Table of contents for September/October 2020 in The Texas Observer

Social Workers Are On Call I’d like to thank the Texas Observer for the article by Isabela Dias (“Telehealth Could Be Great, if Texans Had Access to It,” July 16, texasobserver.org). Folks living in rural areas of our state lack access to mental health services, including telehealth. ¶ One point of clarification that I would like to offer concerns the statistic cited that “Washington County, of which Brenham is the county seat, had only three psychiatrists and five psychologists as of 2018.” While I do not dispute this fact, this gives the false impression that psychologists are the only licensed mental health care providers who can provide therapy. This is an incorrect implication. In fact, licensed professional counselors (LPC), licensed marriage and family therapists (LMFT), and licensed clinical social workers…

I once heard someone say that if aliens were to ever visit Houston, they would surmise that we had one law above all else—the cars must be happy. THIS SPRING, IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THE COVID-19 LOCKDOWN, MY family joined thousands of other Houstonians in taking advantage of the car-free streets to go for long bike rides. It was surreal. Streets in Houston are for cars, not people, and yet there they were: People on brand-new bicycles, seeing the city up close for the first time. Kids rode bikes in packs like characters from The Sandlot. Families, like mine, luxuriated with toddlers on once-dangerous streets. Bike rentals skyrocketed.¶ In cities across Texas, people were unable to gather in their usual spots—offices, malls, movie theaters—without risking disease and death. Large…

THE BLACK YEARBOOK IS A FINE-ART PIECE THAT CONSISTS OF MORE THAN 200 IMAGES AND 50 interviews with Black students at the University of Texas at Austin. On a campus of 52,000 students, only 4 percent are Black. The Black student population has flatlined in the past 10 years. This project aims to share the stories of joy, hardship, and truth through honest dialogue. I started this project two years ago, when I interviewed 25 Black men on campus and showed the work (portraits and interviews) at the George Washington Carver Museum in East Austin. The project has grown and developed so much in the past year. I raised a little under $5,000 to do this project, and I am now in the process of creating the actual book. A…

LIKE OTHER TRIBAL NATIONS ON THE Plains, the Kiowa Tribe, my tribe, created pictorial records of important events, stories, and people. The accounts, known as sai-guat, can be translated as “calendars.” In many calendars, disease and epidemics are graphically illustrated. The winter of 1839, as recorded by Set’tan, for example, is known as Tä’dalkop Sai, or smallpox winter, represented by the image of a person covered with spots. This is the first mention of the disease in this sai-guat and was rerecorded by Smithsonian anthropologist James Mooney in his Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians, produced for the Bureau of American Ethnology. “The epidemic broke out early in spring and continued through the summer,” writes Mooney. “It began in the Kiowa school, and its terribly fatal consequences were due largely…

DATE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 PAGE 21 The years living on the street showed in Alvin Sanderson’s weatherworn face as he approached the microphone at Austin City Hall last June. His bleach-white hair combed neatly back, the 64-year-old had come to urge the city council to roll back a 23-year-old ordinance criminalizing camping in public places, a law he said forced homeless Austinites into dangerous places like creek beds. He spoke of Suzie, a friend he said had been sleeping in a tunnel when a flash flood took her life. “She was a good person,” he said, his halting voice rising. “She surely didn’t have to die because of a camping ordinance.” He spoke of Sarah, a friend killed while resting in a dark corner of the city, and Doc, who drowned. “I think…

Democrats turned out to vote in record numbers for the primary runoff election in July, despite the ongoing pandemic. Nearly 956,000 Texans voted in the Democratic contests, more than twice the number of voters in the party’s 2018 gubernatorial runoff. Still, the record turnout represented just under 6 percent of registered voters. Texas health officials recently released death certificate data showing that Black and Hispanic Texans are dying at higher rates from COVID-19. The largest discrepancy is among Hispanic Texans, who make up 40 percent of the population and about half of COVID-19 deaths. As of August, Texas was not counting the results of rapid antigen tests in its reported COVID-19 case counts, according to the Houston Chronicle, resulting in an undercount of at least tens of thousands of cases.…

“The police are an offshoot of the overseer on the plantation and the slave patrols…. This history of race and policing in America is deep, and we do ourselves a disservice by just glossing over it.” THE UPRISING SPARKED BY THE POLICE KILLING OF George Floyd on May 25 has pushed the debate around public safety into territory that would have seemed unthinkable in Texas just months ago. Howard Henderson, director of the Center for Justice Research at Texas Southern University, says the protests have turned into an unprecedented opportunityto reimagine policing in the United States. In June, Henderson gathered a group of Black criminal justice researchers and experts to center the voices of communities most affected by police violence in evaluating the barrage of policy proposals that have followed…

NEARLY SIX MONTHS INTO THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC, MORE THAN HALF a million Texans have been infected. As of mid-August, more than 9,000 had died. Total cases and deaths more than doubled from July to August. For several weeks this summer, hospitalizations broke records daily. ¶ We hear these numbers a lot. For each, there are the people who care for them, hope for them, mourn them. There are people who lost their jobs, who miss their family, who worry about their kids, who don’t know how they’ll make it. These are ordinary people dealing with extraordinary circumstances. These are some of their stories. Name: Michael Saenz Age: 35 Profession: Radiologic technologist Location: Mount Pleasant, Titus County MICHAEL SAENZ MEASURES THE time he was sick in relation to Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. On May…

The angle is just right. The midmorning light makes the windows shine from across the street and brightens the curves of bottles on the shelves. We are still new-enough awakened from darkness that we are relieved to realize the growing warmth, the way every blade of grass is highlighted so that the deer are no longer ghosts slipping through a gray field but bright beasts that cross the road, then turn to watch us pass. The coyote that laughed like a lost maniac last night has gone, and the pasture sparkles with gold tips. The garden is still producing its little bit, and we have brought tomatoes onto the sill to ripen. The mason jars standing in rows along the sink cast the light in their figures across the kitchen.…