. As a psychological scientist, my work focuses on understanding why people believe and spread fake news, and in determining effective interventions to reduce susceptibility to it. If we can be successful, it would take some of the onus off social media companies to act as gatekeepers of information.  

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

That emphasis might have been surprising to progressives across the country who perhaps didn’t think that a political centrist like Biden was up to the challenge of advancing bold climate policy. 

But it mostly was music to the ears of Dina Gilio-Whitaker, a fourth-year American Indian studies lecturer at Cal State San Marcos who’s also a published author and a nationally renowned expert on environmental justice. Gilio-Whitaker, in fact, owns a consulting business that specializes in environmental justice policy planning. 

Both in her writing and her advocacy, however, Gilio-Whitaker broadens the traditional meaning of environmental justice to focus on the unique needs of her people. She descends from the Colville Confederated Tribes in Washington state and regularly is invited to speak to audiences nationwide about topics related to American Indians.  

Question: Can you start by defining environmental justice for people who may not have a good grasp of the term? 

Dina Gilio-Whitaker: Environmental justice refers to the ways that communities of color are disproportionately impacted by environmental processes that expose them to risk and harm. We don't have the language for this until the early 1980s, and it comes as a result of activism that's happening in the Deep South, in Black communities in North Carolina. They're fighting against the siting of a toxic waste dump, which leads to studies that argue for this new kind of racism called environmental racism. Even earlier, we see some of these harms and risks in farmworker communities in California. César Chávez comes to mind, how he led the fight for farmworkers’ rights as a result, initially, of the exposures to pesticides in farm practices. That’s another early articulation of ethnic minority communities being disproportionately harmed. The water crisis in Flint, Mich., is a prominent recent example because it largely affected Black communities. 

Q: In your 2019 book, “As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock,” you argue that the traditional understanding of environmental justice is insufficient for American Indian communities. Can you expound on that? 

DGW: In this case, environmental injustice is a direct result of a centuries-long forced dispossession of Native people from their land. Their whole lives are structured around particular ecosystems, so the forced displacement from those ecosystems results in genocidal processes. Pushing people off their lands is a process, I argue, of environmental injustice toward Native people. And there are all kinds of other ways that we can measure these injustices. For Native people, as people with political relationships to the state, this framework of environmental racism is very inadequate to describe these ongoing processes of injustice. In the realms of policy and law, there's no accommodation for this. So my argument is that it needs to be indigenized; it needs to be expanded to understand the colonial history and structure of the U.S. in order to understand what injustice is environmentally for Native nations. 

Q: How do you feel about environmental justice being a major prong of Biden’s climate plan? 

DGW: It makes me optimistic, or I would say cautiously optimistic. We heard in the Obama administration some commitments to environmental justice, though not as much. I think the climate crisis is really more ramped up now, especially after four years of Trump and the extensive rolling back of environmental rules and regulations, and downplaying of climate change. There were over 100 rules and laws that the previous administration pretty much eviscerated in four years. Now there's a much more renewed and robust commitment to environmental justice with the Biden administration. I think it's because of the backsliding of the last four years. 

Q: Is this something you could have imagined from a political moderate like Biden? 

DGW: It actually seems inevitable to me given the state of affairs of the world and the fact that we are in what experts agree is a sixth mass extinction event. We know ecosystems are collapsing. We know that climate change is happening. We see it, we are living with it daily now. So it doesn't surprise me, and I'm happy that there is this very visible, very explicit commitment to environmental justice. I think they're taking it seriously.  

Q: What is another example, other than the climate plan, of where you’re seeing that commitment? 

DGW: I sat in on a webinar a couple of weeks ago that was put together by the Biden-Harris transition team. It was an informational webinar that they directed to people with environmental justice expertise to apply for jobs everywhere in the federal government. They talked about this thing called the Plum Book, which I had never heard of. It’s a directory, like 237 pages long, of all the jobs in the federal government, all three branches. They encouraged us to study the book and find out where we think our skills as an environmental justice activist or leader would best be put to use. So it's a very broad-based approach where they're seeming to want to infuse all aspects of government with environmental justice expertise. It's pretty interesting.  

Q: Were you tempted at all? Have you perused the Plum Book? 

DGW: I was tempted, but I'm so busy. I don't want to go to work for the federal government. I don't want to move to Washington, D.C. I would love to be an adviser to people in high-level positions. Assuming Deb Haaland gets confirmed as Secretary of the Interior, I could see ideally being consulted at that level or some other level, maybe in the EPA. But to be a 9-to-5 employee of the federal government, no. I'm able to have more impact doing what I do as a teacher and in my consulting work.  

Q: I'm glad you brought up Haaland, who would become the first American Indian to hold a cabinet position. How encouraging is that for Native communities? 

DGW: A Native person, let alone a Native woman, being appointed to a cabinet-level position is real progress. And I think her politics are in the right place. My concern, though, is that the structure is the structure. It's just a revolving door of people and personalities who fill those positions, and they’re based on a very particular structure that is fundamentally colonial, built on logics of dispossession and injustice toward Native peoples, and it's upheld by the scaffolding of federal Indian law that is really problematic for Native people. It's not a system that is designed to deliver justice. There are massive forces that are in conflict with tribal interests. So it will be really tricky for her to get some serious work done amid all of that. I'm skeptical about what actually will be accomplished. 

Q: Getting back to the Biden climate plan, have you had a chance to delve into it? What do you think about the meat of the plan from an environmental justice framework? 

DGW: I haven't really looked at it. From what I’ve read, people are saying it's basically the Green New Deal without the title, and I do know about that. I wrote an article in 2019 for High Country News about the Green New Deal and how it, along with environmental justice, needs to be indigenized, or adapted to be responsive to Indian country. One of the things that worries me is that things won’t fundamentally change under Biden compared to the Obama administration. For Native people, that's a problem because it was under the Obama administration that we got energy independence through fracking processes in the Bakken oil fields. That has led to massive problems for Indian country; that's what gave us the Standing Rock conflict. We continue to have Native peoples fighting oil pipeline projects. What concerns me is the continuing reliance on fossil fuels as part of an everything-on-the-table approach to energy. 

Q: What would you say are the biggest ways that Native populations are endangered by climate change?  

DGW: It varies from region to region because of the different ways that climate change impacts different ecosystems. What endangers one community won't be the same for other communities. For example, one of the big threats of climate change for peoples in the Pacific Northwest, like in the Columbia River watershed, is the warming water temperatures, which endanger salmon species. Salmon species are already collapsing because of the proliferation of dams over the last 80-100 years, which block salmon from migrating to the places that they used to migrate to. And now with climate change, it leads to warmer temperatures in the water, which further endangers those salmon species.  

I come from a tribe that is salmon dependent. Salmon was for our people what the buffalo are to the Plains people; it's the center of our cultures. But after the building of the Grand Coulee Dam in 1942, the Colville reservation has not seen salmon in the upper reaches of the Columbia since then, because of the flooding of a major salmon fishery that we relied on for thousands of years. So not only is it a culturally genocidal impact, it also led to the inability for us to access a traditional food. There are dozens of other traditional foods that, due to development, have been diminished. And that has led to the kinds of health impacts that Native people experience as a result of these colonial processes. All these things are intertwined.  

Q: If you were Joe Biden for a day, what would be the most important step you could take to address environmental justice issues for American Indians? 

DGW: I would pass an executive order with a commitment to free, prior and informed consent. FPIC comes out of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and it's a commitment for governments to not just consult with tribes on development projects that involve their lands, but to obtain consent for those kinds of projects. Consultation doesn't mean the same thing as consent. Those are massive differences when it comes to these kinds of development projects. 

The United States was the last nation in the world to affirm the declaration, three years after it was passed in the UN General Assembly in 2007. When Obama finally signed the U.S. on as a signatory, he did so with a 15-page declaration full of disclaimers, basically rationalizing how U.S. federal law is already the framework through which all of this stuff will happen. Ultimately, federal law is the problem. It's the structure that maintains this relationship of injustice between tribes and the federal government. Native people are just saying, “Look, you agreed to support free, prior and informed consent, but you're not doing it.” More and more, they’re holding the government's feet to the fire on this concept. And if they actually are able to enshrine consent over consultation in federal law, it'll be a major step forward.  

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

For years, the Cal State San Marcos history professor served as the campus coordinator of the American Democracy Project, a national initiative focused on public higher education’s role in preparing the next generation of informed, engaged citizens for our country.  

Quinney was the first faculty adviser of CSUSM’s Civic Learning Initiative, which was launched in 2015 and included such programs as the Speaking of Democracy series and Democracy in Action, in which students and faculty partner on projects with local city governments. 

Earlier this month, she was one of three panelists for an Arts & Lectures event titled “Disinformation and Democracy” about the intersection of social media and elections around the world.  

One of the foremost reasons why Quinney thinks so much about democracy is that she has a strong historical foundation in its antithesis. Her scholarly research has focused on Italian Fascism, with her doctoral thesis examining the lackluster U.S. and British efforts to purge fascists from high-ranking positions in postwar Italy. 

In this edition of Ask the Expert, Quinney talks about the historical underpinnings of fascism and what warnings can be gleaned about the strength of American democracy. 

Question: Let’s start with something really basic. What exactly is fascism? Where does the word and concept come from? 

Kimber Quinney: The word fascism comes from the Italian word “fascisti,” which describes a bundle of twigs that was a symbol of the Roman empire. The seeds of Italian Fascism were laid during World War I, and shortly after, in 1922, Benito Mussolini marched into Rome to claim power in Italy on behalf of the Italian Fascist Party. Mussolini and a government minister named Giovanni Gentile developed a “philosophy of fascism” that laid the groundwork for the ideology that would reign in Italy for the next 21 years.  

The major tenets of fascism have been long debated by historians, political scientists and philosophers. And I cannot pretend to know exactly what defines fascism because it is contextual. German Nazism, for example, looked very different from Italian Fascism, yet we use the word “fascism” to describe both regimes. The way I would explain it is that we need to distinguish the original version of Italian Fascism (with a capital “F”) from more generic or broader tendencies that existed — and still exists — in various nations around the world.  

We can see essential characteristics of a political phenomenon called “fascism” in the same way that we might identify similar elements in “socialism” or “liberalism.” Some of these characteristics are generally agreed upon; others are disputed. For example, most scholars agree that fascism emerges after a major political, social or economic upheaval, such as World War I or the Great Depression. Because of the dire circumstances in which fascism arises, the political ideology is often accompanied by a sense of cultural pessimism. This pessimism inspires a claim to renew or remake the nation, with an extraordinary emphasis on ultra-patriotic or nationalist aims. While the fascist ideology looks forward to a renewal or restoration of the nation, it also looks to the golden years of a past era. Tradition is a prominent theme. Veneration of an authoritarian leader who is seen as a savior who can rescue the country from its decline is another characteristic. But fascism cannot exist without a tide of popular — or populist — support that usually begins with the lower middle classes. Concerted campaigns of propaganda and disinformation, full of bold imagery and symbols, are necessary tools to carry out fascist agendas. Manipulation of the media is important. Finally, fascist movements use intimidation and violence to achieve political ends. They intentionally creating a climate of unrest in which only the fascists seem capable of securing the nation from “unpatriotic” or “radical” forces.  

Q: Why are you so interested in the rise and fall of fascism in Italy? 

KQ: I have a personal interest; I am Italian American. My grandmother’s parents emigrated from Italy at the turn of the 20th century. I traveled on many occasions to Italy as a teenager to visit my Italian relatives in Savona (outside of Genoa). I have a personal affinity for Italy, Italian places, people and culture — and Italian food! 

When I decided to pursue my Ph.D., I knew that I wanted to study the history of American foreign relations. I wanted to explore the ways in which the United States relates to the rest of the world. My particular interest was the history of the American mission to “democratize” globally, and the effects that that global mission has on other nations — but also on democracy at home in America.  

And Italy is a perfect historical case study. The United States intervened in July 1943 to fight fascism in Italy and to replace Mussolini’s regime with a democratic regime. But then the United States found itself waging another war, this time against Italian communism. The impact of all of this on Italian democracy, and on American democracy, is where I have focused my research. 

Q: You’ve written about how refugees from Mussolini’s Italy issued warnings to Americans about the vulnerability of our democracy. What was the nature of their warnings? 

KQ: When I started to examine the ways in which U.S. policy toward Italy was tied to domestic politics, I realized how important the Italian-American population was to President Franklin Roosevelt’s calculations during World War II and, later, to President Harry Truman’s Cold War strategy.  

I started to learn more about the direct impact of U.S. foreign policy on shaping American national identity. What I mean by that is that I started to examine the ways in which Italian Americans — whether they were recent immigrants to the United States or were born in the United States — had a vested interest in U.S. policy toward Italy. They attempted to shape that policy, either by serving in government or teaching about Italy or preaching about Italy or forming community and neighborhood groups. Their relatives were still living in Italy, of course, and they watched to see how U.S. policies would affect the Italian people — their families. 

The refugee scholars who came to the United States were very outspoken about the dangers of fascism and anti-Semitism. They identified how vulnerable Italy had been and then pointed out how any nation — even the United States— could also be threatened. 

Two refugees — Max Ascoli and Gaetano Salvemini —stand out. They wrote for newspapers, they gave lectures, they traveled the country to warn about fascism, and they established an Italian-American organization called the Mazzini Society, the mission of which was to educate Italians in America about fascism, and about democracy.  

They warned that fascism was not imposed in Italy by a coup or a revolution. Instead, it creeped into the Italian system legally. When Mussolini issued orders to censor the press or to decree what could or could not be taught in the school system or to declare who was able to travel where in the nation, he did so legally. He used the Italian democratic system to dismantle liberal democracy — step by step.  

Q: There’s been a lot of talk in America over the past few years about the potential threat of authoritarianism and the fragility of our democracy. As a historian, are you seeing that, and in what ways? 

KQ: Equating Italian Fascism with any other version of authoritarianism is dangerous and can be misleading. But I think it’s really important to study the conditions that gave rise to fascism in Italy and to understand how that happened because those conditions keep recurring. And there’s no question that we’re living in an international system that is giving rise to authoritarian regimes around the world, from Belarus to Brazil.  

Indeed, one vital observation that Max Ascoli made again and again to Americans in the late 1920s and 1930s was that fascism did not exist in an international vacuum. Systemic political, economic and social conditions gave rise to the phenomenon. Ascoli reminded Americans that fascism was born amid conditions of deep unrest and insecurity. Mussolini worked to deepen that unrest, to exacerbate that insecurity to such an extent that Italians “accepted” what Ascoli called the “fascist peace.” That was a fascist strategy: to wear Italian citizens down, exhausted from the chaos, such that they could no longer bear the cost of politics. In Ascoli’s words, they “could no longer pay the price of democratic political life.” 

So, I would simply say that when leaders strive to divide the nation, rather than unite it, we need to be vigilant. That is a fascist tactic, and we need to pay attention.  

Q: What do you see as the best ways to safeguard our democracy, in both the short and long term? 

KQ: The most important lesson that the Italian refugees brought to the United States was to remind Americans that the best protection against fascism is to safeguard democracy. When all is said and done, what Americans could and should do (according to Ascoli) was to learn about democracy, participate in democracy, do democracy. The nonchalant assumption that democracy was here to stay forever without citizen participation was dangerous, in their view. Democracy demands effort.  

Ascoli described himself as a “liberal.” That label meant something different in the mid-20th century than it does today. He was a “middle of the road” kind of guy — he was anti-fascist, but he did not identify as a socialist, and he was ardently anti-communist. I think if Ascoli were here, he would argue that deliberative democracy, the process that brings us consensus – even if we disagree on this or that – is powerful in a healthy democracy. And in our politically polarized moment, we lose sight of the value of this process. 

Q: What is the importance of education, and particularly college education, in the effort to protect democracy? 

KQ: In my view, education is indeed a guardian of democracy. And I do mean K-12, but of course I especially value the role of higher education. The college campus provides us a context in which to debate ideas and differences of opinion — and to see that as a goal of learning. It is an education in democracy because our goal is to learn from, and share opinions with, each other.  

Q: How big of a threat to democracy is disinformation and social media manipulation? What can be done to combat that? 

KQ: Disinformation is a form of manipulation, and usually employed for political ends. Historically, it has been used by democracies as well as by dictatorships. The United States, for instance, has used disinformation as a covert tactic to destabilize opposing regimes.  

But when disinformation is used by a government to divide and destabilize the nation itself, that poses a direct threat to democracy. The aim is to cause chaos and uncertainty. Conspiracy theories are a prime example.  

Authoritarian governments have always liked conspiracy theories. In the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, Mussolini’s fascists came to power and stayed there in large part by claiming that communists or Jews were conspiring to undermine the stability of the country and to spread fear of this fabricated threat. 

Racial laws were not introduced in Italy until 1938, but anti-Semitism was present at the birth of Italian Fascism. In fact, Giovanni Preziosi, who participated in Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922, was the first to translate “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in Italian in 1921. This fabricated document fueled conspiracy theories about Jewish people all over the world — including, of course, in Fascist Italy. 

Q: In a recent article that quoted you, you mentioned the phrase “historical thinking.” What is that and why is it important? 

KQ: Historians want evidence. Every claim we make when we interpret the past must be informed by documents, by sources, by evidence that is cross-checked against other pieces of evidence. We are trained to check the authenticity of sources; we ask who wrote that document, when, and we do our best to interpret why. We also corroborate the sources — we cannot simply rely on a single document to tell the story.  

We call this kind of critical thinking “historical thinking.” Another important aspect of historical thinking is that we do our best to acknowledge our own biases, first, but also try to set those biases aside so that the documents — the historical voices of the past — are prioritized.  

One of the dangers in our current moment — especially in the jungle of social media — is “confirmation bias.” We want our prejudices or beliefs to be confirmed. Historians are very wary of this skewed pursuit of information. Indeed, we approach information with a healthy skepticism. Because historians seek to check not merely the content but also the source of information, historical thinking can serve as a guard against disinformation and can be used to debunk conspiracy theories. 

Historians seek to avoid what is known as “motivated reasoning” — that’s the phenomenon wherein we have an emotional attachment to a particular outcome or conclusion and so we seek evidence to support that outcome.  

Q: What else are you thinking about with the election just days away? 

KQ: Civic learning is not just about memorizing the preamble of the Declaration of Independence or learning more about the electoral college. Democracy is about participating, becoming informed, and making your own decisions. One of the core lessons of history is that people make choices and choices make history. I am borrowing this phrase from an educational program called “Facing History and Ourselves,” and I think it works really well to remind us of human agency in history.  

History empowers. Every single one of us, no matter our social status or our race or our gender, makes history. Each of us has an opportunity — individually and collectively — to participate in democracy.  

I am not for one moment suggesting that it’s an equal playing field, or that we do so without individual and collective struggle. To the contrary, the democratic value of history is that it provides evidence to reveal that historical wrongs can only be righted by doing something about it. History teaches us that democracy needs cultivating, through civil disobedience and resistance, but also through casting a ballot. 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Since 2014, Diekman has been working on a digital media project, “Run Dry,” which tells the story of the water crisis in California’s San Joaquin Valley. 

This interview about the project, conducted by Kathryn Stein, originally appeared in The Confluence, a blog of the California Institute for Water Resources. It’s reprinted here with their permission.  

Question: Could you provide an overview of the “Run Dry” project? 

Kristine Diekman: “Run Dry” is a story of small, rural California communities and their struggle to remain connected to the most precious resource — water. This digital media project combines short documentary films, personal stories, photographs and data visualizations about water scarcity and contamination in the San Joaquin Valley. It asks: What does clean water bring us, and why should we tell the story of its loss?

Without water, we cannot drink, bathe, cook or clean. It is indispensable for empowerment, health, dignity and economic security. Water is a human right, yet 10% of the world's population, mostly in rural areas, lives without safe water. The personal stories in “Run Dry” investigate the significance of water and reveal the systems of power that govern its distribution. The project addresses how water is accessed, what systems govern water resources, how they have developed over decades, and how they impact human well-being today. Audiences learn specifically about how race, class, migration, water policy, climate, hydrology and agricultural history combined to create the water crisis in the San Joaquin Valley.  

Q: What was your inspiration for the project, and how did it come to be? 

KD: I was inspired to connect people to a human understanding of the value of water and how scarce a resource it is. “Run Dry” was originally funded by the California Humanities Community Stories grant, which supports projects that tell unheard stories of marginalized communities. In 2014, when the drought hit hard, I was compelled to collect the personal stories of people living without water, or with contaminated water, in the San Joaquin Valley. Media outlets had been focusing on these stories of hardship, and only a few sustained their reporting or connected water scarcity to larger issues. I wanted to make something comprehensive that also had community impact and empowered people living there.

I collaborated with the Community Water Center and Self-Help Enterprises in Visalia to identify individuals who wanted to share their stories. I also focused on success stories of communities connecting to neighboring water systems. I highlighted efforts to install water tanks to temporarily bring water into homes and the work of local water board members to improve community conditions. An animation I produced explaining groundwater contamination and scarcity is still being used by the Community Water Center.

Q: This project spanned 2014-17. Since then, do you think the water shortage and contamination issues in the San Joaquin Valley have changed? 

KD: Since 2017, California has had some years with above-average rain and snowpack, but it is never completely free of drought. Climate change affects the snowpack, which previously provided reliable surface water that could be utilized over time. During 2011-15, little to no surface water was allocated to San Joaquin Valley farms from the State Water Project or the Central Valley Project.

Without surface water for irrigation, farmers pumped water from underground aquifers at greater and greater depths, some as deep at 2,000 feet, which depleted shared groundwater. Private family wells that reach on average 100 to 200 feet began to run dry as the aquifer lowered below that of private domestic wells. Well drilling is very expensive, and most rural residents could not afford to drill deeper wells. The State Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) was enacted to alleviate this through regional water regulation. But equitable solutions are still in the future as plans for water sustainability won't be fully implemented until 2040.

Q: The project highlights how important it is to inform people about the personal impacts of water access. What do you hope people will take away from the stories in “Run Dry”? 

KD: When I show these videos to people, they are shocked. Viewers generally don't know a lot about the human impacts of water scarcity, even in their backyards. I found it sadly ironic that some scientists who viewed it – people who have the most in-depth information about water science, hydrology, climatology and climate research – did not necessarily connect the importance of their work to the human condition. This is not their fault. The compartmentalization of knowledge and research, especially the divide between the arts, humanities and the sciences, leads to this disconnect. My hope is that the films help people feel personally connected to the issues through storytelling.

The public was also not aware of the threat of water scarcity due to drought. One of the messages is about water conservation, which everyone can do. Find out where your water comes from. Once you understand the complexities of water conveyance in California, you will be more likely to conserve what does reach your faucet. In the video “This Happens to Real People,” Mary Schaffer says: “Go to one of these areas that don't have no water and see how the people are having to live and what they are having to do to get by. You'll be more conscious with your water. Conserve that water, because we could run out. We are very close to being out again, and this time it will be everybody.” We need to work together as residents, policy makers and scientists to make sure our water use is sustainable, not just now but into the future.

Q: Watching these stories can lead to feeling a bit hopeless. How did gathering them impact you? 

KD: I have made several documentary and educational films that focus on telling the personal stories of struggle. These include films about gang prevention, pregnancy prevention, the legal system, and others. Each time I engage with an interview subject, I am deeply affected. My role as filmmaker is to facilitate the stories and be a witness. I provide time and space for someone to tell me about their life or community. As a filmmaker, I often do not go into these projects with a deep knowledge of the subject. I let the experts and community members educate me.

With this project, I started to educate myself about water conveyance, water science and water policy. It is truly a complex and unending story. I do think there is hope in mitigating water contamination. There are grassroots organizations, like the Community Water Center, that work tirelessly to facilitate community members speaking at hearings for policy change. They connect municipal systems, help to install water treatment facilities and gather data to support their mission. Water sampling and monitoring is crucial, and the state is working toward compliance. As for drought and climate change, I believe that California will always have a tenuous relationship to water – either too much or too little. Do we spend on storage or environmental health? Agriculture or wildlife? Small rural communities or urban centers? I do hope that the State Groundwater Management Act will reflect true community need.

Q: What are you working on now, and what are your plans for future projects? 

KD: I haven't truly finished “Run Dry” yet. There are two outstanding features. First is real-time GIS maps, which I will add to the “Run Dry” website. I want people to understand the relationship between climate change, water, socio-economics, agriculture, migration and other factors. I hope that when people see this data visualized, they will understand how interlocked these factors are. Second, I promised to bring the project back to the San Joaquin Valley, where it originated. The public library system in Tulare County has agreed to house the project, show the films and create a place for residents to provide feedback. Because of COVID-19, this project is temporarily suspended.

Educating young people about climate change is important, too. I am working across academic disciplines to create college curricula that help students connect science to the human condition. A team of faculty from across CSU campuses in the sciences, social sciences and humanities developed a proposal for an integrated, interdisciplinary and experiential hydrosocial curriculum for students. Hydrosocial studies focus on how people, societies, institutions, technology, science and geo-political interests interact synergistically to allocate, protect and understand water's importance as a community resource. The curriculum is designed to address both social and environmental relationships we have with water in California from humanistic and scientific viewpoints, something I think is desperately needed.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

But ever since the epidemic became a pandemic early this spring and began to hijack almost all aspects of daily life around the world, scholars of every stripe have found applications to their chosen area of study, and Al-Marashi is no exception. He has written at least a half-dozen research papers or op-eds related to the pandemic, with titles as wide-ranging as “The Geopolitics of the Coronavirus Outbreak,” “COVID-19 and the Middle East’s ‘Cold War,’ ” and “Pandemics Incubate Other Viruses Like Racism.” 

In terms of COVID-19, one of Al-Marashi’s primary goals is to try to place the disease and its myriad effects into the proper historical framing, which he does by way of an arcane field called clio-epidemiology. 

Question: What is clio-epidemiology, and why does it interest you? 

Ibrahim Al-Marashi: We academics love to use obscure terms for simple phenomena, but clio-epidemiology can be most succinctly defined as the history of disease. This field provides context to better understand our present during the coronavirus outbreak. 

Q: Have you taught the concept in your classes before? How that will change or broaden because of COVID-19? 

IA: Before COVID-19, it was difficult to get students interested in clio-epidemiology. For example, after giving a lecture on how smallpox eradicated Native American populations or how it was eliminated during the Cold War due to the cooperation of the U.S. and USSR, I would not see any hands raised. I would then remind them, “You might not be interested in viruses, but viruses are interested in you!” 

Q: Have students shown more interest in the subject since COVID, or do you think they will this fall? 

IA: Absolutely. Since the pandemic, the interest in clio-epidemiology has surged.  

Q: In one of your papers, you write about lessons from three historic pandemics – Black Death, Spanish flu and smallpox – that can be applied to this one. Let’s start with the Black Death of the 14th century. What are the lessons from that? 

IA: The Black Death, the Spanish flu and smallpox are just a few examples that provide valuable historical understanding of how states and societies responded to pandemics, furthering our understanding of the COVID cultures that are emerging in 2020. It is often said that COVID-19 will lead to the end of globalization. Globalization is not a process that simply begins and ends. Saying that globalization will end is like saying that the weather will end. The Black Death of the mid-1300s spread rapidly due to a globalization linked to a pax-Mongolica. The Mongols ushered in an integrated trading network. It allowed someone like Marco Polo to travel from Venice to the Mongol capital unmolested. It also allowed the bacterium that caused the Black Death to do the same.  

Q: What are the lessons from Spanish flu? 

The need for transparency is paramount, reflected in the name of the 1918-1919 “Spanish flu” pandemic, which was avian in origin, infected half a billion people worldwide, and killed 50 million of them, much more than the war that preceded it. The reason for its name is not because it originated in Spain, but as the nation was not a party to World War I, it did not have a wartime censorship regime in place, whereas other nations censored the news of the pandemic. The World War is a partial reason why the flu spread around the world, with mass movement of soldiers and wartime material causing global spread that would not have occurred in peace time. Whether it is the Chinese or American government, both need to allow scientists to communicate freely with the public, without politicization impeding this communication.  

Q: What are the lessons from smallpox? 

IA: That diseases can be eradicated when the nations of the world cooperate. From 1966 to 1977, a global vaccination campaign under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO) eradicated smallpox from the planet in one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century. The lesson for the U.S. today is that it needs to cooperate, not confront China, and continue to fund the WHO. The Trump administration has neglected to do both. 

Q: You’re an expert in Middle East history. How has the pandemic affected that region, both in terms of public health and culture/society? 

IA: Iran was the where the epidemic broke out in the region. Sanctions imposed by the Trump administration that targeted humanitarian trade with Iran have hurt the Islamic Republic’s ability to deal with the outbreak.  

The Iraqi government has found itself dealing with its greatest governance challenge since the ISIS invasion of 2014. The coronavirus has hit Iraq’s economy and placed additional stress on an already strained medical infrastructure. Iraq’s public health sector has been undermined by the sanctions that began after 1991, and the effects of depleted uranium from the wars in 1991 and 2003. The collapse of the state in 2003 exacerbated the decline of the health sector, already eviscerated by the United Nations-imposed sanctions. Afterward, Iraq suffered a flight of its educated professional middle class for years, especially doctors, fleeing to Europe or the U.S. The brain drain had dire ramifications as the Iraqi Red Crescent estimated that about 50 percent of Iraq’s doctors and 70 percent of medical specialists left in the exodus. Hospitals and clinics had been degraded by war, insurgency and violence.  

The pandemic hit Lebanon while it was dealing with an economic crisis that emerged when it defaulted on international loans. Syria and Yemen are in a state of civil war and will suffer the challenges posed by COVID. All three suffer poverty, which the virus thrives in. Middle Eastern conflicts, particularly between Iran and Saudi Arabia, have also hindered collective biosecurity.  

Q: How you do think history will judge the public response to this pandemic, both worldwide and in the U.S.? 

IA: Poorly. The new coronavirus is a problem that is global in nature, which requires political solutions and transparency, based on international cooperation on the multinational, national and local level. This cooperation did not occur.  

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Glover has spent much of her career researching and teaching about police and the criminal legal system in America, with a particular focus on racial profiling. In 2009, she wrote a book titled “Racial Profiling: Research, Racism and Resistance” in which she investigates the influence of the practice in shaping public understanding of race, law and law enforcement.

The importance of research like that, of course, took on greater urgency over the past month, as protests of police brutality and racial inequality spread like wildfire in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Memorial Day.

The protests have died down to some extent, but the national dialogue about the proper and just role of police in our society continues.

Question: How did you first come to the subject of racial profiling, and why does it so interest you?

Karen Glover: I was beat up by the police, officially reported it with photos documenting my injuries, and was told by officials that the event did not happen. It changed my understanding of belonging and my relationship with the state. Particularly the lack of accountability, which is justice. I knew my experience with this as a white woman was an anomaly. I thought about what those experiences must do to whole communities, like our Black and Brown communities. I eventually wanted to know what creates the conditions for racialized state violence to occur – racial profiling creates the conditions. Because of racial profiling, communities of color, particularly Black communities, are disproportionately exposed to state agents who have been authorized to use lethal force. Because racial profiling is about criminalization, the threat and fear born of that criminalization facilitates force. This all is sounding kind of academic; it basically comes down to a love for the people.

Q: Can you articulate the main themes of your book? What would you want a reader to take away from it?

KG: It’s basically a two-part book. Racial profiling was a “hot” agenda item in police studies at that time. The first part of the book is a critique, as one of the reviewers stated, of the “epistemological, methodological, theoretical and substantive limitations of mainstream work…” on racial profiling. Much of the literature out there was not race conscious, even though the researchers were studying racial profiling, so it was a critique of my discipline. I tend to do that. Readers would take away that racialization and criminalization processes happen during the “production of knowledge” in part because the researchers themselves are not race conscious. Police studies, for instance, were and are largely still a white male realm. They analyze race “as a variable” without going deep, and that limits the accuracy of our knowledge about how race operates. The second half of the book analyzes interview data from people of color who experienced racial profiling with law enforcement. Readers would take away that these experiences are watershed moments in folks’ lives that dismantle one’s sense of belonging, rights and protections – nothing less. It also leads to resistance to the injustice.

Q: How do you think society has changed, if at all, in terms of racial profiling since the book came out 11 years ago?

KG: Racial profiling, in the limited sense of traffic stops as I focused on in the book, is still very much in play. Traffic stops are considered a “seizure” under constitutional protections against unwarranted searches and seizures by the state. We have much more scientific data on racialized patterns of traffic stops, which are important to focus on because they capture our everydayness and have potential to be a point that formally introduces folks to the criminal legal system. The research is pretty settled now. Blacks in particular, but people of color more generally, experience intervention by the state disproportionate to their representation in the general population. They also experience more punitive practices following the initial traffic stop. In San Diego, for instance, we have a very recent traffic stop analysis – not without its problems – that showed this trend. Unfortunately, the San Diego State researchers have just come out publicly and stated that their report on the study to the City of San Diego and the San Diego Police Department was “immediately shelved.” So we are also not only having consistent data documenting racial profiling in these intervening years, but that data is often not used as it needs to be. There is research suggesting that some research, policy and institutional public efforts to appear responsive to racial profiling only serves to legitimize law enforcement without changing actual practices.

We’ve also had a least two high-profile peaks of anti-immigrant sentiment and practice in the U.S. since the time data was collected for the book. I moved to North County in 2007 when one peak was going on, and the campaign and presidency of Trump in recent times has created more recent hostile conditions. It affects our powerful students who may be in the country without the permission of the U.S. government, and it affects their families and their communities. Law enforcement discrimination takes on another level of surveillance with the Latinx community because of the issue of documentation in addition to being Brown. This surveillance is more intense than when data for the book was gathered.

As well, the emergence of Black Lives Matter since Trayvon Martin’s death and social media have amplified awareness of police brutality in the Black community and resistance to that racialized state violence. There has been a lot of good justice work there. I teach on BLM a lot in classes, often in connection with the Black Panther Party and its origins in protecting the community from police abuses of power. When she visited CSUSM a few years back, our students were able to give Alicia Garza, one of the founders of BLM, personal letters they’d written reflecting on what BLM meant to them! It was a very powerful moment.

Q: You recently wrote a campus article about two pieces of law enforcement-related legislation that local Assemblymember Shirley Weber was integral in getting passed. Can you describe those two state laws and explain why you think they’re so important?

KG: Assembly Bill 953, the Racial and Identity Profiling Act of 2015 (known as RIPA), mandates that law enforcement agencies in California collect and report data about their contacts with community members. The data is the officer’s perception of things like race/ethnicity, gender, national origin and mental health of the community member. Law enforcement agencies are required to work with the RIPA advisory board (community advocates, law enforcement practitioners, academics) and the California Department of Justice to analyze, consult and develop policy around the data to help prevent unjust practices by law enforcement. It is called the strictest law of its kind in the country. I work it into my classes a lot.

AB 392, the California Act to Save Lives of 2019 (sometimes called the Stephon Clark law), was a hard-fought battle changing some language in the law on when law enforcement use of lethal force is justified. The law now reflects the “necessity” of using lethal force, so theoretically there is a stricter standard for law enforcement to meet when using lethal force in California.

Both are important because they are race conscious.

Q: What has been your main reaction to the protests taking place across the country, and the world, since the police killing of George Floyd?

KG: Contradicting feelings of deep pain because of the brutality and joy at the actions of the people is a main reaction. We must be witnesses to both. I think this is a huge showing of Black love.

Another main reaction is fear that this is being consumed and commodified by whites and the media. There is a sea of white faces. People are asking me: Isn’t that what we want? But I’m just putting two and two together. My sense is that the world would look different already if even a small percentage of whites out there now were acting in more racially just economic, political and social ways in their everyday lives. White folks have to do something real now – economically, politically and socially – for this to be authentic on our part. There has to be white aftermath to what is going down. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does have to be real and sustained.

The conditions of the last four years and COVID-19 may have helped open up this much-needed political space. I protested at the White House, left my Amadou Diallo sign at the black fence that surrounds the White House, and marched with thousands of folks. So much purpose in the air. My brilliant niece and nephew, people of color, are very involved in the protests. She is in the Oakland area and just texted me a picture of activist Angela Davis, who was standing next to her in the crowd, masked and with fist raised. He is in New York City and exhausted. I’m extremely proud of them!

While this action is necessary and generating some powerful energy and love, we have to anticipate and prepare for the pushback and backlash. It is coming.

Q: What do you think of the “defund the police” movement? If you could design your ideal law enforcement system, what would it look like?

KG: I value the urgency of the phrase. The phrase is disruptive, and folks who are already conjuring up things in their heads are scared by it. It is not a new idea – it is a critique of capitalism and the prison industrial complex. It is totally something we should do – re-envision and change the whole institution. I recently heard it described from the Critical Resistance organization that abolition is not just about tearing things down but about building other things up. A related idea is “justice reinvestment” that divests from incarcerative racial projects and invests in community building on economic, political and social levels. That is not too much to ask. Criminology research tells us that good housing; stable, meaningful and decent wages and employment; and access to quality, relevant education are three things we actually need for well-being. Folks with solid access to those few things are less likely to be incarcerated or return to incarceration. That is not too much to ask.

I sometimes ask my students to imagine a world where each country is rated for “well-being” based on the smallness of their incarcerated population. Today, the U.S. would be ranked at the bottom. My ideal law enforcement system would have a very small punitive footprint. There are alternative ways, more loving ways, to hold folks accountable for transgression. We have a lot of work to do. Of course, this law enforcement system could be born only after the current economic, political and social system gets turned on its head.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

That story happened on Memorial Day, when a white police officer from Minneapolis killed a Black man named George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes, the brutal encounter captured on video and quickly beamed across the internet. 

Almost instantly, protests broke out around the United States and the world, with masses of people gathering in the streets of big cities and small towns alike to rail against police brutality and racial injustice. One month later, the protests continue, marking the longest and most sustained action on this front since the civil rights era of the 1960s.  

The terms that many Americans are just now awakening to – things like systemic racism, anti-racist, white privilege and “defund the police” – make up much of the life’s work of Sharon Elise. The longtime Cal State San Marcos sociology professor has spent decades teaching and researching such subjects as critical race theory, colonialism, inequality and white supremacy. 

Perhaps more than anyone else on the CSUSM campus, Elise is best suited to put the ground-breaking events of the past few weeks into the proper social and historical perspective.  

Question: Have you been surprised by the size and scope of the nationwide protests since the killing of George Floyd?  

Sharon Elise: I have been pleasantly surprised that people are taking great risks during a pandemic that is disproportionately affecting Black and Native/Indigenous people to come into the streets to protest the police lynching of George Floyd. We watched him die on our television sets as a white police officer calculatedly pressed his knee onto the neck of George Floyd, aided by other police officers and despite protests of observers for close to nine agonizing minutes, until he was dead. It is important to note that these protests also call out other recent police attacks on Black people, including trans woman Toni McDade in Florida, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, and attacks by white supremacists who hunted and murdered Ahmaud Arbery. The movement names white supremacy, systemic racism and anti-Black racism as roots of the problem. Video images, cast and recast, bring persistent white supremacy and its integral relation to policing into the public gaze, and a growing number of people of all races and ages and circumstances are demanding change now.  

Yet it is not surprising because this protest is built upon years of organizing in the Black Lives Matter movement, which was founded by Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. The movement began first around the 2012 vigilante killing of Trayvon Martin and was further galvanized by the 2014 police lynching of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, dehumanized even in death as his body was left lying in the street for hours after his murder, and of Eric Garner, whose dying words, “I can’t breathe,” have become a rallying cry.  

Q: A lot of people are saying that this time “feels different,” whether it’s the protests being sustained over a long period of time, the composition of the crowds, or polls showing greater support for Black Lives Matter. Does it feel different to you? 

SE: Yes, the size is impressive, and the protests are persistent for almost a month now. It seems the protests are growing despite the militaristic response of police who have attacked protestors with batons, tear gas and rubber bullets. As the crowds grow and as people witness the multiracial composition of the protestors, the movement is attracting more attention and support, unfortunately fueled by the unabated police and white vigilante attacks that continue to murder and brutalize Black people. The movement is having an impact: No longer can Black people be shot down by police (or choked or any other means of murder) with impunity and silence. We follow the movement adage to “say their names” and demand justice and social change, and we are seeing results. A new “Breonna’s Law” was passed in Louisville banning the no-knock warrant, and the chokehold is banned now in San Diego and elsewhere in the country. Protests are influencing public opinion, as polls in 2014 showed 51% finding police killings to be “isolated incidents” while recent polls show 69% of those polled see these murders as indicative of a broad problem in policing.  

The Black Lives Matter movement is also bringing other forms of change, as some of our California legislators referred to George Floyd or the protests as influencing them to pass AB 1460 as a way to “do the right thing,” to make an ethnic studies course a graduation requirement for all CSU students. This means all CSU students will take at least one class in an ethnic studies department or program (includes Africana/Black Studies, American Indian Studies, Chicanx/Latinx and Asian/Pacific Islander Studies) and, as one legislator said, it means they will have to learn about race and racism and about the experience, history and culture of racialized people in our society. 

Q: Do you think the effects of COVID-19 and its disproportionate effect on people of color has played a role in the intensity of the protests? 

SE: There is no research on this as yet, though it may well be in process, so I can only theorize that it may play a role since it is certainly the case that COVID-19 is not killing us randomly. Black people are disproportionately casualties of the pandemic. It is killing us more often, and when people say, “Oh, it is due to underlying conditions,” it must be understood that those underlying conditions were created by systemic racism, particularly the virulent racism that has beset Black people throughout our history here. That anti-Black racism dehumanizes us so that our lives do not matter, nor does the persistent poverty, poorly resourced schools, hypersegregation and poor access to health care that beset us. It is these things that lead to the high rates of hypertension, heart disease, diabetes and stress associated with poor chances of surviving COVID-19. We see the same thing in Native/Indigenous communities, which have similar relations with the police. So if you are paying attention to systemic racism, attacks resulting in Black death represent trauma on top of trauma in the midst of the pandemic, and that may well be driving people to protest. But they are not doing it just because they want to get out of the house after months of quarantine, like some of the quarantine protests we have seen.  

Q: What do you see as the greatest importance of the Black Lives Matter movement? 

SE: I love the refusal of the movement to settle for anything short of systemic change — to proclaim we are not looking for reforms, we are tired of waiting for justice! The movement is pushing all of us to be bold, to demand justice, to actually make Black lives matter, which requires us to address systemic racism, to call out white supremacy and anti-Black racism specifically. And it is effecting change as I noted earlier. The movement is influencing the public discourse: I have seldom heard phrases and concepts like “white supremacy,” “white fragility,” “anti-Black racism” and “systemic racism” in the public discourse, not just among movement activists but also legislators, city officials and even some police administrators. As part of this change in discourse, the movement has popularized police abolition as a legitimate stance.  

The movement echoes many of the tactics of the civil rights movement — like direct, nonviolent confrontation — and in some ways is an extension of that and the Black Power movement. It is recreating a strong sense of community — the beloved community Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of where hierarchies and competitive individualism are discouraged in the ways people are relating and supporting each other. The movement is impacting the white supremacist culture that has allowed statues of slaveholders and heroes of the Confederacy to adorn our public parks and universities. The Pioneer and Pioneer Mother statues that I used to flip off as I walked the campus at the University of Oregon are standing no more. The Confederate flags are gone from NASCAR, and a Black driver has “Black Lives Matter” painted on his race car. Even the president now lives at 1600 Black Lives Matter Plaza.  

Q: It seems that this time we’re seeing less of a backlash to the Black Lives Matter cause with people saying, “blue lives matter” and “all lives matter.” Do you agree with that, and why are those terms problematic? 

SE: Unfortunately, there is a backlash both in the aforementioned militarism of the police responses at some protests and in isolated fits of white supremacist hate. Police stood by recently while whites painted a blue line over a Black Lives Matter street painting as a way of saying “blue lives matter.” With over 1,000 police killings annually and most of those being killings of Blacks, there is an obvious reason why we need to make Black lives matter. Nooses are being hung — one of the most egregious cases would be in Milwaukee, where there were six nooses with photos of Black people who were victims of police or vigilante violence, including Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Botham Jean, Ahmaud Arbery, Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin. There are reports of hangings of Black people that have been labeled suicides but need to be fully investigated. 

I have not heard or seen the “n-word” as frequently as I have in recent weeks, including some Zoom-bombing that seems often to include a mix of swastikas, the n-word and pornography to target anti-racism webinars and even private celebrations among Black people, including graduations and birthday parties. Some white people feel emboldened by their anger to either call the police on Black people (e.g., Amy Cooper and the birdwatcher in New York) or to curse and n-word Black people on the street as happened recently in San Diego. White individuals have driven their cars right into the midst of peaceful protesters in other incidents. These are flailing attempts to stem the overwhelming tide of protest against systemic racism, hopefully just the last gasp of a dying white supremacist culture. One can hope. 

Q: The protests have mostly been peaceful since the first few days, but what do you think about the ones that turned into rioting? Is that counterproductive to the cause or an understandable manifestation of pent-up anger? 

SE: We need to decode this question since it suggests more concern for property than for Black lives and because “rioting” to many people is racially coded as a Black thing. When I think of “rioting,” I think of Tulsa in 1921, I think of Rosewood in 1923, I think of the first decades of the 20th century when whites attacked Black bodies and Black communities, burning their property to the ground and killing off as many Black people as they could. What we have seen recently looks nothing like that, and violence has been primarily police against protestors. Moreover, there are reports of white supremacist infiltration to try to instigate violence. It is the movement’s goal to practice nonviolent protest, and I do not consider looting from businesses a form of violence in the face of historic violence against Black bodies.  

In a recent show, Trevor Noah proclaimed that Black people are being looted from their bodies (killed) and we should be more concerned with the looting of bodies than the looting of property. Perhaps it is also a protest against global racialized capitalism and the enduring poverty that some have been consigned to. Noah argues, quite sociologically, that there is no reason why we should expect people who have been shut out of the social contract to honor that social contract, that agreement that we will follow the norms and values of society in return for what society provides us. If society, for multiple generations, has shut some whole groups of people out of benefiting from the distribution of power, status and material resources, why should they honor the social contract? If we want people to adhere, there has to be a sense that they will share in the social benefits that have been so inequitably distributed. As long as “the game is rigged,” there will be players who do not play by the rules. Meanwhile, elites get away with breaking the rules, corporations are allowed to loot the people, and the government stands by the side of elites and corporations. 

Q: What do you think of the “defund the police” cause? How important is that, and what would it look like to you? 

SE: Calls to defund and demilitarize the police are related to the police and prison abolitionist movement. A move to begin this process by defunding policing and prisons and closing detention centers is significant for those of us in education who saw our public higher education budgets depleted as funds were diverted to a build-up of policing and prisons in what scholars describe as a carceral state, a “prison industrial complex” in a period that writer Michelle Alexander describes as “the New Jim Crow” because of its disproportionate impact on Black and Latinx people. The schools attended by poor Black and Latinx students are “pipelines to prison” or, as activist Angela Davis describes them, “prep schools for prison.” There, children encounter police and punishment regimes that result in racialized penalties for their clothing and culture, and ultimately disproportionate suspensions and expulsions of Black and Latinx youth, effectively pushing them out of school in too many cases.  

Money moved from education to policing and imprisonment as California schools went “from first to worst.” The California Faculty Association, which represents the 29,000 faculty in the CSU, released a report, “Equity, Interrupted,” that found as the student bodies in the CSU went from white to brown, the funding grew lighter. Tuitions rose and students became reliant on loans, not grants as grant funding declined. At the same time, as we learn in Davis’ book, “Are Prisons Obsolete?” California doubled the number of prisons. In the ’90s, California added 12 new prisons and only three new CSU campuses and one new UC. These educational institutions spend millions on policing while failing to meet the standards for mental health resources for their students. The standard is one counselor per 1,000 students; in fact, some CSUs have one counselor per 3,000-5,000 students. Meanwhile, there has been a failure to provide adequate instructional resources for students, and then administrators wonder why students don’t graduate in four years.  

There are multiple reasons to defund the police: We need to stop using “law and order” solutions to social problems that would be better addressed with mental health counseling and funding for housing, health and education. This requires a shift in our thinking so that we move from policing, which frankly emerged historically from the policing, capture and control of enslaved Africans. This requires radical social and cultural change, putting people before property and creating systems of community care and accountability. 

Q: How would you define “anti-racist,” and what are ways that people can work toward that? 

SE: Anti-racism is a concept that contests the notion that racism is individual prejudice. Racism is systemic in our society. It is based on white supremacy where, as activist Peggy McIntosh argued, white people can count on cashing in on their whiteness; one where, as scholar Cheryl Harris says, whiteness is form of property that they can invest in and draw from, while being racialized as people of color, we can only count on accumulating disadvantage. We have all been impacted by white supremacy and have learned the dominant racial narratives that explain the poor footing that Black, Native/Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islander peoples have in society by referencing their cultures instead of the system of white advantage that is historic and enduring. Racial narratives suggest that people of color could get ahead if only they would just behave and operate like white people. But of course that is not true. Even when Cherokee people spoke English, engaged farming, had written language and schools, and tried to make peace, they were removed.  

Racism is not about the cultures of people of color and not about our looks; it is tied to capitalism and it is about getting our labor (free or cheap) and stealing our lands so that white people can have better resources and keeping power in white hands so that this arrangement is secured — that is the “American way.” It is not possible to be non-racist; we are mired in a racial system, and if we are not actively learning to identify and contest white supremacist culture in our institutions, policies and practices, we are reproducing that white supremacist system. Anti-racism is an active engagement against white supremacy, noticing the whiteness at the top of our organizations, noticing the predominance of whiteness among the faculty, noticing how white things/people/culture are given greater value, and refusing to normalize that. Anti-racism means acknowledging we need a power shift so that people of color can be valued, so Black lives can matter, so we people of color can have a major voice in our social arrangements. It is not just about “diversity” given that, for some people, a room is diverse when there are all white people and one Black person and one Latinx person whose voices are ignored. Racism functions best in silence; it must be called out and interrupted whether it is policy, a practice or a social interaction. 

Q: What would you like to see happen next, both at CSUSM and nationally?  

SE: At CSUSM, we have too few faculty, staff and administrators of color, so even if the majority/white group is well-intentioned, as they may be, they are making decisions that impact a student body which is primarily working-class Latino and other students of color, and too often those decisions do not reflect their values and needs. Black people, Pacific Islanders and Native/American Indian people are severely underrepresented in the student body and among faculty, staff and administration. White people tend to predominate on every single hiring committee for every single kind of position, and that tends to reproduce whiteness. White administrators, staff and faculty need to educate themselves to be anti-racist and need to center anti-racism and social justice in their work or they cannot lead fairly and effectively. Faculty and staff of color seldom are evaluated/reviewed by people who understand our experiences, especially experiences of racism and are often uncomfortable talking about it. Some white faculty and administrators seem to have a hard time even saying “race” or “racism,” so there is real room for education there.  

We need to be clear about racism, especially anti-Black racism, which cuts across all groups. We need a clear strategy for targeted hires and targeted programming to support students, staff and faculty of color. We have a tiny ethnic studies program with only one tenure-track faculty line assigned to it — we need a department of ethnic studies (San Francisco State has a whole College of Ethnic Studies!) and we need to grow that curriculum and hire more faculty to deliver it. We should follow the lead of San Diego State, which has a targeted hiring program and is engaging cluster hires — such an approach to hiring Black and other faculty of color would assure that they’re not an isolated individual in a sea of whiteness in their academic unit. We need a larger team of tenure-track mental health counselors that reflect our student body, and each group needs representation among that team. We need a plan to convert lecturer faculty to permanent positions to stabilize instruction and to fairly compensate these educational workers. We need to defund and demilitarize the police — they look like a SWAT team, they have racially profiled some of my colleagues and students, and they do not foster a welcoming environment. We need a cultural shift just to notice these issues.  

Nationally, we need a retreat from law-and-order approaches to social and interpersonal issues. Invest in the people, not corporations, policing and prisons. We need to provide free health care and mental health care, free education, putting people over property and profits, and giving all people a living wage that allows them to overcome housing and food insecurity so they don’t have to work two poorly paid jobs to pay rent, and benefits to support workers who are caretaking and parenting. We need a culture of compassion for each other and a culture of care for our planet if it is to sustain us. I favor abolition of policing as we know it, and abolition of the prisons that are caging most Black and Latinx people. We need a path to citizenship for immigrants. We need a reconciliation, apology, atonement and reparations for the injustices meted out to people of color for hundreds of years. We need real change, not just reform. But in the short run, we need to look at legislative policies that bring back affirmative action to redress the racism and sexism of the system and push for a national program as well. We need national programs for mail-in voting, and we need to restore the vote for people who have served time in prison. We need to restructure our taxes so that we can reallocate resources away from corporations and the one percent, and we need a body of legislators that truly represents the needs of the people.  

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

The longtime communication professor is sensitive to the reality that she’s a white person being interviewed about racial inequality amid widespread national protests following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May. 

What Moon has on her side is more than two decades of experience teaching about white supremacy to students at CSUSM. Her most popular course, COMM 454: Communication of Whiteness, has been offered at the university since 2003. Several years later, she added as a capstone to the class the annual Whiteness Forum, an end-of-semester project in which students create posters and present their findings to a campus-wide audience. 

Moon’s course and the accompanying forum are not without controversial elements that have resulted in backlash toward Moon personally. But on the other side of the ledger, many former students have reached out to Moon since the protests began to thank her for the imprint her teachings left on them and the way they now view the world.  

Question: How long have you been studying whiteness as an academic pursuit? And what led you in that direction to begin with? 

Dreama Moon: I've studied race and been involved in racial justice activities since I was a teenager. Whiteness as an academic discipline came about in the late ’80s, and in my graduate program, I turned from race to white supremacy as a focus of study, so that's been 25-30 years now.  

I grew up in a state that was once part of the South, West Virginia, though it went with the North during the Civil War. Segregation had been ended, but we were still segregated de facto, though I didn't understand that term. Growing up, I saw that in my town at that point, there were only black people and white people and learned the white norms of “do not interact with black people.” I never quite understood it. Then when I went to high school, the schools were finally forced to integrate. People were not prepared to be together, so there was a lot of violence, a lot of fighting. And I was trying to figure all that out while watching Martin Luther King on television and the civil rights movement.  

We started a group in high school to try to deal with these racial issues. We had no idea what we were doing. We had no knowledge, we learned nothing. But the intention was to make things better. Much later, I learned something about that situation and why there was a lot of animosity. Back then, though, nobody told us; we didn't have those conversations as kids, and you did your best to figure it out. But it did spark a lifelong commitment to racial justice and understanding the role that white people play in that. 

Q: At a base level, I think we all understand what whiteness means and what white privilege means, but how do you define them as a scholar in this area? 

DM: Well, I generally don't talk about white privilege, at least not immediately. There's a lot of pushback to white privilege, and in working with students over the last 22 years, I've come to realize that it's really because we're starting at the end of an equation. White privilege is an effect of a very old and very intricate system of white supremacy. So when you start talking about the effect with people without them understanding how this effect is created, there's some resistance and some confusion. When I get to white privilege, it's after I've talked about, and we've studied, how this system of race and white supremacy has come into being, what were the driving forces of that in the U.S. context, what laws and policies and practices were put into place to solidify it, and what narrative was created about race, and the anti-Blackness that formed the foundation of it. Then the perfect carrot to get white people to participate in this system and support it is privilege. When you start talking about the carrot without understanding the horse, people just don't get it. So I don't spend a great deal of time there. I'm much more interested in people understanding how we got to where we are today and how systemic racism continues to be fueled with and without our conscious participation. 

Q: Has the reaction to the term white privilege and what it entails has dissipated over time or is it still pretty strong? 

DM: Around 2016, I think there was a turn. I've spent all these years working against color-blind ideology because my students were raised in a time when they were told, “Let's have tacos” and “Let's build a teepee” and “We're all the same.” That very superficial idea is what we were always trying to counter, like “Color blindness is not necessarily the way we want to go here, and how many times can you invoke Martin Luther King to bolster that?” I think when Donald Trump was elected and white supremacy and whiteness became more transparent to more people, and particularly white people, initially students were flabbergasted. They were like, “What is happening here? We live in a color-blind society, and this man is saying negative things about groups of people.” After that initial shock, I think people started to get it and they were much hungrier for conversation. Before, they kind of wanted the nice version; they weren't willing to go deeply. And this was true for many students of color as well as white students. 

Q: Do you think the Barack Obama presidency led to some of that because there was all of this talk about a postracial society? 

DM: Well, I don't think that white folks were prepared for a sophisticated, intelligent, family-loving Black man to be in charge of their country. I know when Obama went on Twitter, the first day he had literally hundreds of tweets calling him the N-word. While there were people who saw his election as a positive move, I think there were just as many people who said, “Oh, heck no.” White supremacists have always been online, but I think the online presence became stronger. They were just waiting for their moment and they got that moment in 2016. They've made good use of it. 

Q: Can you talk about the origins of the whiteness course at CSUSM? 

DM: I tried to propose the course when I first came here in 1998, but my department discouraged me, said I should do something else. As a new faculty member, I didn't understand I had the right to do what I wanted to do. Then a year or so later, now knowing I had some academic freedom and rights, I started working with a group of students to develop the course, which came out in 2003. But it wasn't welcomed. At that time, there were very few people of color on campus. It was extremely different than it is today. There wasn't talk of race, there wasn't talk of racism except in these small little pockets.  

I wanted to do this class because I thought we needed to talk not only about racism, but about the system that makes it happen. In my department, students weren't getting any kind of education about racial inequality. The context is really important because I wanted to teach the course to fill an intellectual gap around race in our department and also participate in the larger campus culture. One of the things I learned as a racial justice advocate is that, as a white person, you do your part. If the gap is there, I cannot say, “Well, I'm not a person of color, so I shouldn't really teach that course.” Or just teach the course and learn something as you go and learn to do it better. So that was the impetus. 

Q: And how did the whiteness forum come about? 

DM: I was finding that, while students were writing the traditional semester paper and presenting it to each other, that didn't seem sufficient because part of the intent of the course is to help students become comfortable in having these conversations without them turning into knock-down, drag-out fights. But also just to encourage them to have the conversations and to have a knowledge base to facilitate the conversation. So I came up with the forum as a way of sharing what students were learning with the larger campus community because we do not talk about white supremacy on this campus. Even today, we talk about race, about racism, about systemic racism, but folks don't want to go there with whiteness. And I think that's a problem. 

Q: What kind of blowback have you gotten from the whiteness forum? 

DM: I'm not the first faculty member who studies race who's been attacked. This campus has a very long history of racism toward faculty of color in particular. And unfortunately, many times in the past those faculty of color were not supported and protected in the way that they needed to be. Many of them are now gone, and some are still here. It was not cool that the faculty couldn't look to its employer to keep them from being assaulted or harassed or whatever the case may be. In my situation, the harassment could be because I'm white, it could be because it's a different context with different players, could be a piece of all of that. But part of what's happened is that we have developed some protocols about these matters, and any faculty who experiences this kind of targeting because of what they teach has some recourse.  

Actually, though, the class did not have too much trouble until 2016. There were negative comments here and there. And I'm not trying to make this a Trump thing, but I'm just trying to say that in this era where it is now more acceptable to espouse white supremacist ideology, there is a very concerted effort to target and threaten people. So of course I get nasty comments. But it has been elevated to threats of harm, people attempting to break into my house, and my car has been vandalized a couple of times. Those things didn't happen prior to 2016. We take very careful precautions with students because I never want anything to happen to a student, and they've not been targeted. But when you see your name on the Stormfront website, that's not cool.  

Q: Have those types of threats given you pause in terms of continuing with either the class or the forum? 

DM: No, it just tells me that what we're doing is valuable. And this is a time when we need to talk about white supremacy even more. To let these folks shut you down is not acceptable. I do take precautions, and I think about all the people of color who are targeted in way more drastic ways. So it's part of the work, it's your job, it's your responsibility. 

Q: Do you think being a white person helps you or hurts you in terms of teaching and trying to communicate messages about whiteness? 

DM: I think it's a mixed bag. I think my body in the class is definitely going to be read differently than a black or brown body. So there are things that have to happen. For white students, many times they've never heard another white person talk about these matters in this kind of depth or with this kind of knowledge base. And that's probably true for students of color. With students of color, you have to earn your respect. I'm not a good white liberal. That's not who I am or what I do. I don't live that particular experience, but I do live a racial experience. I think more people are open to hearing about these issues right now, but not all of them. 

Q: As a communication professor, what has been your main reaction to the media coverage of the protests following the George Floyd killing? 

DM: I haven't cared for the coverage of the protests in these situations because I think there's that strain of media that's like, “Riot versus protest; this isn't the way to make your voices heard.” But then, what's the way? Taking a knee wasn't the way, either, so it's like, “What's the way? Could you outline the way please?” 

I haven't seen multicultural protests in a long time around racial issues. Even the civil rights movement wasn't this diverse. It tells me that a lot of people are really tired of this. If Black people are protesting, it's very easy for white America to ignore that. So the fact that it's diverse suggests that something different is happening. It’s also very youth-driven. I'm very encouraged to see young people getting involved, working together. I've been to some of the protests, and it's young people that are very well-organized. They know what they're doing. So I think there's a lot of hopeful signs. 

Q: I've heard a lot of talk about allyship in the last few weeks. How do you define that term, and what you think it means to be an ally? 

DM: I'm probably the worst person to ask because I hate that word so much. And I'll tell you why: What I would like for white people to do is to own the struggle. I think of myself as a person who is fighting for freedom in the struggle. That means I have to do the work in order to have an analysis of what's going on. Sometimes I think white people think that when you say “ally,” it's like you are helping them in their struggle. I want it to be our struggle, too. Everybody has to own it because all of us are impacted in different ways. White people suffer from white supremacy; they just don't know it. They certainly don't suffer like Black and brown people, but to believe the things that you have to believe in order to embrace whiteness, it's really crazy. There's a place for white people to embrace the struggle and to own it. That doesn't mean to usurp the place of people of color or to get in front of them and start speaking for them. I've been trying to think of a better word than “ally” for years – a comrade, a coequal, a co-conspirator. I've heard a lot of terms. I don't like any of them. But “ally” means coming to understand that this is your issue and you need to figure out ways to contribute and learn things so you can be a productive part of the struggle. 

Q: For people interested in the idea of “owning the struggle,” what concrete steps could they take in this moment? 

DM: I'm an academic, so I'm going to say read, and nobody wants to do that. But that is how you get to the kind of in-depth analysis that you need. People have written on this stuff for years, for decades. That's how I got started, by reading black radicals in my teenage years and going, “What are you talking about? This is crazy stuff, right?” And I still read and try to encourage others to. But if you're not going to read, watch a movie, watch a video, hang out with some folks and just listen. Don't ask stupid questions. But you have to know something. You have to understand because white supremacy is deeply rooted.  

Trump talks about make America great again. People talk as if we need to go back to this kinder, gentler time, but in the U.S., there's never been a kinder, gentler time. In Nazi Germany, they could always reflect back on the Germany that existed before Nazism, like, “Oh yeah, we used to not kill Jewish people. Yeah, I remember that.” But we don't have that. We have nothing to look back on that shows a kinder, gentler United States. So we're in a really weird and dangerous position because we have to actually create it anew, and that's some major stuff. You really need to know what you're up against, you need to know how it was and it came to be if you're going to undo it. Maybe I'm too much an advocate of reading, but that's just how I have come to understand the world through a non-white lens, and I think you have to do that. 

Q: Do you worry about the notion of white fatigue just when it seems like there's so much momentum behind the movement? 

DM: I think Americans have the shortest attention spans ever, and I keep my fingers crossed that people will stay the course because if you know anything about the criminal justice system, it's going to be a long time before George Floyd’s murderers are dealt with. I'm rather amazed that protests are still happening, but even if it's not protesting, there has to be constant pressure applied somewhere. A lot of people are pledging to do this, that and the other, but we have to keep the commitments that we make and understand that most of what we say we're going to do probably isn't what we need to be doing. I don't know what happens if the protests end. Is it a moment where significant change can happen? Yeah. Will it? Don't know, but I'm hopeful. 

Q: What would you like to see happen next? 

DM: Well, I think there are some challenging issues on campus. Sometimes we talk as if we are all on the same page, and we're not; we're on different pages. Hopefully not egregiously different. I'd like to see some of the white faculty and staff take on their whiteness. I've thought of doing something like my whiteness class, but at the Faculty Center. But I don't know that we white folks are always good partners to people of color on campus when we don't do our homework and we're not working on our own stuff. I've sat in many meetings where I'm like, “Oh my God, some really egregious stuff has happened to faculty of color and staff of color in the meeting and we let it go.” I don't know how you change the structure of an organization if everybody can't participate, if not equally at least similarly. I really would like to see the white faculty and staff do some hard work. 

Q: What does it mean to you that so many former students have reached out to you over the last few weeks? 

DM: I really do value my relationships with students. That is the primary reason I stayed here and probably the primary reason I continue to stay here. I worked with students at other institutions before I came here, and it wasn't so fun. But here I have always appreciated them. They're willing to engage and they're willing to have a conversation and they're willing to not close their minds in most cases. When you're dealing with these issues of race and racism and the impact they have in your life, people tell their stories. I tell my stories, too, because it's only fair. So we generally form pretty solid bonds that extend over the years. When something happens around race, I'm going to hear from students. That's because they trust me, because I care and I pay attention. This time, it was a lot of people and people from 15-20 years ago, which is kind of different. But I think the circumstances are generating a lot of conversations for folks and they're having all kinds of feelings and they want to do something.  

It makes me feel like what I do is worthwhile. That's what academics want to know, because you put all this hope and energy into all these people over the years and you think you're planting the seeds, but often you never see the tree. So you wonder, “Does what we do matter?” And on those occasions when you find out that it does, that keeps you going. 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Maybe you have a loved one who has suffered from, or even died from, COVID-19. Maybe you’re a front-line health worker and live in constant fear of being exposed to the disease. 

Maybe you’re one of the millions of Americans who have been laid off from their job and are struggling to pay the bills. Maybe you own a small business and aren’t sure whether it will be able to survive. 

Maybe you’re a student who struggles with virtual learning. Maybe you’re a 2020 college graduate who missed their commencement and faces a dire job market.  

Or maybe your fear and uncertainty are more general and you’re just wondering how long this new reality will last and when life will ever return to normal. 

COVID-induced stress is everywhere and can have serious effects if left unattended. In this edition of Ask the Expert, Cal State San Marcos psychology professor Aleksandria Perez Grabow discusses coping with COVID-19. Grabow joined the CSUSM faculty last fall after earning a Ph.D. in counseling psychology from the University of Oregon. She has worked as a rape crisis counselor, and her academic studies concern various types of trauma and related outcomes.  

Question: What classes did you teach this spring, and what was it like when COVID-19 interrupted everything? How did your students handle it? 

Aleksandria Perez Grabow: This spring, I taught PSYC 340: Survey of Clinical Psychology and CHAD 491: Children, Adolescents and Social Policy, two upper-division courses in the psychology department. Following the interruption of the semester by the COVID-19 pandemic, I feel like faculty, staff and students alike were scrambling to keep our heads above water. I was touched by the patience and compassion with which my students handled the transition to a virtual environment within the scope of two weeks. Overall, I think students were understandably stressed, anxious and overwhelmed by the interruption, but also demonstrated a level of resilience given the unprecedented circumstances. 

Q: We’re now almost three months into COVID-19 being an ever-present issue in our lives. How do you think Americans are coping in general? 

APG: It’s hard to say; I honestly think it depends on who/which groups you talk to. The idea of quarantine has now been normalized to an extent, so the experiences of isolating, wearing face masks, et cetera, may not be as stressful and foreign as they were at the start of the pandemic. Now that the country is starting to re-open, some folks are experiencing an increase in anxiety, while others may be feeling relieved. At the same time, our Black communities are coping not only with the health disparity outcomes related to COVID-19, but with the resurgence of historical, racial trauma reflected in the current events. It’s fair to say many people are struggling to cope, especially our more vulnerable populations. With the global media coverage of both the pandemic and protests, one way in which I see hope is that we see others who are experiencing similar struggles. It can be helpful for people to see and know that they are not alone in their struggles. 

Q: You specialize in the study of trauma. How would you describe the effects of COVID-19 in that sense? How does it compare to more traditional sources of trauma? 

APG: For me, the pandemic is reflective of a collective trauma, one that has affected an entire society. For many of us, our way of living and our sense of safety have been threatened by the pandemic. We hear the phrase “the new normal” thrown around a lot nowadays, communicating that the ways in which we once conducted our normal routines and lifestyles will likely look different in the future. There’s a grieving process that accompanies this, and a lot of us have already started to feel these emotions – shock, denial, anger, guilt, sadness, exhaustion, to name a few. As a collective, it’s important to acknowledge and validate these emotional struggles to be able to move into a place of healing, acceptance and action. As we move forward, I think it will be interesting to see how we shape our narrative and make meaning of this experience, and what we’ll tell future generations. The unique aspect of a collective trauma, as compared to other types or sources of trauma, is that we have a built-in community that is going through a similar struggle, with whom we can heal.  

Q: What do you think are the best steps people can take to ward off the most damaging effects of this pandemic on their mental health? 

APG: I think we can try to find a balance between reframing our struggles to recognize the resilience and strength that have come out of this situation with validating these struggles in a safe space. It’s important to note that not all folks might be at a place to start positively reframing their experience of the pandemic, and that’s OK. As a whole, we can start the healing process through allowing ourselves to experience, express and move through these negative emotions (through talking, writing, art, music, movement/engagement in physical activities, crying, etc.). Overall, I think all of us can benefit from finding a healthy way to soothe and express ourselves. This could look like reaching out for support, seeking professional help, and practicing self-soothing, sensory and mindfulness exercises.  

Q: What are you doing personally as a way to cope? 

APG: I’m fortunate to be living with family; my husband is my rock, and we have a 10-month-old who keeps us on our toes, so I’ve framed this for myself as an extended maternity leave. The research I’m engaging in is also centered around current social justice issues, so I feel rejuvenated during lab meetings with my team. 

Q: What advice would you give to parents whose children are struggling with stress or mental health issues related to the pandemic? 

APG: My 10-month-old was previously in a family daycare setting twice a week, so even though I’m more than happy to spend more time with her and foster attachment, I know she misses being around other little people. I have so much love for parents out there who are adjusting to these circumstances; parenthood is challenging enough on its own! I think it’s important to emphasize that parents absolutely need to make sure they are looking after themselves so that they can be present for their children. That could be having a few minutes to drink tea or coffee, taking a longer shower than usual, doing something simple but enjoyable before bed, etc. A little bit of self-care can go a long way, physically, emotionally and mentally.  

For parents whose children are experiencing mental health challenges during this pandemic, creating a space for their child to process their issues is important. That might look like having an open dialogue with their child, finding a professional for the child to work with (e.g., via telehealth), or finding out how their child best expresses themselves (e.g., physical movement, art, verbal) and being a little creative in creating an opportunity for them to engage in this. 

Q: Do you see signs of hope amid all the devastation wrought by this crisis? What are they? 

APG: Two beautiful aspects of people that bring me hope are our ability to make meaning out of difficult situations as we heal and our desire to connect with one another. I study this intersection through trying to understand how media interacts with our healing. In this pandemic, for example, social media has provided us with a platform to communicate via a Zoom session, an inspirational post, with a therapist via telehealth, through Reddit threads, etc., even with people we may not know but who are also going through similar struggles. There are benefits to being able to create and share memes and GIFs – whether about the pandemic, politics or “Tiger King” – to post TikTok videos and song parodies about life in quarantine, and to invite others to a chain photo challenge. My research lab is currently doing a study examining the positive and negative aspects of media use and exposure on mental health outcomes during this pandemic, so I look forward to sharing our findings with the campus and greater community. Our healing will take time, but I have no doubts that we can and will actively overcome these challenges with the help of one another.  

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

In February, employers added 273,000 new jobs and the unemployment rate was at a record low, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  

Almost overnight, the coronavirus laid waste to that rosy picture. Businesses that were forced to shut down because of the pandemic led, over the next couple of months, a staggering total of 36.5 million people to apply for unemployment benefits.  

Suddenly, the job market that looked so promising could be the worst since the Great Depression. But CSUSM alumni are nothing if not resilient, and that quality will be needed in abundance as they navigate the uncertainty that awaits them. 

In the latest installment of Ask the Expert, we talk to Ranjeeta Basu, a CSUSM economics professor and the university’s interim provost and vice president of Academic Affairs, about the road ahead for the Class of 2020 and her advice to them.  

Question: Most people have seen the numbers, but as an economics professor, can you try to put in perspective the devastation to the economy wrought by COVID-19? 

Ranjeeta Basu: We have never experienced a pandemic in our lifetime, so this kind of analysis is new to us as economists. We have economic models based on the last pandemic from 1918, but needless to say, the structure of the economy and the kind of technology was very different at that time. Having said so, we can extrapolate from our basic macroeconomic models that the pandemic has both supply and demand side effects. On the supply side, shutdown of economic activity in many sectors has resulted in the contraction of economic output. The extent of the contraction depends upon the extent to which businesses are able to pivot and find a way to continue to operate in a virtual environment. A pandemic also causes a contraction in demand because of the loss of income but also because people spend less when there is greater uncertainty and risk.  

The economic impact of the pandemic can be softened by aggressive economic policies that provide relief through income transfers, unemployment benefits, bankruptcy relief and providing infrastructural and distributional support. Sound containment and safety measures can not only flatten the curve of the pandemic, but it can also provide certainty, allowing people to continue to consume and work without fear of infection. By announcing that we plan to be fully virtual with a few limited exceptions (following appropriate safety protocol), we are providing certainty and safety so that students can continue their education and employees can continue to have jobs.  

Q: Have you talked to or heard from any 2020 graduates regarding their anxiety about leaving college and entering this job market? What kinds of things are they saying? 

RB: Graduates are understandably worried about entering the job market during an economic downturn. They are worried that they will not find jobs in their fields.  

Q: What advice do you or can you offer them? 

RB: I can reassure them that college graduates are able to weather economic downturns far better than those without a college degree. Research shows that, during the last recession in 2008, college graduates experienced an unemployment rate of 6.9% compared to the overall unemployment rate of 15.8% for young workers. A vast majority of jobs created since the Great Recession went to college graduates. College graduates earn on average $1 million more over their lifetimes compared to those without a college degree. I will also remind them that the skills that they have learned in college will give them the ability to pivot, to be innovative, to find solutions, to be flexible such that they can find a way to continue economic activity in a very different environment. I will advise our college graduates to let go of their expectations of how things should be and embrace how things could be in this rapidly changing new reality we are in for the foreseeable future. 

Q: Do you think more people than usual will be going to graduate school because of concerns about their immediate job prospects? 

RB: Yes, I think this is the best time to be in school and get a higher degree. It is the best investment that you can make in an uncertain economic environment. Research has shown that enrollment in graduate and undergraduate programs is typically higher during recessions. Obviously, you don’t want to get into a lot of student debt, but by going to a state school like ours that has lower tuition and fees compared to many other universities, you can re-skill and retool and be better poised for the job market when the economy recovers.  

Q: As bad as the 2008 crisis was, most economists seem to think the Great Depression of the 1930s is a more apt comparison for what’s happening now. Do you agree, and if so, what are the possible ramifications of that? 

RB: I think we want to be cautious about false equivalences. At the same time, we also want to learn lessons from the past. The Great Depression taught us that we need to have safety nets in place for those who have the least and are often the hardest hit by economic crisis. This is not only the compassionate thing to do, but it will also “flatten the economic curve” of the recession. We are facing both a public health crisis and an economic crisis – we are not going to be able to survive either one without all of us working together as one seeking solutions that work for all. My economic well-being and survival depends on your economic well-being and survival. I cannot be well unless we all are.  

Q: We’re still early in this crisis, but how long do you think it might take the economy to recover from the hit inflicted by COVID-19? 

RB: From what we are hearing from public health experts, the pandemic will go on with ups and downs for at least two years or more. Given the length of this crisis, we can assume that the structure of the economy will be irrevocably altered. We have to be prepared that some jobs will be gone forever, making way for new jobs that we hadn’t even imagined. The need to have skills that are flexible and can easily adapt to new environments is more critical than ever before.  

Structural change can bring a lot of upheaval and uncertainty, which can be painful, but it can also bring with it the ability to break down barriers and imagine a new way to be that will reduce inequalities, take greater care of our planet and each other for a more sustainable future for all of us. I know that our graduates will be in the vanguard of that new wave. I hope that we have taught them to have the courage to care, to innovate, to be creative, to be fearless in the face of crisis.  

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

“You tell them what you do, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, are you a skin doctor?’ ” Morton said with a laugh. 

The coronavirus epidemic, however, has thrust epidemiology – the study of the incidence, distribution and control of disease in a population – to the forefront of scientific disciplines across the globe and even made temporary celebrities out of some of its practitioners. 

It all has translated into a heady experience for Morton, an assistant professor in the Master of Public Health program and one of only two epidemiologists on the Cal State San Marcos faculty. Her expertise lies in chronic disease epidemiology such as diabetes more than in infectious disease epidemiology like COVID-19, and she has served in an academic research environment rather than the climate of an active public health department. But the principles of epidemiology are the same regardless of background. 

“The COVID-19 crisis has been interesting, and I’m hopeful it translates into a broader interest for public health education and training for programs like ours when this calms down,” she said. 

In this edition of Ask the Expert, we talk to Morton about epidemiology and COVID-19. 

Question: Though you don't specialize in infectious diseases, as someone who does this for a living, I imagine you’ve been fascinated by the coronavirus and tracking it pretty closely. What has been your main reaction to seeing its march across the globe? 

Deborah Morton: At one level, so many deaths worldwide and stories of people dying alone without their families is heartbreaking. From an academic perspective, yes, fascinating to watch a pandemic unfold and evolve in real time before our eyes and on our computer screens. Usually we only know pandemics through history and teaching. Public health education for graduate students requires core knowledge of epidemiology. One of the major principles of epidemiology, which originated due to infectious disease, is the process of how epidemiologists investigate outbreaks and how to proceed with identification of the pathogen, course of the disease, transmission, control of the epidemic, treatment and continued surveillance. The epidemic curve, a major principle of epidemiology, is now big news every day – how the curve moves, how it operates, what direction it takes and how predictive it is of the future case and death rates. And with infectious disease, it happens the same way each time. The left-hand side of the curve goes up very fast when there's an outbreak, and then the right-hand side of the curve, as it comes down, is a more rocky, up-and-down pattern that spans a much longer time period. All of this talk about flattening the curve has become standard language that the general public is beginning to understand – a core piece of the content of a course in epidemiology. Many epidemiologists are being consulted and living in the spotlight as experts for how to proceed and predict the future of the pandemic. A highly unusual and historic situation.  

Q: What are your thoughts about where things stand right now, both in the U.S. and worldwide? 

DM: One of the major issues that keeps getting brought up is testing, a very important concept in epidemiology. We teach calculations for sensitivity and specificity of tests along with the positive and negative predictive value associated with a test. How well does the test identify the pathogen? Does it accurately and reliably identify the people who have the disease along with those who don't have the disease? Do we need an additional confirmatory test? How many false positives are there? How many false negatives are there? It’s a two-by-two table – disease, no disease, exposure, no exposure – and those four cells in that little table explain everything. 

Right now, we don't know what the sensitivity or the specificity is of the test they're using to identify COVID, and we're not yet keeping track of the people who have survived – we don't have that number. However, it is one of the key components that fits into the two-by-two table so sensitivity and specificity can be calculated. Not people who had to go to the hospital and not people who died, but the survivors who have antibodies and people who were never tested for COVID itself. These numbers are one of the major puzzle pieces that will take time for the world to know and that we must have for future planning and dealing with recurring outbreaks, which will also happen. 

Q: What would be your primary piece of advice to your students and other people in the campus community? 

DM: Do what you're told by local public health officials because they are the authorities. Generally in a pandemic, the president is not giving updates. It's U.S. Public Health or the CDC that give updates. And in San Diego County, Public Health Services does that every day. Just do what you're told and convince your family to do the same. When they issue a stay-at-home order, they mean it. Public health doesn't ever make decisions or recommendations lightly. 

Q: As an epidemiologist, what in particular strikes you about the numbers or the trends you’re seeing? 

DM: When you look at the Johns Hopkins map that plots all the cases, if you notice, in South America and Africa there have been fewer cases. There are cases all over those continents, and that could be due to inaccurate surveillance and reporting, but they haven't gotten to the level of China, Italy, Spain or New York. I'm wondering if that has something to do with climate. Viruses like cold weather. For instance, influenza likes cold weather, and it travels around the globe every year. That's why it comes back in the fall. So I'm wondering if this is a virus that when the weather warms up, it will help control the transmission. I'm hoping that's the case. That will be known at some point. 

Q: You’ve done a lot of work with the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center at CSUSM and with tribal/reservation communities in general. What do you think about COVID-19 as it relates to underrepresented minority populations, and what are their unique challenges and risks right now? 

DM: Minority populations are already compromised in a thousand different ways. They have higher rates of chronic disease, they have higher rates of heart disease, and they have higher rates of diseases affecting the lungs. The two leading causes of death in the United States are heart disease and cancer – that’s true for everybody, no matter your age, gender or ethnicity. But minority populations have a higher prevalence rate of chronic disease because they don't have access to good health care. American Indians are entitled to health care by Indian Health Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. They have hospitals and clinics all over the country, but the care is substandard because they're in remote locations, which is where most Indians live who utilize Indian Health Service. There are 5.2 million American Indians, and only about half are cared for by Indian Health Service. A lot of those patients are from reservation populations. At this point, in all of IHS facilities across the United States, there are 10 ventilators and six ICU beds! These facilities are not funded properly, and seriously demonstrate how minority populations are not cared for with equity, especially American Indians. 

Q: Why does COVID affect people with underlying health issues more seriously? 

DM: We all understand that if a virus, such as a new novel virus, targets your lungs and if your lungs are already compromised, then you have less of a fighting chance than someone who doesn't have underlying comorbidities. But we might not completely understand how a chronic disease such as diabetes compromises your body as well if infected with an additional virus. American Indian populations have diabetes at twice the rate, sometimes three times the rate as the non-Indian U.S. population. And just having diabetes is an independent risk factor for heart disease. So the longer you have type 2 diabetes, the more likely you are to develop heart disease as well. As a population, that puts American Indians at greater risk immediately whether they're an elder or not. 

All of the people in this country who are members of minority populations where there are health disparities are at much greater risk than anybody else, whatever the health disparity may be, despite ethnicity, age or zip code. 

Q: What lessons can be applied from past pandemics? 

DM: Everything we know about pandemics can be applied to the current situation. Certainly testing. Certainly procedures when the test does not have known high sensitivity or specificity. Certainly how long it takes to produce a safe and effective vaccine, and certainly treatment. There's no treatment for COVID-19 right now. I’m reminded of HIV when it first emerged; nobody knew what it was. It took a very long time, many years in fact, to develop appropriate drugs that now make HIV a treatable chronic disease. At the beginning of the HIV epidemic, we didn't know how it was transmitted either for a very long time. The country was scared, to say the least. So, yes, of course we can learn from our history, the perfect example being Dr. Anthony Fauci, a force who helped change the world for those who contracted HIV back in the 1980s and has now re-emerged as an important and respected leader during this COVID crisis. 

Q: This seems to be the question on everyone's mind. How long do you think it will take to get a handle on this and resume normal activities? 

DM: As an epidemiologist, my interest is always data-driven. In a recent article, looking at the epidemic curves of the top five global health infectious diseases being continuously surveilled, we can see usual time frames for the lengths of those epidemics. Starting with Zika virus, the first report of it in West Africa was in February 2014; the curve continued to rise until about October and then started to decline. However, not until two years later, in January 2016, was it declared over as an epidemic. For MERS, another coronavirus that hit in Saudi Arabia, beginning in May 2013, it reached its peak, then declined. In April 2014, the curve rose back up again, this time higher than the first time. Epidemics can go on and on and on, because of a country’s resources, vaccine development and equity in treatment. So you are asking the million-dollar question. 

Cases in California are not skyrocketing like they have in New York or in Seattle, and maybe will not because of the measures we've taken in the state and the leadership of Gov. Newsom. But for us in California, we really don’t have a clue yet what’s going to happen because we don’t know when the curve will reach its peak. I'm thinking we won't be back to the new normal until June or July. Even when the curve recedes, there will be spikes in the curve surging back up again. 

Q: So you could envision normal activities resuming in early-to-mid summer and then, based on what happens with the curve, future social distancing measures might be required? 

DM: Yes, social distancing will be extended because until we have a vaccine, COVID can only be controlled by behaviors, personal protective equipment, and isolation and quarantine for those who are sick because of the highly contagious nature of COVID and its ability to survive for up to nine days in the environment.  

Q: I've heard the epidemic curve described as more of a roller coaster because it’s not a steady decline. Do you agree with that? 

DM: Yes, that’s what will happen. When there’s an epidemic and it ramps up with many deaths, that's news and everybody hears about it. But then when the epidemic peaks and starts to come back down, the news goes on to something else and we don't hear about the fact that it takes possibly 18 months to two to three years before that epidemic is considered over and under control by public health officials. Look at the Ebola outbreak in West Africa several years ago. We all heard about it in the news and the Americans who were sent home, treated and survived. But we never heard about when the epidemic in Africa was officially over. We know it ended, but we were never told when it ended. And COVID-19 will probably follow the same pattern because it's a highly contagious virus and viruses are known to be similar in their outbreak patterns. 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Most students were going to brick-and-mortar buildings for their classes. Most college professors and all K-12 teachers were standing before rooms full of kids and young adults, delivering lectures or otherwise engaging them academically in person. 

Almost overnight, that age-old model fundamentally shifted because of the coronavirus outbreak, and in many ways, K-12 schools as well as colleges and universities are still scrambling to adjust to this new reality.  

To help instructors in smoothing that process, we reached out to a pair of faculty members from Cal State San Marcos’ School of Education who specialize in virtual teaching. Brooke Soles is an assistant professor of educational administration and leadership, and Anthony Matranga is an assistant professor of mathematics education and educational technologies.   

Question: What are the most important pieces of advice you’d give to K-12 teachers who are struggling to make this transition in the middle of a school year?  

Brooke Soles: Teacher-student connections matter. Like a physical classroom environment, the teacher is the most important factor in an online classroom. Even if your lesson doesn’t seem to be going well, the students remember how you made them feel. Students have to process feelings like hunger and fear before they can open up to learn intellectually. Yes, I understand that feelings are not a substitute for learning, but by creating a culture of care and working through a cultural proficiency framework, learning will occur. Whether you are sending a video post card through Animoto (a cloud-based video creation service) to your students, simply recording a 60-second Zoom announcement of yourself about the upcoming assignment, or providing a synchronous video chat for informal conversations or structured communication through free protocols from the National School Reform Faculty Harmony Education Center, it remains crucial to stay human and connected while delivering content. As an instructor, consider having students conduct their own brief Zoom meetings, following a set protocol, recording it, and posting it for you to review. Find ways to work smarter, not harder.  

Anthony Matranga: The most important piece of advice I’d give to teachers is to try not to recreate what you do in a face-to-face setting in the online setting. Instead, I’d encourage teachers to take advantage of the fact that collaboration in online settings can be asynchronous. In other words, the learning experience does not have to happen during a specifically scheduled time period during the day like folks are used to in face-to-face settings. Asynchronous collaboration has many benefits and slows down the fast pace of teaching and learning and provides learners and instructors time to think deeply about course content and their peers’/students’ ideas.  

Q: How does that advice differ for an elementary school teacher vs. a middle school teacher, and for middle school vs. high school? 

BS: It is not about time management, but rather attention management. Having worked in elementary, middle and high schools as a K-12 teacher in California and having worked as an assistant principal, principal and county office administrator, I find that no matter what age, people are people, and we get distracted. All classrooms need norms, accountability, connection, collaboration and caring environments to focus our attention to teaching and learning. Our middle school students might be posting to TikTok, but our adults are equally distracted responding to emails while on Zoom. Thus, how can we have not only courageous conversations about race and identity, for example, in our online environments, but also who owns and controls our attention?  

AM: This is a hard question. I don’t see an immediate difference between middle school and high school; however, my thought is that things might be different for elementary teachers because students might need more support staying focused on a task and transferring their thinking into an online space.  

Q: What have you been doing since the COVID-19 outbreak hit to assist instructors in the move online, either on or off campus? 

BS: My main focus has been checking in via email, phone and Zoom with my instructors and students to better understand what support they need and how to co-construct their next steps toward success. Because our Master of Arts in Education program is fully online, our instructors are already 100% online. Yet, some of these instructors are still new to teaching online and are now joining the rest of the teachers across the state who are learning how to teach online because of COVID-19. A unique challenge our program is facing is that our students who are K-12 teachers aspiring to be administrators are working in schools and districts that have closed their physical and sometimes virtual doors to teaching. The challenge right now is not the teaching but how to reduce the anxiety many people are experiencing so learning can occur.  

AM: I have been collecting resources for online teaching and learning, particularly in the area of mathematics education. I have been talking with my mathematics teacher candidates on a regular basis to support them in making the shift to online instruction. I’ve also reached out to some K-12 teachers I have worked with to see if they need help with the transition. I have been attending webinars from professional organizations to continue to learn more about teaching and learning online.  

Q: What do you see as the biggest challenges involved in online teaching? 

BS: Some of the biggest challenges of online teaching come from our own understanding of what we think online teaching can and cannot do. Once we get past the technical aspect of learning the technical – for example, how to click when and where – online teaching really becomes an experience in and of itself. In fact, there are data that show teachers and students have the same connection and learning experiences online as in person.  

In addition, instructors must be vigilant and address the racism, hate and xenophobia that occur online just like the physical classroom. Resources like Teaching Tolerance provide avenues and lessons on how to engage in courageous conversations on this topic. Instructors need to have synchronous opportunities, check blog posts, monitor Zoom chats, and scan the screen for visual signals of behavior that must be addressed. Silence can also mean many things in all settings. Zoom bombing is happening, too. Meeting one-on-one with students or even in smaller groups can benefit all to better understand your online classroom.  

AM: One the biggest challenges I see with online teaching is creating a learning experience for students that feels as if it is not mediated by the internet. I use several strategies to overcome this challenge. The first is to stay in regular contact with the students through a variety of communication mechanisms. For example, I send frequent announcements to a class regarding assignment deadlines, grading, etc. I also try to respond to student questions via email as fast as possible; even if I don’t have the answer to a question, I might say something like “I’m working on this, I’ll get back to you with an answer soon.” This strategy also includes reaching out to students if they miss a deadline for an assignment soon after the assignment was due. The idea is to give the class the sense that you are always online and always monitoring their activity in the online space.

The second strategy I use is to support communication between students. This includes using discussion forums to promote dialogue between students about the course they are completing. I monitor these spaces by subscribing to the course’s discussion forum so that every time someone posts to the forum, I get an email. Often times, questions come up and instead of answering the question, I might look for a student who had a similar question or seemed like they would have a good response to the question and tell the student to go to that person’s thread. In this sense, I am just facilitating conversation, just like you might do in a face-to-face setting. Another strategy I use is keeping track of the students I communicate with and when. For example, I’ll create a spreadsheet that has my students’ names and the weeks of the course. Every time I interact with a student via email, course discussion forum, etc., I tally the interaction on my spreadsheet. This allows me to ensure I am regularly interacting with all students in the class.  

Q: What pieces of technology or programs do you think would be most beneficial to teachers dealing with this situation? 

BS: Start with the one thing that works for you. There are so many options now. I recommend flipping the script by having students bring what they like to you or have seen to the classroom. What are they already using that is engaging? I understand social media use is a tricky area, yet having a conversation about what is appropriate and why is also realistic. Everything is a learning opportunity. You do not have to be the expert; you just have to be curious. Now, how will you connect it to your content?  

AM: I think the most important pieces of technology are those that allow for communication between students. Many universities have learning management systems with discussion forums, which I think are great for collaboration, particularly the asynchronous collaboration that I mentioned earlier. However, there are other technologies such as Edmodo and Google Classroom that can serve similar purposes. In addition, platforms such as Zoom, Google Hangouts, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Slack and so on allow for synchronous, video-based communication. I also think Twitter and other apps geared for mobile communication can be effectively used to support productive collaboration between students. With that said, I think the most effective online instruction uses a variety of these communication technologies in order to appeal to students’ different interests and learning styles. 

Q: Most teachers can no longer fill up the whole school day with virtual instruction. What do you think parents can or should be doing to help fill the void?  

BS: Work with your colleagues and school leaders to figure out what our collective future looks like. I do not consider this as helping to fill a void. It is most definitely a period of transition, transformation and the unknown. It is a time of free play coupled with lots of reading. And perhaps it is a time to better understand how to engage in play, innovative practices and even video games with our families and communities, as Dr. Sinem Siyahhan, CSUSM School of Education faculty, discusses in her book, “Families at Play.” How are we changing the narrative we are telling ourselves about what is happening and what will happen? 

AM: Well, I’m not sure I have the answer for this, but I can tell you what my wife and I have been doing with our 5-year-old and 18-month-old girls. My kids love animals and going to the zoo, so our breakfast routine has included watching a YouTube video from a series the Cincinnati Zoo is doing. Each day they spotlight a particular animal, and the zookeeper talks about the animals and answers questions from the “live” audience. I have also been trying to teach my 5-year-old some basic coding using an app on the iPad. We asked our 5-year-old what she wanted to learn, and she said to “tell time.” So we have been working with her on learning how to tell time. We also read together and do other things like build a boat out of pillows and “paddle to La Jolla,” and we have had several trips to “the beach,” which is the patio area of our apartment. We also watch movies, exercise, and cook together. It has been interesting so far, but I guess my recommendation would be to involve your kids in things you are interested in doing and also get involved in the things your kids are interested in doing.  

Q: What do you say about the problem of students who don’t have the same access to the technology and equipment necessary for online education? 

BS: This is a serious equity issue. Not all families have access to reliable Wi-Fi. Parents have been laid off due to COVID-19. Families are negotiating space at home for those who have been infected with the coronavirus. Two-parent households are both working from home with kids. Single-parent households are doing the same with more responsibilities. This is everyone; not just our students, but our teachers and faculty, too. Figuring out how to get food into the home without exposing loved ones to the coronavirus is a daunting task, let alone figuring out how to pay for that food with the income-earner falling ill. Thus, it is our responsibility as teachers, school leaders and community members to work together to find solutions for the good of everyone.  

AM: This is a hard one. Zoom and other video communication technologies are data-heavy and require up-to-date technology and strong internet connection during a particular time period of the day. Therefore, I think asynchronous collaboration can help with this issue because students can participate via text-based communication (which is less data-heavy than video) during a time when they may have access to a friend or family members’ technology. With that said, I’ve heard that schools are trying to provide some students with technologies as well as set up hotspots to improve access to strong internet connection.  

Q: Do you foresee a crisis like this making online education more palatable or appealing to teachers? 

BS: We have to change our mindset. It is really not just about going online. It is about how the way of life as we know it has changed because of COVID-19. It seems “going to online instruction” is being conflated with “this is absolutely terrible.” I love teaching. Whether it is online, in person or in blended modalities, teaching and learning are my thing. I challenge myself and others to use a future studies frame to examine what possible, probable and preferable futures we would like to envision. We have to meet the students, technology and ourselves where we are and go from there. 

AM: I hope so! While I don’t see teaching moving exclusively online for a long time or if it even makes sense to do that, I think at least hybrid instruction has benefits that can improve student learning in all classrooms. For example, teachers could incorporate online discussions into their class that occur before the face-to-face class session. The teacher could then read the discussion before the class and identify interesting themes in the discussion, misconceptions, etc. that can be used to inform the face-to-face discussion and questions the teacher might ask during the discussion.  

However, there may be environmental benefits to moving to exclusively online instruction. For example, as we are seeing, reductions in travel because of the pandemic are resulting in improved air quality in China and potentially in the United States and globally in the weeks to come. Travel for educational purposes is not the sole contributor to CO2 emissions in the world; however, the more we move instruction online, the larger impact education can have on reducing CO2 emissions.  

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Burns has been teaching part-time at CSUSM since 1999, but his primary focus is as a research scientist at Decision Research, an Oregon-based institute that focuses on judgment, decision-making and risk perception. For three different periods between 2013 and 2015, he served months-long stints inside the Department of Homeland Security as a scientific adviser. 

Burns specializes in analyzing risk and how the public responds to crisis, meaning his students were kept well-informed as the coronavirus first began to spread in China and then throughout the world. Now that the virus has infected thousands of Americans and is deeply affecting nearly every aspect of our daily lives, we sought out Burns to draw on his decades of expertise.  

Question: What are your thoughts so far on the public response to this crisis, both worldwide and in the U.S.? 

Answer: It's hard to know what went on in China because it’s difficult to get really good information. And their response was largely dictated by the government – stay home and all that. We have a little more information about public response in Europe, and particularly the United States. At Decision Research, we've looked at this stuff for 40 years – not me, but people who have gone before me. And it's quite understandable that when you have a threat like the coronavirus, it pushes all our buttons. It has the ability to kill lots of people, to make a lot of people sick, it travels unseen. The symptoms don't show up for a while; you may have it and don't know it, so you're always kind of living on the edge. There's a lot of uncertainty about it. There were some initial missteps in the United States about how to handle it. It didn't help at all that many people were calling this a hoax. So what this does is create a lot of fear.  

Q: What’s the antidote to that? 

A: One is trust. For example, when President Trump declared a state of emergency last week, the Dow bounced back to the tune of almost 10%. Our research would have predicted that because what the public is looking for right now is a certain amount of certainty. They want people at the national level, the state level and the local level to be saying, “Look, here's what we know about the crisis, here's what we don't know yet but we're investigating, and here's what we're doing about it. And here's what you can do about it.” Because deep within every one of us is the desire to control our fates. And when it's unclear what we should be doing or what the government is doing, people are filled with fear, and that gets expressed in a lot of ways.  

I would predict that, for a while, the public is going to remain very, very concerned. What people naturally pay attention to is not so much the levels – the total number of people who have been infected or the total number of people who have died. We're amazingly insensitive to those kinds of large numbers, and that's been well-researched. What we are very sensitive to are changes in those levels. As we see these reportings continue to climb, that makes us nervous, that hits the fear bell. Particularly if we see these numbers begin to accelerate, and we will see these numbers accelerate for a while, because this is what we mean by exponential growth. As soon as you see the numbers start to come down, turn in the other direction, even if the number of reported infections or deaths is very high, that will begin to quell fears. It sends a signal to people that we've got our hands around this, it's under control. There's light at the end of the tunnel. 

Q: For a lot of people, this feels like something without precedent in their lives. Do you feel the same way? 

A: There's certainly no recent precedent, and by recent I mean decades of history. I'm looking back 40 or 50 years, and at no time have I seen something like this. I've lived through the Cold War, when we were always on the alert for Russian bombs. With 9/11, there was a huge amount of fear, and people were not getting on airplanes. The difference between then and now is that, post-9/11, the risk of you been killed or affected by a terrorist act was always vanishingly small. And yet, we wouldn't get on airplanes, and the financial losses were staggering. But when you look at studies that examine how we recovered from 9/11, we were resilient. People are amazingly resilient once they understand that it’s a controllable situation. Even with the financial crisis of 2008, there was no good news for the entire fall season, but when we tracked people through a national panel, their perceptions of risk came down, their fear came down, because we have a natural tendency to recover. We have good psychological mechanism that says the sky isn't falling.  

For most of our students here, this is the first global crisis they've faced. Many were too young to remember the 2008 financial crisis. They’ve already been affected by this. It's no small thing to go from in-class teaching to virtual instruction, because a lot of these students build relationships with their classmates and their professors. They rely on that, and now they have to adapt. But as I've said to my students, you're going to learn through this crisis something that we as professors would be hard pressed to teach: Adversity can be a good thing. It can make you better, it can make you stronger, it can give you a more balanced perspective on your life. 

Q: You mentioned some early missteps in the U.S. crisis response. What do you think those are? 

A: The State Department, the CDC and NIH were all getting reports about what was going on in China. I think all these experts knew that those numbers were underreported, and even the underreported numbers were very, very grim. Because of the draconian measures that China took early on with massive quarantines, it bought the rest of the world possibly a month or more to prepare. They slowed down the spread of the virus, flattened that curve as much as they could. Some nations took that time and made good of it: South Korea, Singapore, for example. We were very slow to respond. And it isn't that the CDC or NIH was slow. It was people at the top who didn't think it was as serious as some of their medical experts were saying. This isn't me being partisan; go Google all the statements surrounding this.

What you really want to do in any crisis is get on top of it as soon as you can and communicate very clearly with the public about what you know and what you don't know. You should speak with one voice, and if there's disagreement among experts, you can say that there's disagreement, you can express the uncertainty. But you shouldn't be saying one thing one day, another thing another day and have it appear like it's politically motivated, as opposed to a genuine concern for welfare. People are amazingly tolerant to uncertainty if they feel like they're being told the truth.

Q: As an expert, how do you analyze risk when it comes to the coronavirus? 

A: It has three components to it. There's the threat of exposure, meaning what's the chance that the virus will make its way to my eyes, nose or mouth? Second is vulnerability. How vulnerable am I? How sick will I be if I actually come in contact with the virus? And then there's the consequences. Suppose that you do get very sick. Well, that probably means you're going to end up in the hospital, in the ICU possibly, on a ventilator possibly, or even die. The reason it's important to break risk up like this is that our greatest leverage is reducing the probability of exposure. How do we do that? Social distancing, washing our hands, avoiding touching our face. That's where we flatten the curve. Vulnerability, we have less control over because it's hard to change our underlying conditions, of which I consider age one. Though we can to a certain degree. This is why we always tell college students not to burn the candle at both ends. Get rest, eat sensibly, manage your stress level, drink plenty of fluids. That actually does influence your vulnerability to some extent.

Q: By this point, we’ve all experienced or seen pictures of long lines at grocery stores, hoarding, runs on certain products. Is that something that should be expected in a crisis like this? 

A: Yes, absolutely. These types of responses are understandable. It can become a problem if a select portion of the population has all the goods and there are no more canned goods to buy. As long as the shelves can be reasonably replenished, this is a natural human response. It's one thing people can do to comfort themselves that they're doing something.

You want a signal about a crisis, have long lines at the grocery stores. We often take our cues about how risky something is by what other people are doing. The fact that people are hoarding food is neither here nor there about the real risks. But most of us are not medical experts, so we're going to take our cues where we can get them, and that's a big one. If I were a public health official, I would be reminding the public that it's perfectly fine to stock up food. But let's not take that as a signal that the sky is falling.

Q: What do you say to what I assume is a rapidly dwindling number of people who think this is overblown? 

A: I would have accepted that a month ago, maybe three weeks ago. I would have said, “Well, maybe it is. Let's hope it is.” It would have been understandable. Now I would hope that if people have any doubts about the overblownness, go to the CDC, John Hopkins, NIH, your local public health department and look at what the facts are. These folks have expertise and have no other motivation than to help solve this problem, period. All the rest of the people have mixed motivations. The people peddling conspiracy theories, they either have economic motivation or they’re motivated by malicious mischief. They just like to scare people and create havoc. For others, they buy into and share these conspiracy theories because that is their way to wrap their mind around the problem, feel like they have some control over the situation. Now that's not harmless – like the way stocking up on food is – because if you tell people it's a hoax, maybe they won't take it as seriously as they should.

Q: What are your biggest concerns going forward? 

A: First and foremost is the race to flatten the infection curve before the U.S. and other nations hit their health care capacity thresholds. This is the top priority right now. We need to take all reasonable measures to slow down the spread of the virus because otherwise we could be looking at truly horrific public health statistics. Second, we need to take appropriate actions, including clear communication, to restore public confidence to mitigate the likely economic consequences that are coming, including loss of jobs and the closures of small businesses. When there's severe economic fallout, the people most vulnerable are those who are most affected. And finally, I fear the stigmatization of certain groups. It won't be limited to the Chinese. It could be Iran. It could be Italians. It could be, in general, foreigners. Our nation already has big fears about mass immigration, people overrunning our borders. In the aftermath of this, people will look for scapegoats. All of us have a strong tendency to want to hold people culpable for things. It is true we could have handled things better. But it's no nation's fault, it's no ethnic group's fault.

There are going to be big lessons learned. If there's a silver lining here, we all knew it was a question of when, not if, a pandemic would come. And now we figured out we weren't as prepared as we thought we were. This is a wakeup call.

For the latest updates on the coronavirus situation at CSUSM, visit the university’s COVID-19 website. Any additional questions can be emailed to covid@csusm.edu.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

As of Monday, more than 110,000 cases had been confirmed in more than 100 countries and territories around the world, with major outbreaks in China, South Korea, Italy and Iran. More than 3,800 people have died.  

Coronavirus reached the United States in late January, and the number of confirmed cases has surpassed 500. Twenty-two people have died, including one in California. Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency, saying it will “help the state further prepare our communities and our health care system in the event it spreads more broadly.” 

Based on current trends, that seems inevitable. To learn more about coronavirus, and to try to separate fact from fiction, we turned to a pair of experts from the Cal State San Marcos faculty: biology professors Bianca Mothé, an immunologist, and James Jancovich, a virologist.  

Question: How concerned do you think people should be? 

James Jancovich: My opinion is it's going to continue to spread. I don't think there's too much you can do about it at this point. It has been disseminating; we just don't know how far it's disseminated. The labs that are testing are expanding, so I think we're going to have a better idea about what its dissemination rate is, but I don't think panicking is going to help anything. Even if the dissemination rate continues to go up, the mortality rate is still pretty low.  

Bianca Mothé: There are a lot of pathogens out there. When you think about it in the context of infectious diseases, you have TB and in specific areas of the world, you have things like Ebola that just circulate and people get sick. For something like Ebola, there’s a really high mortality rate, and we've had outbreaks of Ebola that have transmitted to the U.S., which is much more alarming. In terms of the average person who doesn't have any additional underlying health conditions, you could get something and not even know whether you have COVID-19 (the name of the disease caused by coronavirus) or a cold or a flu. For the normal person, I don't think there’s a reason to be completely panicked, like this rush to buy hand sanitizer and masks running out.  

Q: There's been a lot of discussion in the media about historical antecedents for this virus, from SARS to the Spanish flu of 1918. As experts, what do you think is the most direct comparison? 

JJ: I guess it's closest to SARS. But it's different than SARS in that SARS was transmitted when people started showing signs of disease. And with coronavirus, I don't think we know the complete parameters of when this is being transmitted. But between SARS and flu, I think those two are probably pretty close in terms of models that we could follow.  

BM: In terms of transmission from an animal source, SARS is probably the closest. I think there's been more human-to-human transmission with this infection, which would probably make it more comparable to something like flu, and flu has many more numbers and infects many more people. SARS had a greater mortality rate but didn't infect as many people, whereas here you're probably getting many more infections, probably most of them untested at this point, but a lower mortality rate. 

Q: What has surprised you most about the coronavirus so far? 

BM: We've seen SARS and MERS, which were other coronaviral infections, but they didn't have the ability to spread like this particular coronavirus. 

JJ: That it hasn’t happened before. With world travel these days, you can go around the world in less than 24 hours. Diseases pop up constantly, especially zoonotic diseases. Typically, zoonotic diseases jump from animals to humans, and it's a dead-end pathway. You rarely see human-to-human transmission at that point. If this is what happened here, and it now has jumped and allowed more human-to human-transmission, I'm kind of surprised it hasn't happened before. I would have expected this to be more periodic and cyclical in some ways. 

Q: Because this is a virus that's spreading so fast in our social media age, there's a lot of misinformation out there. What are some of the most prevalent myths you’ve heard, and what is the truth? 

BM: I've seen some bad information. Hand sanitizer is probably protective. But the first time people were reporting on hand sanitizer, they were mislabeling this as like a bacterial infection, along the lines of, “Hand sanitizer kills 99.5% of all bacterial pathogens, including coronavirus,” and I was like, “Oh, no, don't forget this is a virus, it’s not about bacteria.” I think that was a mislabeling, which probably led to this over-panicking, like, “If I have hand sanitizer, I'll be OK.” There’s also this discussion of going into big crowds and we’re beginning to see some large functions getting canceled, and I'm not sure we're at that point yet. There's no evidence that says you can't go into big public places because if you do, you will catch this. For people who have vulnerabilities, it's something to consider, but I don't think it warrants canceling large functions or concerts.

The mask discussion is also interesting. If someone is sick, then maybe they should have a mask. But if you're on the other end, if you don't want to catch it, a regular mask isn't going to help you unless you have an N95 mask (a special surgical mask). If you do have coronavirus, a regular mask will keep your droplets from going out. But once those droplets are out there, they can go through a regular mask. I've been to a doctor for a couple different things recently, and you cannot find a mask in a regular doctor's office. They're all gone.

JJ: Don't touch your face all the time. That's the other thing. It's the concept of contact. If someone is sick, they will sneeze, that virus will last on surfaces for a while, someone else will touch it and then scratch their face, rub their nose.

Q: For people who might tend to brush this off as no big deal, why do you think it's important to keep the conversation going? 

BM: There's an opportunity to educate. It is an outbreak. There's a lot that we don't know about it. It's not to be alarmist that this is going to be the next 1918 Spanish flu. But vulnerable populations, like people with preexisting health conditions or the elderly, are more susceptible to infection. We should be cognizant of that, have a continual discussion and monitor what's happening in the news cycles, but there doesn't need to be a panic that if you catch this, everybody will die in your local community.

JJ: Diseases like this happen a lot and usually just kind of fizzle out and stop. So it’s about understanding that this could happen at even a bigger scale, and making sure that we're prepared for it in whatever way that may be in terms of education, medical care.

Q: From your understanding of viruses, is there anything that makes this one especially dangerous or problematic? 

JJ: Nothing that I've read sticks out. RNA viruses mutate much faster, so this is one where I would expect some change over time. It's just a matter of how long it will take.

BM: I was at an NIH Study Section last week called “Vaccines Against Microbial Diseases,” with a lot of colleagues who think about this all the time. As they’re beginning to prepare vaccine candidates, they're using traditional approaches. This is not a unique pathogen that has a different composition from other viruses. If anything, I think my colleagues dusted off a lot of approaches that they were using for SARS, so animal models that were developed at the time and different vaccine compositions. If the resources are available, this will allow for a vaccine to be designed and tested. You should be able to make a vaccine for this.

Q: Have you changed any of your behaviors or advised others to do so? 

BM: I work with the CSU Student Success Network, and we put together professional development for 80-plus faculty, staff and students. We have a session coming up in early April. I haven't changed anything I'm doing, but I'm about to send out a communication to all of those participants to say that we're monitoring the situation and these are some of the criteria that we will take in consideration if we were to change the delivery of that session, like via video conference instead of in person. I haven't changed classes, but I’m making some alternative plans if there’s a public health threat issued by officials and we can't get large gatherings of people together.

JJ: I have supplies to last for a while – at least a month or two of food and water. But I've always kind of had a supply of things. I tell people always to be prepared because in Southern California, you never know when there might be an earthquake or wildfire. There are so many people in such a small little area, and in case of an emergency, there's nowhere to go, you can't drive anywhere. So always be prepared – that goes back to my Boy Scout days.

Q: I’m going to ask you to put on your prognosticators’ hats. What’s your best guess about what the next year will look like, in terms of best-case, worst-case or most likely scenario? 

JJ: If trends continue, the infection rate will continue to go up. If the mortality rate stays about the same and the coronavirus affects a million people, obviously you're going to have a lot more people succumbing to the disease. But at some point, it's hopefully just going to complete its cycle. The worst-case scenario, I think, is that it gets some sort of mutation that makes it a little bit worse and increases the mortality rate, which is possible, especially with RNA viruses. But now that they've kind of opened up the testing, I think we're going to see the number of cases increase, which will make the mortality rate go down. The biggest issue is if it mutates more and becomes much more pathogenic or increases the mortality rate, but I think it'll fizzle out before then.

BM: We're beyond the initial containment. It's not like we can shut down borders for every country. We have it circulating so we're going to get higher numbers, and the question is: How high will they get? There's lots of unknowns, and I think that's probably one of the biggest unknowns. But most of the cases are probably transmission from people who are feelings some symptoms. So if you can practice good public health and keep those people from being out in public, hopefully you can contain and not get those crazy numbers.

For information about CSUSM's preparations for the coronavirus, visit our Incident Response website. 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Democrats want to know which candidate has the greatest capacity to marshal an army of passionate supporters and defeat President Donald Trump at the ballot box. Republicans want to know who they have to fear the most in terms of denying Trump a second term, while thousands continue to turn out at campaign-style rallies and cheer Trump’s every word. 

Personality, as much as ideology, drives the decision-making of many American voters, and few understand that as well as Rajnandini “Raj” Pillai. The Cal State San Marcos management professor has been studying charismatic leadership for almost three decades, and her interest in that topic connected to presidential elections dates back to 1996, when she and some colleagues studied Bob Dole, the Republican candidate from Kansas who was widely described as charismatically challenged.  

In this debut of “Ask the Expert,” a new feature in which faculty members discuss a subject of current or widespread interest, we talk to Pillai about all things charisma in politics. 

Question: How do you define charisma as it relates to U.S. presidents and presidential candidates? 

Answer: Charisma is kind of hard to pin down. It's almost like one of those things that you know it when you see it, but in my research, I sort of define it as a process that involves the leader and his or her personality and the relationship with the followers. There is that emotional connection that the leader forms with the followers, so much so that they are willing to go to the ends of the earth to espouse the leader's ideas and they find that person's message so compelling. It's like, “Gosh, we share the same values, and I am so inspired by what this person is saying.” And often charisma is in the eye of the beholder, which is why, especially in the context of presidential elections or politics, you see such a difference. It's almost like one side hates the person and the other side is literally willing to forgive the charismatic leader anything.  

Q: Why do you think charisma is such an important quality as opposed to experience or intelligence or other traits? 

A: I think it's because of the emotional connection. My wonderful late doctoral adviser James R. Meindl used to call it social contagion. You go to a political convention and your party's leader walks out and you're all casting your votes and people are excited. He talked about perceptions of charisma being spread like a disease in these sorts of environments, because people just get carried away. And I think people around the world are hopeful about change. When they're not happy with the current situation, they're always looking and investing leaders with much more power and charisma than they can really deliver. So they have an emotional connection that this person can rescue us, this person can change life for us.  

Q: Let's get to the current political landscape. Which Democratic candidate do you think sticks out most from a personality standpoint? 

A: I don't think anybody has that universal charisma Obama had that got people out in large numbers, and it was pretty evident early on in the campaign. So I don't think anyone really stands out. But I do think Bernie Sanders' supporters are very much behind him. If you were to poll them, they would probably find his ideas very charismatic, transformational. Charisma is something that can't be immediately qualified but something that just moves people and gets them behind you in large numbers, and I don't yet see that in most of the candidates.

Q: How would you assess Donald Trump in terms of charisma? 

A: I think he's a classic example of charisma is in the eye of the beholder. He's got such a group of followers, and that is what scares everybody in the Republican Party because they don't want his base turning against them. But I do think he has a presence, and his followers see him as being extremely charismatic. They see him as being someone who's not cut from the same political cloth as others, which is probably one of the reasons why they voted for him.

Q: In your lifetime, which presidents do you think possessed the greatest charisma? 

A: Since I've lived in the U.S., so 1989, it’s obviously Clinton and Obama. I have talked to people who have met Clinton and have clearly declared their partisan affiliations and said, “I did not want to like him.” But he made you feel important when he connected with you, as if you were the only person in the room. What is fascinating about charisma, and one of the reasons why I find it fascinating to study, is that no two people have the same type of charisma. President Obama was considered to be aloof; he was not the retail politician that Clinton was, you know, shaking everybody's hand. But his rhetoric was soaring, and he wanted to achieve big things and got the people to connect with him that way. I wasn’t around for his presidency, but President Reagan had a lot of charisma, too. Part of it came from his career as an actor, but part of it also came from the ability to communicate effectively. Inspiring words create that emotional connection.

Q: Do you think there is a risk of attaching too much importance to charisma over the substance of that person and their beliefs? 

A: Yes. That is one thing that I really worry about when I watch these leaders. Someone who's very solid and checks all the right boxes ought to be the president of the country because they have the experience and they will probably know what to do when we are faced with challenging times. Sometimes followers don't even sit and think, “Sure, these ideas sound fantastic, but is the person actually going to be able to implement them?” No, they just think, “Wow, I'm inspired.” So there is a danger that style can win over substance, and it’s fueled by the force of media, both traditional and social. But unfortunately, the heart wants what it wants.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306