The Long Year: A 2020 Reader 9780231555586

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THE LONG YEAR

Public Books Series

Public Books Series Nicholas Dames, Sharon Marcus, and Caitlin Zaloom, Editors Founded in 2012, Public Books is required reading for anyone interested in what scholars have to say about contemporary culture, politics, and society. The monographs, anthologies, surveys, and experimental formats featured in this series translate the online experience of intellectual creativity and community into the physical world of print. Through writing that exemplifies the magazine’s commitment to expertise, accessibility, and diversity, the Public Books Series aims to break down barriers between the academy and the public in order  to make the life of the mind a public good. Think in Public: A Public Books Reader, edited by Sharon Marcus and Caitlin Zaloom, 2019 Antidemocracy in America: Truth, Power, and the Republic at Risk, edited by Eric Klinenberg, Caitlin Zaloom, and Sharon Marcus, 2019 B-Side Books: Essays on Forgotten Favorites, edited by John Plotz, 2021

THE LONG YEAR A 2020 READER

Edited by

THOMAS J. SUGRUE CAITLIN ZALOOM

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2022 Thomas J. Sugrue and Caitlin Zaloom All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sugrue, Thomas J., 1962– editor. | Zaloom, Caitlin, editor. Title: The long year : a 2020 reader / edited by Thomas J. Sugrue and Caitlin Zaloom. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2021. | Series: Public books series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021027454 (print) | LCCN 2021027455 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231204521 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231204538 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231555586 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Economic development—21st century. | Equality—Social aspects. | Police—Political aspects. | Racial justice. | COVID-19 (Disease)—Social aspects. Classification: LCC HD82 .L636 2021 (print) | LCC HD82 (ebook) | DDC 338.9—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027454 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027455

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Julia Kusnirsky Cover image: Protestors March in Mott Haven, the Bronx, in Early June 2020, by Gabriel Hernández Solano

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Preexisting Conditions

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THOMAS J. SUGRUE

PART I: DIAGNOSING THE CRISES Pandemics as History 17 ANDY HOROWITZ

It’s the Geography, Stupid! Planetary Urbanization Revealed ÉRIC CHARMES AND MAX ROUSSEAU

Global Inequality and the Corona Shock ADAM TOOZE

The Job of Critical Thinking Now JOAN WALLACH SCOTT

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PART II: ESSENTIAL WORK “The Supply Chain Must Continue” 61 ANDREW LAKOFF

The Enduring Disposability of Latinx Workers 73 NATALIA MOLINA

Fast Food, Precarious Workers 81 MARCIA CHATELAIN

Mothers, Mental Health, and the Pandemic

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MICHELLE CERA

Working in China in the COVID-19 Era

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GILLES GUIHEUX, RENYOU HOU, MANON LAURENT, JUN LI, ANNE- VALÉRIE RUINET, AND YE GUO

India in COVID-19: A Tragedy Foretold

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MARINE AL DAHDAH, MATHIEU FERRY, ISABELLE GUÉRIN, AND GOVINDAN VENKATASUBRAMANIAN

Pandemic Security and Insecurity in the Gulf

133

NEHA VORA

Hidden Vulnerability and Inequality: The COVID-19 Pandemic in Singapore 143 SULFIKAR AMIR

Addressing the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Gender Inequality and Gender-Based Violence in South Africa 151 SHERIHAN RADI

Contents

PART III: POLICING AND PROTEST Civil Rights International: The Fight Against Racism Has Always Been Global 159 KEISHA N. BLAIN

Rage and Uprising

171

MUSTAFA DIKEÇ

Defund the Police and Refund the Communities KEEANGA- YAMAHTTA TAYLOR

Policing’s History Argues Against Reform 189 SIMON BALTO

Can I Get a Witness? 201 JEFFREY AARON SNYDER

As American as Child Separation

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RACHEL NOLAN

Protests Against Police Brutality Go Global DAVID SCHMIDT

PART IV: VIRAL BIOPOLITICS To Heal the Body, Heal the Body Politic JULIE LIVINGSTON

American Eldercide 237 MARGARET MORGANROTH GULLETTE

The World Is a Factory Farm XIAOWEI WANG

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Listen to the Birds 255 PRISCILLA WALD

Risk for “Us” or for “Them”? The Comparative Politics of Diversity and Responses to AIDS and COVID-19 265 EVAN LIEBERMAN

Think Like a Virus

275

WARWICK ANDERSON

PART V: PANDEMIC LIVES For the Love of Strangers

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JULIA FOULKES

Where Is She? 293 SOLEDAD ÁLVAREZ VELASCO

Grief Circling 305 SOPHIE LEWIS

In China, Pandemic Diaries Unite and Divide a Nation GUOBIN YANG

PART VI: PRIVATE CRISES IN PUBLIC SPACES The Violence of Urban Vacancy

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SOPHIE GONICK

The Limits of Telecommuting MARGARET O’MARA

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A Quiet Disaster: Mexico City, Mexico

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ALFONSO FIERRO

Health Self-Defense in a São Paulo Favela

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ERICK CORRÊA

Emergency Urbanism 353 ANANYA ROY

A Crisis Too Big to Waste: What Comes After Private Housing Fails? 363 GIANPAOLO BAIOCCHI AND H. JACOB CARLSON

PART VII: THE FAILURE OF THE STATE COVID Blindness 375 QUENTIN RAVELLI

Five Lessons for Democracy from the COVID-19 Pandemic 383 JEAN- PAUL GAGNON, RIKKI J. DEAN, AFSOUN AFSAHI, EMILY BEAUSOLEIL, AND SELEN A. ERCAN

Can Democracies Handle Systemic Risks? 393 MIGUEL CENTENO

The Vulnerable Foundations of India’s Urbanism GAUTAM BHAN

Pandemics in the Post-Grid Imaginary 409 JOANNE RANDA NUCHO

Pandemic Déjà Vu YARIMAR BONILLA

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COVID-19 in a Border Nation

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JACOB A. C. REMES

PART VIII: ALTERNATIVE FUTURES Are We in Denial About Denial?

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RODRIGO NUNES

Can the Crowd Speak?

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WARREN BRECKMAN

The Pandemic’s Brief Disaster Utopia 469 DANIEL F. LORENZ AND CORDULA DITTMER

Building a Society That Values Care

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KATHRYN CAI

Rebuilding Solidarity in a Broken World ERIC KLINENBERG

PART IX: FURTHER READING Pandemic Syllabus

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DAVID S. BARNES, MERLIN CHOWKWANYUN, AND KAVITA SIVARAMAKRISHNAN

List of Contributors Source Credits Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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he year 2020 took us all by storm. The pandemic and the protests for racial justice consumed the daily lives of the scholars, editors, and staff people who worked on The Long Year. This book was inspired by a special series on 2020 that first appeared in Public Books, entitled “Crisis Cities,” edited by Thomas J. Sugrue and commissioned by Caitlin M. Zaloom. Jacqui Cornetta, Amelia Schonbek, Kelley McKinney, Ben Platt, Annie Galvin, Liz Bowen, and Imani Radney. This group first brought “Crisis Cities” to life and then assembled this book’s manuscript at record pace, with the financial support of the NYU Cities Collaborative. We are especially appreciative to the American Society of Magazine Editors for naming “Crisis Cities” a finalist for a National Magazine Award for Single-Topic Issue. Eric Schwartz at Columbia University Press saw right away that the year’s events required the depth of analysis that the scholars published here could bring and winged the process along. We thank him and his colleagues. The Social Science Research Council, under the leadership of Alondra Nelson, was an ideal intellectual partner. The SSRC assembled an important series of essays on COVID-19 and the social sciences, many of which are included in this book. We

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thank Ron Kassimir, Alexa Dietrich, and Rodrigo Ugarte for their advice and support. We also thank the editors and staff of Dissent, Foreign Affairs, Public Seminar, La Vie des Idées//Books and Ideas, and the Brooklyn Rail for enabling us to republish their authors here.

INTRODUCTION Preexisting Conditions THOMAS J. SUGRUE

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t is already certain that 2020 will join a handful of years—1789, 1929, 1989—that suddenly transformed the world. The convergence of pandemic and global economic collapse exacerbated inequalities nearly everywhere. Political institutions throughout the world struggled and often failed to contain the virus and meet the needs of those most vulnerable to disease and dislocation. Democracy and science alike faced challenges to their legitimacy, undermined by a surge of authoritarianism, pervasive distrust, widespread disinformation, and intergroup conflict. The year witnessed an enormous wave of protests throughout the world, sparked by mass demonstrations over policing and racial injustice. Above all, 2020 put a spotlight on the distinctive and often corrosive features of our world today. Just as COVID-19 is particularly dangerous to populations with preexisting conditions, the virus ferociously swept across the world because of preexisting social conditions: the precarity of work; the unaffordability of housing; the depth of racial, ethnic, and class divides; a profoundly unequal global economy; and the failure of many governments worldwide to rise to the challenges. This book brings

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together some of the world’s leading social scientists and humanists to grapple with the implications of the 2020 crises. The voices in the pages that follow are diverse. Their perspectives span the globe, from southern California to South Africa, from Sao Paulo to Singapore, from the banlieues of Paris to the slums of Delhi. Whatever their vantage points, the authors share a fundamental disposition toward the present, best encapsulated by the historian and cultural theorist Joan Wallach Scott: they offer “a critical analysis of how we got here” to imagine a different path forward, refusing to simply return to “the taken-for-granted, everyday existence we led before this virus arrived.” The medical, economic, racial, and political crises of 2020 are the result of serious preexisting conditions that will be not be prevented through vaccination or remediated through modest reforms. Q Q Q

Many of the essays that follow document how preexisting social conditions worsened the 2020 crises. “Generations of racial and economic segregation of the housing market,” writes Margaret O’Mara, “meant that where you lived at the start of the pandemic greatly determined how well you survived its physical and economic hardships.” Yarimar Bonilla, analyzing the general incapacity of the governments of Puerto Rico and the United States to respond to the economic collapse and the containment of the virus, points to the legacy of the “failed state, with gutted infrastructure, inefficient state agencies, and a populace that emerged from the 2008 economic crisis with stark divisions between those who can live through a hurricane, an earthquake, or a pandemic and those who cannot.” From the vantage point of hyperurbanizing India, where informal workers have been devastated by the virus and lockdowns, Gautam Bhan describes the “vulnerability

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that preceded this ‘crisis,’ ” particularly the inadequate “patchwork” of social protections. The particular conditions in each of these places vary. But what is clear is that COVID-19 made visible the social fissures and economic injustices that unleashed the pandemic. Some of the least acknowledged and most critical of 2020’s preexisting conditions are biological and environmental. Starting in China, Xiaowei Wang traces the origins of the pandemic to the entangled global economy of mass food production and high finance: “The more I learned about the dizzying web of international trade agreements, foreign-policy decisions based on agricultural trade, investments, technological change, and ecological devastation wrought by multinational agribusiness over the past two decades, the more surprised I was that a global pandemic hadn’t happened sooner.” Zoonotic diseases like COVID-19 do not spread from viral ingenuity, argues Priscilla Wald, but rather as the result of rapidly accelerating, destructive human activities. “Environmental devastation, an increasingly shrinking and interconnected world, and a growing population all produce the ideal medium for rapid microbial circulation.” It is a disease of globalization. Our conventional understanding of the virus sees it as an exogenous force. The medical historian Warwick Anderson laments that “simplistic contamination models, shorn of any ecological and sociological complexity, came to dominate most accounts of the worldwide spread of the novel coronavirus.” But as with all supposedly natural disasters, the trajectory of the virus is predictably and tragically human-made. It is a destructive consequence of market forces; global trade and travel; a macroeconomy premised on cheap, exploited labor; and regulatory policies that favor profit over protection. Thus, the pandemic is the result of “self-devouring growth,” explains Julie Livingston, in which

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the ravages of COVID-19 are but one manifestation of a global economy that distributes disease, environmental harm, and poverty, all in service of corporate gain. Q Q Q

COVID-19 swept through the most vulnerable populations worldwide—new immigrants and refugees, the elderly and those with chronic illnesses, women, and people of color. In diagnosing the pandemic’s economic impact around the world, Adam Tooze demonstrates that COVID has hit hardest in the regions with the greatest rates of inequality and the weakest welfare states, particularly South Asia, Latin America, and the United States. The disparate impact of the virus, as many of the contributors to this volume show, is overdetermined. It results from the rise of a vast, exploitative labor market of service and informal employment and from the decay of labor-market regulation and social protections for the precariat. For workers the world over—living in the slums of Mumbai and the favelas of São Paulo, the accessory apartments of Los Angeles, the migrant laborer complexes of Singapore, and the workers’ dormitories of Doha—economic precarity was a preexisting condition that contributed to the risk of infection, the severity of the illness, and higher mortality rates. Those laborers who delivered packages and groceries, picked up trash, toiled as meatpackers and chicken processors, and changed bedpans and sanitized hospital rooms were the most likely to fall ill and die. Natalia Molina explains that Latinx laborers in the United States, who have suffered disproportionately from the virus, are “faceless and expendable.” Most invisible, most vulnerable, and most at risk are the legion of essential but underpaid care workers, who attend to the elderly and sick, clean houses and do laundry, and

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nurture their families, paying a high price in both their physical and mental health. The pandemic ravaged the communities that can least afford it. Those insecure service workers whose employment was not deemed essential—like cooks, kitchen hands, waitstaff, domestics, janitors, and low-level retail workers—were hard hit by unemployment, left to scrape by on their savings or on usually meager unemployment benefits. Informal labor, long a strategy for survival, especially for women, partially filled the gap. Mexican migrants sell homemade tamales at crowded intersections in New York. Migrant workers in India defied lockdown orders and walked great distances to work on construction sites or in junkyards. In Lima, Peru, the 70 percent of workers who live hand-to-mouth by toiling as street vendors or casual laborers, were unable to quarantine. Worldwide, these informal workers do not have the comparative luxury of remote work. They had no choice but to leave their homes, cram into crowded buses, vans, and trains, and engage in face-to-face transactions on crowded sidewalks and in cramped shops. These workers risked the virus because hunger and homelessness presented even greater dangers to their health. The intersection of precarious or unpaid labor and the pandemic resulted in what Margaret Morganroth Gullette calls the harrowing crisis of “eldercide.” Older people, often immunocompromised and unhealthy, are particularly susceptible to serious COVID infection. But millions of deaths among the elderly could have been prevented if societies valued care work. Instead, in those countries that warehouse the elderly and infirm in nursing and retirement homes, care workers are chronically underpaid and overworked and often uninsured, susceptible to infection but unable to miss work, even when they fell ill. In societies that leave eldercare to families, the outcomes were scarcely better. “Family members who care for elderly relatives,” writes Kathryn Cai, “are

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left with little outside support.” Providing for a sick parent or grandparent without any subsidy or pay meant that home caregivers, overwhelmingly women, were forced to trade health risks against their own security. Staying home meant going hungry, but leaving to work brought the virus home. The grim result was mass death among both care workers and those they cared for. Economic insecurity worsens housing insecurity, perhaps the defining characteristic of urban life today. Housing costs are unsustainably high in the world’s capitals of tech and finance, places like New York and San Francisco, London, Paris, and Dubai. Each of these metropolises has seen a massive influx of luxury housing and the disappearance of affordable housing near their centers. Real estate allowed the wealthy to weather the pandemic with relative ease. They had the computers, the wireless connections, and the extra space to work remotely and the disposable income to shop online, their purchases processed in crowded warehouses where COVID outbreaks were commonplace and delivered by underpaid gig workers. The richest retreated to their vacation homes, living in comfortable isolation, conducting financial transactions on Zoom, FaceTiming clients from their pool-side chaises. On the urban margins—in outlying ungentrified neighborhoods and unfashionable, declining suburbs in the United States, in belts of high-rise housing outside European cities, in the shantytowns of the Global South—ordinary people are victimized by predatory landlords, skyrocketing rents, and frequent evictions. Even in rich countries like the United States, housing insecurity was a serious preexisting condition. Already before the pandemic, nearly 40 million American households paid more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Now, in COVID-ravaged urban economies, precarious workers live in a state of “emergency urbanism,” to use Ananya Roy’s evocative phrase, subject

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to mass displacements because they cannot afford exorbitant rents and because governments generally lack the will or capacity to provide even meager housing assistance. Overcrowding, a serious problem worldwide, exacerbated the risk of infection. And living in tight indoor spaces during periods of confinement worsened the epidemic of domestic violence. Q Q Q

Nearly everywhere, the ravages of 2020 laid bare another preexisting condition: persistent racial, ethnic, class, and caste inequalities. COVID-19’s grim march followed a predicable path, straight to the neighborhoods with the most marginalized populations. In the United States, the virus struck hardest in long-segregated African American neighborhoods. The Latinx, who are experiencing rapidly rising rates of segregation in cities both large and small, suffer from chronic overcrowding, packed into garages and basements hastily turned into apartments. In Latin America, the virus swept through informal settlements and isolated slums, home to large indigenous and African-descended populations. In the outposts of former European colonies, imperial inequalities profoundly shaped the course of the pandemic, from makeshift houses in the tiny alleyways of India’s vast slums to the shanties of South Africa’s crowded townships. These are places where clean water is a luxury and electrical services are unreliable. Quality health care is scarce. Environmental hazards, particularly polluted air, worsen the course of the disease. Simple precautions like handwashing are a challenge. Social distancing is impossible. Hospitals lack the capacity and equipment to handle even a fraction of serious infections. With anti-immigrant and racial resentments on the rise worldwide, particularly in the authoritarian regimes that have

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swept to power in recent years, the incapacity of governments to manage the disease and provide social supports to the poor has played out with devastating effect. Governments as diverse as those in United States, France, Spain, Great Britain, Kenya, South Africa, and India have practiced what Quentin Ravelli provocatively calls “COVID blindness”: “a withholding of accurate information that has obscured both the impact of the pandemic on the most vulnerable communities and the resurgence of institutional violence that has accompanied it.” One major contribution to that blindness is the prevalence of xenophobic understandings of the virus and its spread. “Metaphors of ‘foreign-ness,’ ” Evan Lieberman argues, “contribute to false notions of the biological susceptibility to disease in terms of ‘them’ and ‘us.’ ” Such binaries make no sense in the connected world of planetary urbanization where people and places are inextricably connected and where the virus respects no boundaries. Q Q Q

Of the injustices that came into focus in 2020, few were more prominent than policing. In the United States, African Americans have long challenged police harassment and violence in a struggle that has spanned slave rebellions, the urban uprisings of the 1960s, and the Black Lives Matter movement of the last several years. Those protests, sparked by the murder of an African American man, George Floyd, in May 2020, spread to cities and even suburbs and small towns throughout the United States but soon went global. Violent, corrupt, and discriminatory policing was a preexisting condition worldwide. The police, long the strong arm of the state, regularly deployed to curb dissent and control groups labeled as ungovernable or unruly, have played a critical role in 2020. In India, police

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brutally enforced the pandemic lockdown. Where xenophobia is rampant, law enforcement officials target migrants. During London’s spring 2020 quarantine, police swept up more people of African descent—who constituted only 13  percent of the city’s population—than whites. Quentin Ravelli quotes a French antiracist activist, Assa Traoré, who points to the link between the pandemic and the policing of Arab and African migrants: “With the lockdown, our neighborhoods have become attraction parks for the cops.” In the United States, police forces were instigators of the riotous behavior that public officials condemned: attempting to crush the BLM movement figuratively and sometimes grimly literally, driving patrol cars into crowds, pummeling and gassing dissidents, and encouraging white vigilantism. Yet police violence is only one reason, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues, that tens of millions took to the streets in 2020. Another is the distribution of public resources to increasingly militarized law enforcement, at the expense of health care, housing, and economic assistance. “Where states struggled to gather PPE for health-care workers,” Taylor notes, “police in cities across the country were armed to the teeth and outfitted in the latest and most expensive gear and devices.” One of the more hopeful dimensions of the 2020 crises has been the rise of mass movements, beginning with the revolts that followed the murder of George Floyd, by police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, revolts that turned into the longest and largest wave of protest in American history, involving an estimated 26 million people in several thousand marches. Within weeks, protestors gathered en masse around the world, often united under the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. They joined mass demonstrations against police profiling in metropolitan France; marches in Rio, São Paulo, and Recife against state-sanctioned violence under Brazil’s authoritarian leader, Jair Bolsonaro; and

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protests and lawsuits targeting racially discriminatory policing in South African cities. David Schmidt writes of Mexico’s 2020 protests, inspired by BLM but also framed as resistance to the “long history of state violence against the poor—especially those who speak up against the status quo—and impunity for those who exert it.” What is most striking about these uprisings is that, though they began with outrage against the police, they seldom stopped there. In the streets of New York City, protestors carried signs calling for trans rights, action on global warming, and demands for better housing and jobs. Many street rebels in the United States targeted major corporate retailers, from Target and McDonald’s in Minneapolis to Louis Vuitton and Coach in Manhattan. “The rage that erupts in urban uprisings,” notes Mustafa Dikeç, “is not an impulsive reaction to isolated cases of bad practice; it is a response to systematic exclusion and oppression, which go beyond police violence and into all areas of urban life, including housing, employment, social encounters, and political worth.” Q Q Q

Above all, the crises of 2020 have laid bare multiple, overlapping institutional failures: a mismatch between existing governmental, economic, and social infrastructures and the current reality. Across the globe, tens of millions challenged local and national governments, fighting for democracy in the face of authoritarian power in Belarus, Brazil, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the United States and challenging the synergistic relationship of governing elites to global capital nearly everywhere. The inadequacy of responses to the 2020 crises have delegitimated all sorts of authority; social-welfare and health providers—from the postindustrial West to the Global South, strapped by decades of

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austerity and privatization—have more often than not failed to meet the needs of a sick, economically fragile, and increasingly distrustful population. Everywhere, democracies came under siege. The pandemic emergency justified what Jean-Paul Gagnon and his collaborators call “the universal turn to unhindered executive decisionmaking.” In some countries, as diverse as Hungary, India, and the United Kingdom, those powers have led to heightened surveillance, threatening basic civil rights. In other countries, notably Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Donald Trump’s United States, the executive branch undermined collective efforts to respond to the virus, fueled intergroup violence, and discredited medicine and science with deadly effect. Widespread disinformation, especially in governments controlled by the right, has undermined efforts to build the solidarity necessary to address underlying social and economic inequalities and has hindered public health campaigns and vaccination efforts. The year 2020 is a moment of crisis, but also a moment ripe with the possibility of radical change. In the past, crises have opened up possibilities for the rethinking of politics, for the reorganization of institutions, for the reimagination of urban space. There is, however, nothing inevitable about the outcomes. In a chastening analysis of right-wing politics and the pervasiveness of disinformation worldwide, Rodrigo Nunes warns that “if there is one thing that the last decade ought to have taught us, it is that strong objective factors do not automatically translate into powerful movements, let alone into the spontaneous discovery of the ‘correct line’ by the masses.” Perhaps the most pressing problem contributing to economic insecurity worldwide remains the lack of global social movements to challenge exploitative labor practices, enact redistributive taxes, and expand social welfare and health care.

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The arc of the moral universe sometimes bends toward justice, but it just as often veers off course. In the past, entrenched problems like violent policing have been met by tepid, largely symbolic reforms, as Simon Balto notes, using the troubled history of the Chicago Police Department as a case study. “What would reform look like,” he asks, “if the institution is the problem?” That is a question applicable not just to law enforcement but to nearly every dimension of public life in our time. What alternatives will we create to respond to the current crises? And how will we get there? Joan Wallach Scott writes that “the pandemic has exposed yet another of the fault lines of our moment: the difficulty of imagining ourselves beyond the current worlds in which we live.” The contributors to this volume begin that task of imagination, offering a wide variety of paths forward as well as some chastening examples of directions that are doomed to failure. Since the 1970s, with the advent of neoliberalism, which has promoted governmental austerity and a faith in the market as a solution to urban woes, cities have reinvented themselves as playgrounds for tourists and as magnets for lucrative employment in high-tech, finance, and related professions, with the misguided assumption that the benefits of corporate tax incentives and costly redevelopment in central business districts would somehow trickle down to the working class and poor. From Mumbai to Manhattan, capital has flowed freely into amenities for the well-to-do and away from the truly disadvantaged. The effects of the lack of support for the most vulnerable became clear in long lines at health clinics, the unfathomable tragedy of corpses strewn on the streets of pandemic-riddled Ecuador, of oxygen-deprived COVID victims gasping in packed hospital waiting rooms in Jaipur and Beirut, and the spread of informal labor, underpaid essential work everywhere.

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Should we place our hopes in the private sector to save our cities this time? No, says Marcia Chatelain, who offers an unflinching critique of the superficial corporate embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement through a look at the fast-food giant McDonald’s. No, says Sophie Gonick, who critiques notions of “urban success predicated on real estate activity” that “paradoxically paved the way for urban crisis,” leaving large sections of cities vacant, even before the economic ravages of the pandemic. No, says Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who argues that the poor have paid a high price because our “aversion to taxing wealthy individuals and corporations has left local governments ill prepared to effectively respond to local crises of poverty and unemployment.” No, says Joanne Nucho, who details the high costs of the “rampant privatization” that has led to the collapse of Lebanon’s electrical grid. The solution, contends Eric Klinenberg, is a reinvigoration of the public sector. That project requires activism at every level, from reconstituting the bonds of solidarity in neighborhoods and at workplaces to rebuilding a sense of common cause and national purpose, delegitimating the poisonous divisions of race and ethnicity that lead to the maldistribution of resources across urban space, and invigorating urban democracy. On this front, we may have grounds for optimism, for as Daniel Lorenz and Cordula Dittmer show, the pandemic spurred “the unexpected emergence of new social communities.” Erick Corrêa offers a powerful account of Sao Paulo’s vast Paraisopolis favela, where residents have created an alternative public-health system to fill the gap where the state has utterly failed. Whether these new forms of community will survive the crisis remains an open question. Can solidarity overcome division and distrust? Can new forms of inclusive democracy emerge, or will revanchism

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and authoritarianism triumph? Will voluntarism lead to new solidaristic public policies, or will neoliberalism grow stronger? The protests in 2020 might be a starting point for that reinvigoration of politics in the post-pandemic age. The rage on the streets may quickly dissipate—as it has too often in the past. Activism is hard to sustain. Protestors against police brutality, government corruption, and inequality may fall victim to the endemic distrust over identity and interest that has split many social movements worldwide. But, as Warren Breckman argues, the social movements of the last decade offer a powerful alternative framework for reconstituting politics. Breckman takes lessons from the Occupy movement and applies it to the 2020 protests, arguing that “the constituent moment of democracy can and should include more than merely bodies gathered in public space; that the collective voice is not discovered but invented; that the spectacle of mass gathering and bodies in motion should give way to talking and listening . . . ; and that, if the crowd is to speak in a democratic voice, then that voice must be both singular and plural.” Renewed democracy requires connection, deliberation, and the creation of alternative institutions. To begin the reconstruction of the post-2020 world requires a diagnosis of the diseases that afflict our societies, full awareness of destructive preexisting conditions, and a prescription for recovery. The essays in this book do not constitute a white paper for reform or a set of policy analyses and technical recommendations. Rather, they offer something else: a sobering analysis of our unresolved past and our troubled present, an accounting of the high stakes of the 2020 crises, and glimpses of a future that we are compelled to create.

PART I Diagnosing the Crises

PANDEMICS AS HISTORY ANDY HOROWITZ

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ttention to historical context is particularly important when it comes to disasters because social scientists long considered them to be, by definition, events without histories at all. Like lightning strikes, disasters seemed to many observers to be pure chance: they came out of nowhere to create their own new realities. Disasters, the sociologist Charles Fritz argued in an influential 1961 article, “provide . . . a clean break from the past.”1  Indeed, social scientists often were drawn to the study of disasters precisely because they believed disasters stripped away historical context, “provid[ing] an arena for the observation of peculiarly human (as opposed to culturally unique) behavior,” Fritz wrote, by “blanking out . . . the past.”2 If that view now seems clearly misguided, its legacy endures. The category of disaster itself, for example, identifies certain events as extraordinary departures from regular life. In doing so, what I elsewhere call “the disaster idea” affirms the notion that these processes can be distinguished from the normal course of events. The longing for a return to normalcy, too, is a product of this kind of thinking. The desire to put things back the way they were before not only assumes that the disaster was an aberration but also reveals the fact that the way things were

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before is precisely what caused the disaster in the first place.3 Put another way, just as people’s so-called preexisting conditions shape their individual vulnerability to COVID-19, social preexisting conditions shape the course of the pandemic broadly. For historians, who write stories in order to account for change over time, the problem of assigning these causes and consequences arrives as a problem of narrative. Therefore, often the most important analytical decision a historian has to make is where to begin. Consider the stakes of this seemingly simple question: When did the history of the COVID-19 pandemic start? It might seem obvious to begin an account of the pandemic in November 2019 in a market in Wuhan, China. A novel coronavirus, which first developed in a bat, was transmitted to some other animal, perhaps a pangolin, which was sold in the market, and then jumped from the animal to a human.4  That person soon became sick, but not before transmitting the virus to several others. By the end of December 2019, dozens of people suffering from the same virus had been admitted to hospitals. On January  7, doctors in China identified the new strain of coronavirus. Four days later, on January 11, China reported the death of a sixty-oneyear-old man who had visited the market in Wuhan. It was the first death attributed to the disease we now call COVID-19. By January  20, there were confirmed cases in China, Thailand, Japan, and Korea.5 The trouble is, starting the story this way—foregrounding a cunning virus and a Chinese public-health apparatus unable to contain it—does nothing to account for the virus’s unequal impacts. Six months later, in June 2020, fewer than 5,000 Chinese people had died from COVID-19, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), compared to more than 100,000 Americans.6  This evidence suggests that a more salient place to start could be with U.S. politics.

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So consider an alternate beginning: In November 2016, Donald Trump was elected president. Once in office, he disregarded pandemic response plans developed by the previous administration and alienated or dismissed technical experts across the executive branch. In May 2018, for example, he disbanded the National Security Council’s Global Health Security and Biodefense Unit.7 That is one reason that in late 2019, as evidence mounted that a dangerous new virus was spreading across Asia, the White House ignored the threat. Even as cases appeared in the United States, the White House proved unable to provide or uninterested in providing the materials necessary to trace and contain the virus’s spread. On March 10, with more than 700 confirmed cases in the United States, Trump continued to tell Americans, “it will go away.”8 By the end of that month, the WHO reported the conservative estimate that nearly 3,000 Americans had died from the coronavirus. And the toll continued to rise.9 In this second version of the story, the protagonist and causal agent is Donald Trump. The virus appears as a problem that could have been solved within the United States had the White House taken appropriate action. But if this beginning answers some questions about distinctions among national experiences with the coronavirus, it raises others: Why was Donald Trump elected? What gave legitimacy to his disregard for an obvious public health crisis? How could a nation often regarded as the strongest in world history prove so impotent? To answer these questions, a historian is tempted to venture ever further back in time. The history of the pandemic might reasonably begin in 2001, when President George W. Bush prioritized antiterrorism efforts at the expense of other kinds of nationalsecurity and emergency response. It could begin in the 1860s, when the Union Army’s pursuit of emancipation for enslaved African Americans delegitimized the federal government in the minds of

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many white people. It could begin in 1492, with the imperial encounter between the Americas and Europe, at the start of the biological process described as the Columbian Exchange. Or the history of this pandemic might begin with the fourteenth-century outbreak of bubonic plague and the strategy of isolating infected people for forty days that bequeathed us the word “quarantine.” Of course, all of these contexts matter, as do many others. The exercise can quickly become bewildering, but the point remains: we must stay attuned to how the past shapes the present on multiple scales. The pandemic exists in history and is a historical process. Its causes and consequences are not intrinsic to the virus; they are contingent on the world around it. The history that scholars will come to name “the COVID-19 pandemic” ultimately will have as much to do with the social world the virus encountered as it will with the virus itself. Looking backward, these overlapping histories can seem to lead inexorably to the present as it is. It is important to recognize, therefore, that even though circumstances inherited from the past create possibilities and limits for change, they do not determine what those changes will be.10  Uncovering the structural inequalities, national distinctions, and other historical contexts that gave the pandemic its shape does not suggest that it was inevitable. In fact, doing so suggests the opposite. History reveals contingency. A swing of fewer than 2 percent of the votes cast in four U.S. states in 2016 would have delivered the presidency to Hillary Clinton rather than Donald Trump, for example, and changed the course of the pandemic. Good historical analysis offers a map of roads not taken and shows where they could have led. Thinking historically about the pandemic also serves as a reminder that its history will not end with the arrival of a vaccine. The narrow time frame the disaster idea imposes often cuts the story short on both ends, blinding observers at once to a

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disaster’s endemic causes as well as its enduring consequences. But historians know that even death is not final. Each person who dies of COVID-19 will reshape the world that survives them by means of the grief their loss inspires, the work they leave unfinished, and the accommodations that have to be made to their absence. The question of where to conclude the history of the pandemic will be as difficult as the question of where to begin. Finally, like all stories we tell, accounts of disasters have morals. And here, too, the legacy of seeing disasters as events without histories endures in insidious ways. When politicians, pundits, and emergency managers consider disasters, their impulse often is to try to discern the “lessons learned.” That goal is a noble one: nobody wishes for catastrophes, and it would be good to learn something about how to avoid them. But the technocratic squint that often frames the search for these lessons too often obscures the recognition that what was wrong usually had less to do with acute error than chronic injustice. The lesson we ought to learn from most disasters is that the problems we face as a society rarely can be fixed with small changes. “The construction of our future is a problem of memory,” the author Kalamu ya Salaam observes, “a problem of accurately identifying and understanding how we came to be whomever we are as we stand at whatever moment we are in, seeking to make decisions about which way to go.”11 Especially in times that can seem unprecedented, scholars can best help chart a course forward by connecting the past to the present, and from there to the future—showing how things might have been different, and might yet still.

NOTES 1. Charles Fritz, “Disaster,” in Contemporary Social Problems: An Introduction to the Sociology of Deviant Behavior and Social Disorganization, ed.

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Robert K. Merton and Robert A. Nisbet (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960), 685. Fritz, “Disaster,” 655. Andy Horowitz, Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). Susanna K. P. Lau et al, “Possible Bat Origin of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 26, no. 7 (July 2020): 1,542–1,547. World Health Organization, “Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Situation Report—1,” January  21, 2020, https://www.who.int/docs/default-source /coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200121-sitrep-1-2019-ncov.pdf. World Health Organization, “Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19) Situation Report—132,” May  31, 2020, https://www.who.int/docs/default-source /coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200531-covid-19-sitrep-132.pdf. Lena  H. Sun, “Top White House Official in Charge of Pandemic Response Exits Abruptly,” Washington Post, May 10, 2018, https://www .washingtonpost .com /news /to -your -health /wp /2018 /05 /10 /top -white -house-official-in-charge-of-pandemic-response-exits-abruptly/. Donald Trump, “Remarks Following a Meeting with Republican Senators and an Exchange with Reporters,” March 10, 2020, Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents no. DCPC202000144 (Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration), 3. For 700 cases, see “Covid-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University,” accessed June 1, 2020. World Health Organization, “Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19) Situation Report—72,” April  1, 2020, https://www.who.int/docs/default-source /coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200401-sitrep-72-covid-19.pdf. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. Saul K Padover (1869). Kalamu ya Salaam, “Know the Beginning Well and the End Will Not Trouble You,” in A Problem of Memory: Stories to End the Racial Nightmare, ed. Taylor Sparrow (Portland, OR: Eberhardt, 2007).

IT’S THE GEOGRAPHY, STUPID! Planetary Urbanization Revealed ÉRIC CHARMES AND MAX ROUSSEAU

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uring spring 2020, a large share of humanity was affected by the government lockdowns enforced to contain the spread of COVID-19. On all continents, governments have brutally disrupted the flows of trade, crippled the economic machine, and destabilized societies. They have also severely restricted public freedoms. That these political decisions were made almost simultaneously is exceptional. So, too, is the fact that the outcome will be a recession on a scale unprecedented since the 1930s. Limiting lockdown to where the outbreaks occurred might have been preferable. A few countries (such as China and Italy) initially attempted to do so. Yet as of last spring, the vast majority of lockdowns did concern full countries. Why did nationwide lockdown measures—which have high economic and social costs—appear worldwide as the only solution? The answer is only partly because of the virus. Yes, the virus infects hosts from whom it can spread imperceptibly.1 But this biological mechanism has allowed the virus to take advantage of another, social mechanism: planetary urbanization. Because of the interconnected urban spaces spread out across the globe, the virus bypassed the usual “local” measures (such as the establishment of containment zones and quarantines in infected areas).

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In this way, economic rule—as the overriding issue in public policies—has come up against a new geographic reality, one that economics, in fact, has largely created.

The Urban Is Out of the City What is urban? Traditionally, the definition of “urban” is contrasted with rural, where there is a juxtaposition of relatively autonomous groups. There is interaction among villages, but they can survive (almost) independently. In the urban world, on the contrary, every part of the territory makes a contribution to the functioning of the whole. Every urban neighborhood depends on the contributions of others for its survival. In this way, the big city, with its different neighborhoods and districts, traditionally embodies the urban. Today, however, the urban has ramified spatially. The so-called global city is deeply embedded in international flows of goods, people, materials, and capital. For example, the head office of a company may be in Paris, but its factories and customer-service centers will likely not be in the Parisian suburbs but rather in Wuhan or Rabat. Big cities are also linked to holiday resorts, as we saw when their residents migrated at the onset of the lockdown. These areas are often considered to be the countryside. Yet they, too, are very urban. In fact, seaside villages and ski resorts are as urban as big cities because they function, above all, in relation to other quite distant places: where second homeowners and, more generally, holidaymakers live. These places, which are dedicated to leisure, also have an essential urban quality: a mix of populations that

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includes seasonal workers, permanent residents, and visitors who, in some cases, may come from all over the world. On a more limited scale, if we consider the spaces that people may travel through daily on their way to work, major cities depend directly on areas located well beyond their designated perimeters. Rural areas are home to the working and lowermiddle classes. Their role, as we have seen with the Yellow Vest movement in France, is to stoke—that is, support and power—the metropolitan economies. The scales of interdependency are also global. The residents of an average European city may employ the local plumber, but, at the same time, they eat meat from animals fed on Latin American soybeans, watch television on Korean screens, or use Algerian petrol. In other words, the metabolism of a place links it to the entire planet.2 This exemplifies the concept of “planetary urbanization,”3 which is intrinsically linked to the globalization of capitalism. Basically, the spread of planetary urbanization involves four inextricably connected processes: (1) the disappearance of “wild” zones, (2) the global interconnectedness of territories, (3) the blurred division between town and country, and (4) the globalization of urban inequalities.

A Virus at the Heart of Planetary Urbanization First: human diseases of animal origin, including zoonoses, represent 60  percent of infectious diseases  globally and threequarters of the new pathogenic agents detected in recent decades.4 These diseases generally come from “wild” zones. They may

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emerge on livestock farms, but in such case the virus usually develops through contamination by wild animals. Therefore, zoonotic diseases are connected to the disappearance of the “wild,” which is linked to planetary urbanization. Throughout the world, the areas considered “wild” are being transformed and degraded by the advance of urbanization in all its forms, whether through mining deposits, planting rubber, or constructing new cities. These advances upset ecosystems and establish new contacts among fauna, flora, and humans.5 As if we still needed proof, the emergence of COVID-19 demonstrates the permeability of the supposed boundary between nature and culture. This permeability is increasing constantly as a result of planetary urbanization. Second: another key feature of the hypothesis of planetary urbanization is the emergence of “urban galaxies,” whose different elements interact with the entire planet almost simultaneously. The acceleration of planetary urbanization has clearly been underestimated, which has meant that governments were even more ill prepared for the emergence of the coronavirus. Eight centuries ago, the Black Death  took fifteen years  to travel the Silk Road to reach Europe.6 The recent major epidemics spread faster, but not nearly as fast as COVID-19. In 2003, four months after the emergence of SARS-CoV, there were 1,600 recorded cases of contamination in the world, compared to 900,000 for SARS-CoV-2 after the same length of time, which is five hundred times faster. Yet less than two decades ago, globalization was nothing like what it is now: in 2018, the estimated number of passengers traveling by plane was 4.2 billion, almost three times higher than in 2003.7 And Wuhan airport, one of China’s main hubs, played a key role in this dynamic. Thus, the virus was dispersed outside China at a speed that few people had genuinely anticipated.

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Everybody knows that many goods are imported from China. But many people tend to imagine factories that manufacture a plethora of objects at low cost, which allows Western working classes to carry on being part of the consumer society. Yet we are a long way from a simple exchange of low-cost goods for highvalue-added products. The flows are much more complex and multiform because of delocalizations and the globalization of manufacturing chains. Thus, in Wuhan, there are a hundred French businesses, including some national champions, notably car manufacturers Renault and the PSA Group. Their factories produce hundreds of thousands of vehicles, far from the cheap products associated with China, and are banking on the globalization of the Western lifestyle. These economic relations go hand in hand with intense human flows of executives, engineers, and sales representatives, along with those who manage the logistical flows. With COVID-19, Europe has learned—to its cost—that China is an integral part of its world or, rather, that Europe is no more than one element in a vast network in which Chinese territories are also key elements. Third: another central element of the planetary-urbanization hypothesis is that a metropolis can no longer be reduced to a dense vertical city. Obviously, the halls of economic power (notably, financial power) are manifest in the business districts that bristle with towers. However, that density is merely an emblem of metropolitanization (and even of the city). The contemporary metropolis is by no means just a historic center with a business district. It should be considered, rather, as an array of interlacing networks, which provide day-to-day links with places that have very diverse forms, sizes, and functions. Of course, major city centers have become epicenters of the epidemic (New York being the best example), so much so that

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people are calling into question what has been perceived as major cities’ main economic advantage until now: their potential for dense and intense exchanges.8 But the fact remains that the first European outbreaks were not identified in metropolitan centers. Let us sum up the main points so far, before diving into the most pressing point. Given the fuzzy urban boundaries, the spread of networks formed by cores of urbanization, and the intensity of the population flows that travel along these networks, isolating individual clusters of the virus was almost impossible. The only limits to containment zones that could be established were the good old national borders. Yet these borders often remained quite permeable because, as we’ve seen, international supply chains could not be interrupted and cross-border workers were indispensable.

The Planetarization of Urban Inequalities A fourth key element that characterizes planetary urbanization: the reconfiguration of the spatial dimension of inequalities. And inequalities play an important role in terms of the impact of COVID-19 on our societies. Pandemics occur, above all, in times when social disparities increase. Peter Turchin observes a historic correlation between the level of inequalities, the intensity of links between distant places, and the virulence of pandemics.9 Indeed, the more a class asserts its wealth, the more it spends on conspicuous consumption, often in the form of luxury products from faraway places. Viruses travel primarily with long-distance trade. This is not a new phenomenon: the almost-simultaneous collapse of the Chinese and Roman Empires in the first few centuries CE can partly be explained by the virulent epidemics that spread along the

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trade routes. However, mobility then was incommensurate with mobility today. In terms of global human flows, the difference is particularly striking among the upper classes. Their sociability has always been international—indeed, cosmopolitan. But their mobility has taken on a new dimension with the impact of globalization and planetary urbanization. Consequently, in the face of a new, extremely social virus that is difficult to detect, the upper classes had become, collectively, a potential super-spreader. Their role in the winter of 2020 proved to be just that. When we reconsider the chronology of the different outbreaks around the world, the prominence of places frequented by the upper classes is striking. In Brazil, the epidemic spread from a Rio beach club—in fact, the most select in the country. In Hong Kong, the first outbreaks were in upscale hotels (as with SARS). In Egypt, some passengers (mostly of European or North American origin) were  infected on a Nile cruise, along with the Egyptian crew.10 In Australia, a cruise was also at issue: the virus spread after infected passengers, who disembarked from an ocean liner, were  scattered across the country.11 In Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, the spread of COVID-19 was linked to the return of holidaymakers from ski resorts in the Alps, notably Ischgl.12 In Eastern Europe, skiing was also implicated: the virus spread to Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus from fashionable clubs and restaurants in Courchevel. Even South Africa was contaminated via the Alps: the first official report of the virus was linked to a holidaymaker returning from a few days skiing in Italy.13 In Mexico and the United States, transmission chains have also been traced back to the slopes in Colorado.14 One last example: in Uruguay, cases multiplied following a high-society wedding, which was attended by a fashion designer  just back from holiday in Spain.15

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The impression that international contagion was elitist may have been strengthened by the fact that getting a hold of tests was initially difficult. (This reflects another form of inequality in the face of the pandemic.) Nonetheless, unlike tuberculosis or cholera, which kill primarily in poor countries and slums, the new epidemic did not initially hit dense working-class districts. It spread, rather, through upper-class networks built on practices that involve intense, ephemeral sociability in multiple locations.16 Therefore, the groups that reap the most benefits from planetary urbanization were the first to be hit by the virus. It spread thanks to their mobility. That is why Europe rapidly surpassed China as the main disseminator of the virus.17 The European hue of the virus in the first stages of its transmission outside East Asia also explains why the neologism “coronization” has spread in Africa and India. The virus’s initial association with the upper classes explains why a governor in Mexico  publicly claimed  that poor people were immune to COVID-19.18 Similarly, in predominantly Black districts in the United States, COVID-19 was  perceived as a “rich, white” disease for a while.19

From the Flows of Globalization to Poor Areas The idea that this was primarily an elite disease quickly petered out. Over time, the virus spread more broadly, both spatially and socially. Here again, the hypothesis of planetary urbanization helps us understand how. First of all, globalization has its stokers.20 Singapore is a case in point: the virus was also carried by people referred to as

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“migrants” rather than “expatriates,” albeit at a much slower rate than in the wealthy categories. Their living conditions in overcrowded dormitories accelerated the rate of transmission, where it was harder to control than in the condominiums in wealthy districts. In general, social distancing is difficult in shantytowns and slums.21 Yet they are a major feature of planetary urbanization and provide shelter to a substantial proportion of the population in megacities in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.22 The virus also spread along the networks that make up the metropolitan systems. The migration that followed the lockdowns revealed the full extent and diversity of territorial interdependences, which go far beyond the suburbs and the peri-urban rings. This migration was prevented in some countries, such as China and  Norway.23 However, in India and  several African countries  (including Madagascar, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of Congo),24 we saw a huge number of migrants, living precariously in the heart of the megacities, for whom returning to the country was  a matter of survival.25 In rich countries where migration was not prohibited before lockdown enforcement, such as the United States and France, students went back to their parents’ homes if they could, and the better-off left the major cities for more comfortable residences.26 The pandemic’s trajectory also highlighted the urban spatial inequalities. Indeed, for those at the bottom of the social ladder, teleworking was often impossible, and daily mobility continued, especially into dense zones where activities are concentrated. During lockdown, it was primarily the residents in working-class districts who had to keep going to their workplace and having contact with others. (Obviously, wealthier categories such as doctors still traveled to work, but there are fewer of them proportionally.) Added to the working classes’ greater dependence

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on public transport, this mobility significantly helped spread the virus among them. It explains why there is a higher concentration of cases and more deaths in working-class areas. The precariousness of the urban service workforce also contributed to spread the virus. In the first outbreak reported in the United States, at a retirement home in Kirkland, in the suburbs of Seattle, the employees, mostly women, helped spread the virus.27 They were reluctant to mention that they were contaminated, not because of social stigma (as in some affluent circles at the start of the pandemic) but quite simply because they were afraid of losing their jobs and did not have sick leave. In addition, such employees often have several precarious jobs, perhaps including one in the restaurant sector, whose role in the spread of the virus is well known. In this way, COVID-19 highlights the new territorial inequalities that are a product of planetary urbanization. Although worldwide links usually benefit the wealthy classes,28 workingclass areas, above all, have become epicenters despite being some distance from the initial outbreaks. For example, in Europe and the United States, the main outbreaks occurred at ski resorts, but Seine-Saint-Denis, the poorest department in France, and Detroit, one of the most impoverished big cities in the United States, quickly became epicenters. In New Orleans, the spread of the pandemic was boosted by Mardi Gras, when the infection was imported by tourists and revelers, some even having the good taste to dress up as a virus. The city’s poor districts have been paying one of the heaviest tolls in the entire United States.29 Research must refine the general outline provided here, but the overall picture is clear. COVID-19 reveals the magnitude of the inequalities associated with planetary urbanization: on the one hand are members of the upper class who, in their travels for

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work or pleasure, have carried the virus all over the world, and on the other hand are the far more sedentary working classes, who often work in their service. The latter will pay the highest price for the pandemic.

A Government of Planetary Urbanization? It is obviously important to avoid jumping to conclusions. The pandemic’s impact will depend particularly on its duration. If it is curbed rapidly for some reason, we can expect a return to normal. However, if the virus sticks around, social relationships and the economy will be severely disrupted. Therefore, the COVID-19 crisis, which is partly the outcome of planetary urbanization, could affect it profoundly in return. In particular, the virus could modify the established hierarchies between the types of urban spaces. Notwithstanding the locations of the first phases of the pandemic’s spread, a fear of dense cities is likely to resurface. In fact, once the epidemic was established, the virus spread much faster in large and dense urban centers and their suburbs. The lines will shift slowly, but a new cycle may develop that would be less favorable to density. Although this projection is currently up for debate, a resurfaced fear of cities among the wealthier classes could reduce the real-estate pressure on the major metropolitan centers and make them slightly more accessible to the menial workers who stoke the metropolitan economies. Undoubtedly, this would also mean that more political consideration would be given to peri-urban and rural areas. However, such a shift would increase pressure on environmental resources in these

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areas (due to competition between agricultural and residential uses of land, an increase of pollution generated by private car use, and so forth). These changes highlight the need to democratize and expand the scale of urban governance and government, which are currently too focused on central areas. Current and future disputes over land use—environmental preservation, housing distribution, and agricultural and industrial relocation—can only be discussed and mediated effectively in the broader context of vast metropolitan regions. On another scale, COVID-19 also underscores how the planet is governed. With planetary urbanization, the interdependency among places, territories, and areas has largely overcome national borders. In addition, international exchanges have become more complex and multiscalar, in the sense that it is not France that has come into contact with China. Instead, the Contamines-Montjoie ski resort (one of the main initial clusters of the virus in France) found itself connected to a forest in Hubei via an English tourist returning from a conference in Singapore, where he had met other Chinese executives, one of whom may have dined with a doctor friend who works in a hospital in Wuhan. How can links like this be governed? This brings us back to the beginning of the article. We can put forward the hypothesis that a measure as brutal and blind as a lockdown was imposed on billions of individuals because of the impossibility of weaning us abruptly off the flows borne by planetary urbanization, combined with the failure to control them. Governing flows of people is the focus of current discussions around tracking and monitoring the contacts of people who are potentially ill. The problem here is that the specter of tighter control and surveillance looms, as Foucault observed when the plague struck. Many people fear that efforts to control population

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flows will involve disciplinary measures or even constitute a threat to freedom. All the more so because multinational companies who supply security and electronic-surveillance systems are keen to market their products to states aiming to strengthen their capacity to protect their citizens. In this context, how can tracking be conducted without impinging on fundamental freedoms? This type of question, which is almost impossible to answer positively, has forced most governments to conclude that the virus will be difficult to eliminate. Indeed, a country that implements the necessary measures would severely restrict its relationships with its neighbors. New Zealand, a country where the virus seems to have virtually disappeared, has imposed stringent border controls since March 2020, including a quarantine for at least fourteen days on all its nationals returning from abroad and a simple banning of foreigners, with few exceptions. Can this continue for much longer when the virus is still on the country’s doorstep?30 Given that COVID-19’s morbidity, unlike SARS’s, does not seem totally unacceptable to many people, especially to the ruling elite (the burden of the disease being borne mostly by the weak and the poor), striving to live with the disease has seemed to be the “least bad” solution. Thus, numerous countries have stopped trying to eliminate the virus and instead are striving to control the spread by social distancing (of which lockdown is an extreme version). They are betting that with a treatment, a vaccine, or group immunity, the pandemic will end up becoming as banal as the flu. This wager has already brought a first, devastating lockdown, with no guarantee that others will be ruled out. Indeed, as we write, most governments are struggling to find solutions in order to avoid new lockdowns. If the virus continues to disrupt social and economic exchanges, a growing number of people

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will be asking whether planetary urbanization is really worth it after all.

NOTES The authors would like to thank Philippe Genestier, Maxime Decout, Pascal Séverac, and the editorial staff of La Vie des Idées for their critical comments after reading the first draft of this article. Translated from the French by Isis Olivier, with the support of the CIRAD and of the ANR project GELULE. 1. The characteristics specific to the virus obviously play a role. Clearly, sacrificing the economy and social life for physical health is not directly caused by the virus’s mortality rate: estimated at between 0.4 and 1.3 percent, it is much lower than that of recent epidemics, notably SARS (11 percent) and MERS (34 percent). In addition, COVID-19 is not particularly contagious, with a reproductive rate (or R zero) not very different from that of SARS, a disease whose spread was contained. However, COVID19 has specific characteristics that make its spread particularly difficult to control. It spreads quite rapidly and is hard to detect because many people show no apparent symptoms but are contagious nonetheless. Robert Verity et  al, “Estimates of the Severity of Coronavirus Disease 2019: A Model-Based Analysis,”  The Lancet Infectious Diseases 20, no. 6 (June  2020): 669–77, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article /PIIS1473-3099(20)30243-7/fulltext. 2. Phillipe Sansonetti, “Covid-19: Chronicle of an Outbreak Foretold,” trans. Tiam Goudarzi, Books & Ideas, March  30, 2020, https:// books andideas.net/Covid-19-Chronicle-of-an-Outbreak-Foretold.html. 3. A recent discussion described these changes precisely. It was triggered when the concept of “planetary urbanization” was revised on the basis of earlier proposals by Henri Lefebvre (about the extension of urban society and urban fabric toward “complete urbanization”). In a work published in 2014, Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid advocate a complete overhaul of the traditional categories of analysis, starting with the distinction between town and country. The ambitious theories presented in this work sparked intense discussions but struggled to win approval because of the lack of convincing empirical evidence. However, since the outbreak and spread of COVID-19 and in the wake of the public response to the health crisis and its economic and social repercussions, many recent events can be read and better understood through the prism of planetary

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urbanization. As a result, this crisis provides a crucial empirical boost to Brenner and Schmid’s hypothesis. Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, “Planetary Urbanization,”  in Implosions/Explosions : Toward a Study of Planetary Urbanization, ed. Neil Brenne (Berlin: Jovis, 2013), http:// urbantheorylab.net/uploads/UTL_Implosions-Explosions_1.pdf; Matthieu Giroud, “Beyond ‘Planetary Urbanization’: Recasting Contemporary Urban Research,” trans. Oliver Waine, Metropolitics, November 27, 2015, https://metropolitiques.eu/Beyond-planetary-urbanization.html. Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean, “Zoonotic Disease: Emerging Public Health Threats in the Region,” World Health Organization, 61st Session, October 22, 2014, https://www.emro.who.int/fr/about -who/rc61/zoonotic-diseases.html. The geographers who have conducted research on recent pandemics, particularly SARS, have shown that the advance of urbanization plays a key role in the emergence of new infectious agents. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the major new viruses have emerged in territories (China, West Africa, the Middle East) where the advance of urbanization is unbridled in the extreme, multiplying new contacts between human societies and the wildest remaining regions. S. Harris Ali and Roger Keil, “Global Cities and the Spread of Infectious Disease: The Case of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in Toronto, Canada,” Urban Studies 43, no. 3 (March 2006): 491–509, https://journals.sagepub .com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00420980500452458 Boris  V. Schmid et  al., “Climate-Driven Introductions of Plague Into Europe,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 2015, https://www.pnas.org /content/early/2015/02/20/1412887112. “Air Transport, Passengers Carried,” World Bank, https://data.world bank .org /indicator/is.air.psgr. Brian M. Rosenthal, “Density Is New York City’s Big ‘Enemy’ in the Coronavirus Fight,” New York Times, March  23, 2020, https://www.nytimes .com/2020/03/23/nyregion/coronavirus-nyc-crowds-density.html. P. Turchin, “8 Modeling Periodic Waves of Integration in the AfroEurasian World-System,” in Globalization as Evolutionary Process: Modeling Global Change, ed. George Modelski, Tessaleno Devezas, and William R. Thompson (New York: Routledge, 2008), 163–91, https://www .semanticscholar.org /paper/8-Modeling-periodic-waves -of-integration -in -the -Turchin / babf35b5e4466084a4647b53575c081188a7f132 # paper -header. Sudarsan Raghavan and Meryl Kornfield, “The Tale of How a Nile Cruise Boosted the International Coronavirus Outbreak,” Washington Post.

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13.

14.

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16.

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March  14, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east /the -tale - of-a-nile -cruise -that-spawned-an-international-coronavirus -outbreak /2020/03/13/6ab633fc-6314-11ea-8a8e-5c5336b32760_story.html. Alison Bevege, “Why Is Australia’s Coronavirus Hitting the Rich? How Deadly Virus Spread on First Class Flights, Luxury Cruises, and on a Super-Spreader Skiing Holiday in Aspen,” Daily Mail, March 26, 2020, https://www.dailymail .co .uk /news /article -8157819 /Australias - corona virus-infections-nations-exclusive-suburbs-spreading.html. Denise Hruby, “How an Austrian Ski Resort Helped Coronavirus Spread Across Europe,” CNN.com, March  24, 2020, https://edition.cnn.com /2020 /03 /24 /europe /austria - ski -resort-ischgl - coronavirus -intl /index .html. Hassan Isilow, “South Africa Confirms Third COVID-19 Case,” Anadolu Agency, August 3, 2020, https://www.aa.com.tr/en/latest-on-coronavirus -outbreak /south-africa-confirms-third-covid-19-case/1758766. Kate Linthicum, “Some of Mexico’s Wealthiest Residents Went to Colorado to Ski. They Brought Home Coronavirus,” Los Angeles Times, March 20, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020–03–20/some -of-mexicos-wealthiest-residents-went-to-colorado-to-ski-they-brought -home-coronavirus. Uki Goñi, “Half of Uruguay’s Coronavirus Cases Traced to a Single Guest at a Society Party,” The Guardian, March  19, 2020, https://www . theguardian . com / world /2020 /mar /19 /uruguay - coronavirus - party -guest-argentina. Singapore is a good example of how the virus spread along social classes. The first confirmed case goes back to  January 23. It concerns a Chinese man from Wuhan who went to an up-market resort. The first nonimported infections were reported on February 4, in a shop frequented by Chinese tourists. It was not until April, two months later, that the epidemic affected more modest social groups, when an outbreak was reported in a dormitory of migrant workers. Given the dynamics of the epidemic, this time lapse is considerable.  https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki /COVID-19_pandemic_in_Singapore#January_2020. Indeed, this is confirmed by phylogenetic data: the spread of the virus in Africa came essentially from Europe. Even in India, although the initial cases were linked to China, the first outbreaks were linked to Europe. During the second phase of the pandemic, other routes of globalization became key, characterized by the flows between the European hub and recently infected countries. The Nextstrain Team, “Genomic Epidemiology of Novel Coronavirus—Africa-Focused Subsampling,” https://nextstrain

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19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

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.org /ncov/africa; Prabhash K Dutta, “Coronavirus Pandemic: Why Europe Not China Coronised the World,” India Today, April  4, 2020, https:// www . indiatoday. in /india /story /coronavirus -pandemic -why -europe-not-china-coronised-the-world-1663143-2020-04-04. David Agren, “Mexican Governor Prompts Outrage with Claim Poor Are Immune to Coronavirus,” The Guardian, March  26, 2020, https:// www.theguardian .com /world /2020/mar/26/mexican-governor-miguel -barbosa-prompts-outrage-with-claim-poor-are-immune-to-covid-19. Tony Barboza, Ben Poston, and Angel Jennings, “Wealthy L.A. Areas Have Higher Rates of Coronavirus Cases. Why Those Numbers Are Deceiving,” Los Angeles Times, April  2, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/california /story/2020–04–02/coronavirus-cases-wealthy-rich-test-la-county. See Armelle Choplin and Olivier Pliez, La Mondialisation des pauvres: Loin de Wall Street et de Davos (Paris: Seuil, 2018). Dom Phillips, “ ‘We’re Abandoned to Our Own Fate’: Coronavirus Menaces Brazil’s Favelas,” The Guardian, April  14, 2020, https://www .theguardian.com /global-development /2020/apr/14/were-abandoned-to -our-own-luck-coronavirus-menaces-brazils-favelas. See Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2017) Feargus O’Sullivan, “Why Norway Is Banning Its Residents from Their Own Vacation Homes,” Bloomberg, March  17, 2020, https://www . bloomberg . com /news /articles /2020– 03–17 /norway - bans -vacation -homes-during-coronavirus. “En Afrique, le Covid-19 nourrit une vague d’exode urbain,” Le Monde, March  30, 2020, https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2020/03/30/en -afrique-le-covid-19-nourrit-une-vague-d-exode-urbain_6034903_3212 .html. Marine Al Dahdah, Mathieu Ferry, Isabelle Guérin, Govindan Venkatasubramanian, “The Covid-19 Crisis in India: A Nascent Humanitarian Tragedy,” Books & Ideas, April 13, 2020, https:// booksandideas.net/The -Covid-19-Crisis-in-India.html. The analysis by the French National Institute for Statistics and Economic Research shows that 11 percent of Parisian residents left the city. When the better-off departed to their second homes, it left a strong impression in the media: new spatial inequalities became apparent in France and the United States. It appeared that these inequalities operate at much larger scales than those usually considered, such as when city centers are contrasted with their working-class suburbs or distant peri-urban rings. The urban exodus to second homes fueled a strong resentment among residents in the host territories, which will be hard to reabsorb.

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27. Richard Read, “Nursing Home Staff Spread Coronavirus to Other Facilities, CDC Investigation Finds,” Los Angeles Times, March  18, 2020, https://www. latimes .com /world -nation /story/2020 - 03 -18 /coronavirus -spread-nursing-homes. 28. Branko Milanović, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 29. These inequalities are effectively doubled by the virus’s extreme selectivity. Apart from the elderly, the virus targets individuals presenting comorbid factors (such as diabetes and heart problems). Obviously, these conditions are not equally distributed in society and in space. 30. Michael Plank et al., “How New Zealand Could Keep Eliminating Coronavirus at Its Border for Months to Come, Even as the Global Pandemic Worsens,” The Conversation, July 15, 2020, https://theconversation.com / how-new-zealand-could-keep -eliminating-coronavirus -at-its -border -for-months-to-come-even-as-the-global-pandemic-worsens-142368.

GLOBAL INEQUALITY AND THE CORONA SHOCK ADAM TOOZE

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n the first half of 2020, as the world economy shut down, hundreds of millions of people across the world lost their jobs. Following India’s lockdown on March  24, tens of millions of displaced migrant workers thronged bus stops waiting for a ride back to their villages. Many gave up and spent weeks on the road walking home. Over 1.5 billion young people were affected by school closures.1 The human capital forgone will, according to the World Bank, cost $10 trillion in future income.2 Meanwhile, in China, economic growth had resumed by the summer. Amazon has added hundreds of thousands to its global workforce. The world’s corporations issued debt as never before. And with Jeff Bezos in the lead, America’s billionaires saw their wealth surge to ever-more-grotesque heights.3 In Las Vegas the painted rectangles of parking lots were repurposed as socially distanced campsites for those with no shelter to go to.4 Tech-savvy police forces in Southern California procured drones with loudspeakers to issue orders to the homeless remotely.5 Lines of SUVs and middle-class sedans snaked for miles as tens of thousands of Americans stopped commuting and queued for food. Meanwhile, in the Hamptons, wealthy exiles

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from Manhattan outbid one another to install luxury swimming pools on the grounds of their summer residences.6 Even in a world accustomed to extreme inequality, the disparate experience of the COVID shock has been dizzying. It will be years before comprehensive data is available to chart the precise impact of the pandemic on global inequality. But what might a sketch look like? Q Q Q

In the last fifty years, we have seen national differences between rich and poor countries narrow. Around the world, a new global middle class has emerged. At the same time, as lower-middle income and working-class incomes have been squeezed and the incomes of the top 1 percent have surged, inequality has widened within the advanced economies. Viewing the situation at scale, Branko Milanovic diagnosed a move back to the world of Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon, a world organized by hierarchies of class and race, rather than by nation.7 This does not mean that nation-states do not matter. Inequality is not fate. Not only have some societies made huge leaps forward, but national welfare states also have the power to substantially mitigate inequality. If the distribution of disposable incomes is much less unequal in Germany than in the United States, it is not because Germany is less globalized. It is not because it is less capitalist. It is not because pretax income inequality in Germany is less—it is, if anything, slightly more unequal than in the United States. It is not even because Germany has a much more progressive tax system. It doesn’t. It is because Germany’s welfare system is far more generous in transferring income to the least well-off. It is a matter of political choice.

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Inequality trends are best studied on a long-term basis. But large shocks, like the financial crisis of 2008, can have major impacts. The worst impact of the mortgage and banking crisis was confined to the North Atlantic. As a result, the rapidly growing emerging economies, led by China, accelerated their catchup. In the short run, income differentials within Europe and the United States were compressed. But as the economy bounced back, the gap between rich and poor once again widened.8 This was compounded by policy responses to the crisis, including central-bank monetary stimulus, which lopsidedly boosted financial markets. At the world level, while the Asian middle class continued to grow, in other emerging market economies, notably in Brazil and South Africa, growth ground to a halt. COVID-19, a disease originating in marginalized rural communities in central China, is the most sudden and savage globalization shock to date. It is the first truly comprehensive crisis of the Anthropocene era, affecting virtually everyone on the planet. It poses a far more general challenge to states and national welfare systems than 2008 did. It has confirmed familiar differences among national regimes of inequality, and it has exposed new ones. Q Q Q

How severe the shock on a country becomes depends on how well the public-health crisis is managed, on societal reserves and coping capacities, on the institutional and technical infrastructures that underpin solidarity, and on political will. In this respect, China, where the disease originated, and India are polar opposites. Thanks to a dramatic collective mobilization, China managed to contain the spread of the virus by February. The shock to

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production and consumption was severe but short-lived. In 2020, China will probably be the only major economy to achieve any growth.9 In that regard its status in 2020 is even more distinctive than it was in 2008. As the rest of the world shrinks, the Chinese Communist Party moves ever closer to achieving its objective of transforming China into a “comprehensively well-off society.”10 This does not mean that all Chinese escaped the crisis. In fact, because the average level of consumption continues to rise, it is precisely through stark disparities that the impact of the pandemic has been felt. In February, as the lockdowns hit, it was above all China’s vast army of 290 million migrant workers who bore the brunt. Tens of millions are still looking for work.11 Government efforts to prop up small businesses with loans and a $15 billion retraining program to reskill 50 million workers have had limited success.12 Little wonder that open discussion of unemployment and inequality is increasingly controversial. Whereas robust overall growth has allowed Beijing to maintain the momentum of the China Dream, the reverse is true in India. Between 2014 and 2018, India was, for a brief heady moment, the fastest-growing economy in the world. In 2019 worrying signs of fragility, particularly in the financial sector, were revealed. But the abrupt shutdown ordered by Modi’s government on the night of March 24 was shattering, and the impact fell extraordinarily heavily on the least well-off. A hundred million migrant workers were left stranded. Millions were held in detention centers without adequate housing or food. Unemployment soared to a dizzying 24 percent.13 GDP in the second quarter of 2020 was down by a similar percentage—by far the worst among the G20 economies. By the summer New Delhi was forced to change tack, encouraging a resumption of economic activity despite the fact that the epidemic

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was running out of control. The parts of India least well equipped to cope are poor rural backwaters, to which migrant workers returned in their millions, bringing the virus with them. Meanwhile, 270 million schoolchildren wait to hear when and how schooling will resume. Only 8 percent of India’s households have a computer with an internet connection.14 Whereas in China the narrative of national triumph over COVID “balances” the hardship of those worst affected, in India a rampant epidemic, a savage economic recession, and extreme disparities compound one another. The same is true in Latin America. Latin America is the most unequal continent in the world.15 Since 2013, growth has slowed far behind the pace being set in Asia.16 Both facts are reflected in the continent’s failure to cope with COVID. When the virus first arrived in Mexico, it was labeled a rich person’s disease. It was affluent families who had been on ski holidays in the United States that brought it home. Miguel Barbosa, the populist governor of Puebla state, rallied his supporters by declaring that “the poor, we’re immune.”17 From its initial foothold among the most affluent neighborhoods, COVID spread into the sprawling favelas. Peru imposed a determined lockdown policy. But it was nearly impossible to make that stick in a megacity like Lima, in which, despite two decades of unprecedented economic growth, more than 70 percent of the population lives hand to mouth, relying on street commerce and informal labor markets.18 The most graphic images of the entire epidemic came from Guayaquil in Ecuador, where bodies in improvised coffins were left to rot on the streets of a city whose history is one characterized by deep class and racial divides.19 At the beginning of the new millennium, Latin America counted alongside “emerging Asia” as an arena of the new “global

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middle class.” The shock of 2020 raises the specter of another “lost decade.” Q Q Q

Rich societies faced the corona shock with far greater economic and medical resources. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan made good use of these advantages to contain the epidemic. The same cannot be said of Europe and the United States. As a result of their failure to react promptly, Europe and the United States underwent prolonged lockdowns, triggering recessions that are significantly worse than those of 2008. But not all rich countries have done equally badly. Germany effectively contained the first wave of the epidemic without a comprehensive lockdown of its economy. Given the devastating shock suffered by Italy and Spain, there was reason to fear a widening gulf within the EU, which might even have escalated into a new crisis of the Euro area. Instead, after months of knife-edge negotiation, Europe’s leaders agreed on a €750 billion program to share at least some of the cost of reconstruction and recovery.20 This act of solidarity among states was impressive. But it was a long way removed from the pain suffered, in Europe as elsewhere, by low-wage workers, poor households, migrant workers, and precarious small businesses. It is Europe’s uniquely extensive national-welfare and health-care regimes that have been put to the test. Reactions ranged from a rapid adjustment in workplace health and safety conditions to a strategy to address the pandemic, which in the British case revolved entirely around “saving” the National Health Service.21 Europe’s great welfare innovation of the crisis has been the adoption of short-time working systems on a model pioneered by Germany during the 2008 crisis. Employers are subsidized to cover the wages of furloughed workers. This system has a progressive

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distributional effect through providing wage support only up to an upper-income threshold. It is not just the scale of these systems that is remarkable but the fact that they have been extended to include a variety of self-employed workers, gig workers, agency workers, and previously stigmatized groups such as sex workers.22 All in all, though the pandemic was poorly handled, and the economic shock in Europe (as measured by the contraction of GDP) has been worse than in the United States, the safety net of legal and social regulation has gone a long way toward absorbing the crisis’s impact on the most vulnerable—so far, at least. Q Q Q

Since the 1970s, America’s inequality dynamics along lines of both class and race have been more extreme than in any other advanced society. So, too, has been the open subordination of politics to the interests of wealth. COVID has confirmed that contrast. New York City, the epicenter of the U.S. epidemic, was a case study in extremes. While the affluent Upper East Side emptied out, working-class Black and Latino people living in Queens suffered COVID mortality rates almost as bad as the worst of northern Italy.23 School closures divided the city along lines of housing and access to internet. Single parents, overwhelmingly mothers and disproportionately women of color, were left to fend as best they could. While Wall Street traders toiled to reap the profits of turbulent markets, hundreds of thousands of workers in retail, bars, restaurants, nail and hair salons, and the theater business were summarily dismissed. So dramatic was the skew in job losses toward the least well paid that, as employment collapsed, in April America’s hourly average wage surged by 5.5 percent.24 The sense of impending social crisis was so severe that for a brief moment the congressional Republican Party actually joined the Democrats in voting through the $2 trillion CARES Act. The

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United States lacks the labor-market infrastructure that would enable a European-style response to the crisis.25 But for a brief moment in 2020, Congressional largesse demonstrated what a welfare-driven, redistributive social policy in America might look like. With supplements to unemployment benefits and stimulus checks, disposable incomes rose even as tens of millions lost their jobs. But even at that moment, there was no let-up in the distributional struggle. Short-term relief for low-paid workers was traded for massive support for corporate America and a staggering tax cut for the wealthiest.26 While small firms were battered, Amazon and the other tech giants thrived. Once again, inequality of living conditions, employment, and income was compounded by massive differences in the structure of wealth. The essential complement to congressional fiscal policy was a series of interventions by the Fed to stabilize financial markets. Without the Fed’s liquidity provision, March might have seen a financial heart attack on the scale of 2008. The result would have been a disaster for more than the U.S. economy. Yet monetary largesse has side effects. While it brings interest rates down, it induces a lopsided surge in stock markets that benefits the 10 percent of the population who hold substantial wealth in the form of equity.27 And even among those with financial assets, not everyone gained equally. The crisis selected among firms as well as among people. The difference in fortunes between the energy and tech sectors has been huge, as has been the fate of those who work in those sectors.28 Meanwhile, amid the extreme polarization of the summer and with the impending election and unemployment numbers suggesting at least some degree of recovery, that brief moment of political cohesion was soon over. Congress became deadlocked over efforts to pass a new stimulus package. The GOP went back

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to arguing that generous benefits rob low-waged Americans of the incentive to work. Such benefits, the thinking goes, do too much to mitigate inequality. The other sticking point has been the Republican refusal to support adequate financial assistance for the states and cities hardest hit by the crisis. As a result, America heads toward 2021 facing the prospect of an urban fiscal crisis on a scale last seen in the 1970s.29 Q Q Q

The upshot of this partial exercise in mapping is that the COVID crisis reveals a world split into five distinct regimes of inequality and growth. Europe and the United States have differed in ways that have become familiar in recent decades. What is new is that the world of emerging markets has split three ways. All three are marked by extreme inequality, but whereas China has maintained growth, India has suffered a shuddering blow that has starkly exposed its limited governance capacities. The one consolation is that India may be able to get back on track. The same cannot be said for Latin America, which is haunted by the prospect of a new “lost decade.” If 2020 will be remembered as, in the words of President Macron of France, the moment when humanity as a whole suffered an “anthropological shock,” it will also be remembered as a moment of extreme polarization, the moment that buried, once and for all, the millennial vision of a convergent future of economic globalization, growth, and social transformation.

NOTES 1. UNESCO, “1.3 Billion Learners Are Still Affected by School or University Closures, as Educational Institutions Start Reopening Around the World, Says UNESCO,” UNESCO, April 29, 2020, https://en.unesco.org

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7. 8.

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/news /13-billion-learners -are -still-affected-school-university-closures -educational-institutions. World Bank, “COVID-19 Could Lead to Permanent Loss in Learning and Trillions of Dollars in Lost Earnings,” June  18, 2020, https://www .worldbank .org /en /news /press -release /2020/06/18/covid-19 - could-lead - to - permanent - loss - in - learning - and - trillions - of - dollars - in - lost -earnings. Wolf Richter, “The Rich Got Richer During the Pandemic, Bailed Out by the Fed. How It Happened and Why That’s Bad for the Economy,” Wolf Street, August 19, 2020, https://wolfstreet.com/2020/08/19/the-fed-made -sure -the -rich-got-richer-during-the -pandemic-why-thats -bad-for-the -economy/. Mario Koran, “Las Vegas Parking Lot Turned Into ‘Homeless Shelter’ with Social Distancing Markers,” The Guardian, March 30, 2020, https:// www.theguardian .com /us -news /2020 /mar /30 / las -vegas -parking -lot -homeless-shelter. “Calif. Police Using Drones to Patrol During COVID-19 Lockdown,” Police 1, March  25, 2020, https://www.police1.com/police-products /police - drones /articles /calif -police -using - drones -to -patrol - during -covid-19-lockdown-8kCSOd9lY2cEYKfN/. Ginia Bellafante, “First They Fled the City. Now They’re Building $75,000 In-Ground Pools,” New York Times, May 22, 2020, https://www.nytimes .com/2020/05/22/nyregion/quarantine-rich-pools.html. Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Elise Gould, “Decades of Rising Economic Inequality in the U.S.,” Economic Policy Institute, March 27, 2019, https://www.epi.org /publication /decades - of-rising - economic -inequality-in -the -u - s -testimony-before -the-u-s-house-of-representatives-ways-and-means-committee/. OECD, “Building Confidence Crucial Amid an Uncertain Economic Recovery,” September 16, 2020, http://www.oecd.org /economy/ building -confidence-crucial-amid-an-uncertain-economic-recovery.htm. Frank Tang, “Is China Rich Enough to Claim a ‘Well-Off Society’? One Ex-Official Says Grand Economic Goal Can Wait,” South China Morning Post, July 28, 2020, https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article /3095038/china-rich-enough-claim-well-society-one-ex-official-says. Frank Tang, “China’s Unemployment Crisis Shows No Signs of Easing as Graduates Face Reality Check Due to Coronavirus,” South China Morning Post, July 15, 2020, https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy

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13. 14.

15.

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19. 20.

21.

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/article /3093235 /chinas -unemployment- crisis -shows -no -signs - easing -graduates. Financial Times, “China’s Retraining Campaign Offers Scant Prospects for the Unemployed,” September  14, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content /51caf358-1058-4ee7-834a-c5b5cb8bf205. CMIE, “Unemployment Rate in India,” https://unemploymentinindia .cmie.com/. Elizabeth Puranam, “Coronavirus Forces Millions of Indian Children to Miss School,” Al Jazeera, August  13, 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com /news /2020 /8 /13 /coronavirus -forces -millions - of -indian - children -to -miss-school. Oxfam, “Latin American Billionaires Surge as World’s Most Unequal Region Buckles Under Coronavirus Strain,” press release, July 27, 2020, https://www.oxfam .org /en /press -releases / latin -american -billionaires -surge-worlds-most-unequal-region-buckles. McKinsey Global Institute, Latin America’s Missing Middle: Rebooting Inclusive Growth, May  2019, https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKin sey/Featured%20Insights/Americas/Latin%20Americas%20missing%20 middle%20of%20midsize%20firms%20and%20middle - class%20spending%20power/MGI-Latin-Americas-missing-middle-Report-final.ashx. David Agren, “Mexican Governor Prompts Outrage with Claim Poor Are Immune to Coronavirus,” The Guardian, March  26, 2020, https:// www.theguardian .com /world /2020/mar/26/mexican-governor-miguel -barbosa-prompts-outrage-with-claim-poor-are-immune-to-covid-19. Juan Chacaltana, “Rapid Response to COVID-19 Under High Informality? The Case of Peru,” International Labour Organization, May 25, 2020, https:// www . ilo . org / wcmsp5 /groups /public / - - - ed_emp /documents /publication/wcms_746116.pdf. Chris Garces, “Carceral Pandemic Politics and Epidemiological Elites in Ecuador,” NACLA Report on the Americas 52, no. 3 (2020). Adam Tooze, “It’s a New Europe—if You Can Keep It,” Foreign Policy, August  7, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/07/merkel-macron-eu -its-a-new-europe-if-you-can-keep-it/. Jacob Leibenluft, “The Pandemic Hurts Countries That Don’t Value Workers,” Foreign Affairs, August  19, 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs .com /articles/united-states/2020-08-19/pandemic-hurts-countries-dont -value-workers. Jonathan Rothwell, “The Effects of COVID-19 on International Labor Markets: An Update,” Brookings, May 27, 2020, https://www.brookings

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.edu /research /the - effects - of- covid-19 - on-international-labor-markets -an-update/. Kevin Quealy, “The Richest Neighborhoods Emptied Out Most as Coronavirus Hit New York City, New York Times, May 15, 2020, https://www . ny times . com / interactive /2020 /05 / 15 / upshot / who - left - new - york -coronavirus.html. “Real Earnings—February  2021,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, March 10, 2021, https://www.bls.gov/news.release /pdf/realer.pdf. Mike Konczal, “Our Political System Is Hostile to Real Reform,” Dissent, March  26, 2020, https://www.dissentmagazine.org /online_articles/our -political-system-is-hostile-to-real-reform. Allan Sloan, “The CARES Act Sent You a $1,200 Check but Gave Millionaires and Billionaires Far More,” ProPublica, June  8, 2020, https:// www.propublica .org /article /the -cares -act-sent-you-a-1-200 -check-but -gave-millionaires-and-billionaires-far-more. Heather Boushey, “The Stock Market Is Detached from Economic Reality. A Reckoning Is Coming,” Washington Post, September  9, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook /stock-market-unemploy ment -disconnect /2020/09/09/087374ca-f306–11ea-bc45-e5d48ab44b9f_story .html. Tamir Kalifa and Clifford Krauss, “This Feels Very Different,” New York Times, May 1, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/business/energy -environment/oil-industry-texas-coronavirus.html. Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui, “The Recession Is About to Slam Cities. Not Just the Blue-State Ones,” New York Times, August  17, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/17/upshot /pandemic-recession-cities -fiscal-shortfall.html.

THE JOB OF CRITICAL THINKING NOW JOAN WALLACH SCOTT

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e are experiencing the COVID-19 crisis as a long season of indeterminacy. When will it end? How will it end? Despite an outpouring of commentary from any number of public intellectuals, there are few answers being offered about what the future might hold. There are even fewer about how to get there. In that way, the pandemic has exposed yet another of the fault lines of our moment: the difficulty of imagining ourselves beyond the current worlds in which we live. As with those other fault lines, the problem is not new, as François Hartog reminds us when he writes of “presentism.”1 Sometime in the twentieth century, we lost our belief in the redemptive power of history and so in the guarantee of a better future. Wendy Brown puts it succinctly: “We know ourselves to be saturated by history, we feel the extraordinary force of its determinations; we are also steeped in a discourse of its insignificance, and, above all, we know that history will no longer (always already did not) act as our redeemer.”2 The loss of history’s guarantee does not mean we have no future; it just means we alone are responsible for what it might be. Of course, as the virus reveals one social disaster after another, there are pious hopes being uttered that this moment could usher

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in a better, more just world. The New York Times devoted a whole Sunday section to pointing out the need for more and better forms of equality and justice. But something we might call a critical analysis of how we got here was entirely absent. Like the commentators summoned by the Times, pundits have only underscored what the crisis of a pandemic has starkly revealed and what has been evident all along. They note the flagrant inequalities of class and race; the precarity of millions of working families; the violence wrought by the privatization of health care and other social services; the connection between climate change and susceptibility to chronic disease (asthma being a case in point); the ravages of profiteering pharmaceutical companies; the insatiable greed of banks and hedge-fund managers; the dire effects on public welfare of years of tax cuts and austerity measures; the unpreparedness of governments to address the situation; and the undermining of collective consciousness by neoliberal ideologies. But this isn’t critical analysis: it is description. After a while, the reading of these accounts of socioeconomic pathology and human suffering serves only to compound the depression and sense of impotence that comes with quarantine and confinement. We are being told what we already know—the symptoms and toll of the disease are being endlessly well documented. This is not critique or critical analysis because we are not being offered the means by which to think about these social ills and so about what might constitute a cure for them that the pandemic has so glaringly exposed. Most of the talk about the future is, ironically, about a return to the past: what is sometimes called “normal life.” The wish most fervently expressed is for a return to the taken-for-granted, everyday existence we led before this virus arrived. In medical terminology, crisis represents the decisive turning point which

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leads either to recovery or death. The social analogy trades on the synonymity of recovery and normalcy. Of course, the normal must be adjusted, we are told. A new normal might require more regulation (of big Pharma, banks, hedge funds), the restoration of some safety nets for the poor, and even universal health care. Bernie Sanders was most vocal and explicit about what needed to be done, but his call for “revolution” has been muted, bits of it harnessed by Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, other parts of it tucked away. In fact, if the past is any indication of our future, COVID-19 will have provided the opportunity for capitalism’s further consolidation under the aegis of the state. This is what happened in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008, to say nothing of what followed the plagues of previous centuries. Where are the critical analyses that point to fissures in the structures of power that might be pressed on to bring about forms of serious change? Some of them seem to be coming from on-theground protests by medical professionals—nurses especially— who, even as they are on the front lines of emergency care, have been outspoken in their fury at shortages of supplies, failures to ensure their safety, and the mercenary calculations of for-profit hospitals. In the name of the common good, nurses have denounced the right-wing assemblies demanding “freedom” and the exercise of individual rights. One nurse in scrubs stood alone facing a mob of unmasked, closely packed Trump supporters, whose actions, she said, were threatening the right to life of the rest of us. At the heart of her protest was an insistence on the interconnectedness of our lives, a refusal of the individualist libertarianism that has come to characterize neoliberalism. All over the country, there are African American groups organizing to address specific instances of racist discrimination,

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echoing the Black Lives Matter campaigns a few years ago. Workers in Amazon “fulfillment centers” have been protesting conditions of labor that defy social distancing rules, deny sick leave, and punish those who dare to complain. Members of the Communication Workers of America at General Motors plants have condemned that company for failing to use its workforce to manufacture the ventilators that hospitals desperately need. Instead, GM has laid off workers, and factory space is sitting empty. These workers are calling on citizens to demand that the president use his authority to require the production of ventilators at unused facilities. They are not the only workers demanding that corporations take the public interest into account. Yet there is little media coverage of these events, making it hard to see what is likely an emerging pattern of refusing what we could know about the “normal” these workers still live in. Instead, the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post regale us with stories of the Trump supporters and their protests— organized and paid for by the president’s deep-pocketed enablers. If there is a “deep state” to be found, it is not in the paranoid fantasies of the American right, but in the Trump administration, supported by financial donors whose anonymity is protected by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision of 2010. There seems to be a willful desire—at least on the part of the mainstream media—to minimize the significance of protest that offers sustained and serious criticism—and that might look to and help all of us imagine an alternative future. In the absence of media attention, critical intellectuals ought to be calling attention to these protests, magnifying their visibility, attending to their programs, heeding their calls. For it is these protests that are identifying the fissures—the pressure points—that may provide openings to the future.

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The theorist Michel Foucault characterized these kinds of protest as forms of insubordination, a refusal not of law or government per se but rather expressing the wish “not to be governed like that.”3 As Foucault explained: “I mean that, in this great preoccupation about the way to govern . . . we identify a perpetual question which would be: how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles. . . . not like that, not for that, not by them.” Protest, in other words, is also a form of critical analysis that the rest of us can learn from. “Not to want to be governed like that also means not wanting to accept these laws because they are unjust, because . . . they hide a fundamental illegitimacy.” The test for legitimacy may come from previous communally based systems of social organization or from contemporary collective modes of being in neighborhoods or at work—in places where interdependence already provides the ground for distinguishing right from wrong. In other words, forms of resistance do not need to be invented by theorists. They are an integral aspect of the complex relations of power in any society.  In an article in 1994, Hortense Spillers, writing of the responsibility of “black creative intellectuals” rejected the idea that it was their role to “save our people.”  Rather, she said, “it seems to me that the only question that the intellectual can actually use is: To what extent do the ‘conditions of theoretical practice’ pass through him or her, as the living site of significant intervention?” The cultural theorist Fred Moten reads this as a call for intellectuals to accompany activists, to riff on the analyses their protests offer. It seems to me that that ought to be our job now—not endlessly detailing the injustices this crisis has only made more evident but, instead, looking for the refusals that might become the levers for openings to an alternative future.

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NOTES 1. François Hartog, “Trouble dans le présentisme: le temps du Covid-19,” AOC, April 1, 2020, https://aoc.media/analyse/2020/03/31/trouble-dans -le-presentisme-le-temps-du-covid-19/. 2. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 3. Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?,” in The Politics of Truth: Michel Foucault, ed. Sylvére Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth (New York: Semiotext(e) 1997).

PART II Essential Work

“THE SUPPLY CHAIN MUST CONTINUE” ANDREW LAKOFF

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n early October 2020, as the White House emerged as a hotspot for COVID-19 transmission, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany revealed her own positive diagnosis. In a message to the national press corps, she sought to project an image of heroic sacrifice. “As an essential worker,” she wrote, “I have worked diligently to provide needed information to the American people.” McEnany’s appropriation of the term “essential worker” was perhaps ill advised, given the Trump administration’s general indifference to protecting those whose occupations placed them at risk.1 But it also pointed to the fluidity of the category, which was unfamiliar before the pandemic but which is now widely recognized, even if its boundaries remain unclear. An estimated 50 to 60 million Americans have jobs that are designated as “essential” by the Department of Homeland Security.2 The designation encompasses a vast array of occupations, from physicians to truck drivers, from software engineers to meat processing plant workers. Such a variegated terrain points to the question of how, precisely, the category of essential worker is delimited. The stakes of such a definition are high, in that the category provides states with a rationale for allowing certain industries and services to continue to operate when much of social and economic life is shut

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down. The federal government defines the category to include “workers who conduct a range of operations and services that are essential to continued infrastructure viability.”3 But in practice, it can seemingly be expanded in an ad hoc fashion, as when California added recreational cannabis to its list of essential industries or when the governor of Florida declared World Wrestling Entertainment to be an essential service. Significant contestation has arisen over which industries should be deemed essential, as in the National Rifle Association’s legal efforts to ensure that gun shops remain open or the Trump administration’s classification of teachers as “critical infrastructure workers” in order to enable states to require them to work onsite.4 A number of other tensions have emerged around the politics of the essential: how to ensure that essential workers receive adequate protection against contagion; whether such workers should receive special compensation for their heightened exposure to risk; and—now on the horizon—how they should be prioritized in vaccine allocation schemes. Perhaps most critically, the category points to a fundamental inequality at the heart of the U.S. pandemic response: In many cases, essential workers have no choice but to put themselves at risk, working in industries—such as meat processing, agriculture, and logistics—where they keep supply chains operational so that others may work remotely.5 Those whose work is categorized as “essential” are often those whose lives are most precarious. Despite the apparent novelty of the “essential worker” category and the controversies that have arisen around its application, there has been little discussion up to this point on where the category came from or why it made such a prominent entrance onto the pandemic scene. This essay explores how a technique of classification that emerged from the world of national-security planning became a source of subjective identification and an object of

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political contestation—one that pointed to a new form of vulnerability. As we will see, the category of essential worker arose from a broader security framework, dating from the early Cold War, for governing collective life in a future emergency. Specifically, it comes from the practice of defining certain industrial and service sectors as elements of “critical infrastructure.” Designed to mitigate vulnerability, the concept of “essential worker” has, during the pandemic, become its own source of risk.6

Essential During Covid-19 On March 19, 2020, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security released a guidance for state and local officials on “the identification of essential critical infrastructure workers during the Covid-19 response.”7 For the sake of “public health and safety and community well-being” during the pandemic emergency, the guidance stated, certain industries had “a special responsibility to continue operations” even in the face of stay-at-home orders from public health authorities. “In the modern economy,” it explained, “reliance on technology and on just-in-time supply chains means that certain workers must be able to access certain sites, facilities, and assets in order to ensure continuity of functions.” As for the question of which workers should remain physically on site, the document included lists of dozens of specific occupations— classified according to sixteen different infrastructure sectors, including food and agriculture, healthcare and public health, transportation, and commercial facilities. The guidance was advisory rather than directive; the matter of determining actual exceptions to stay-at-home orders was under

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the purview of individual states rather than the federal government. Although implementation of the guidance varied according to local political and social environments, we can look at California for one prominent example of how essential-worker policy was put into action. In a March 19 executive order, Governor Gavin Newsom required “all individuals” living in the state to stay at home “except as needed to maintain continuity of operations of the federal critical infrastructure sectors” identified in the DHS guidance.8 Given “the importance of these sectors to Californians’ health and wellbeing,” the order stated, those employed in these vital sectors “may continue their work.” Here it is worth pausing to consider the form of rationality underlying these government pronouncements. Insofar as essential-worker policy was directed toward fostering the “health and well-being” of the population in the midst of a pandemic, it articulated a distinctive understanding of how to promote this aim. The policy was not oriented toward traditional public health activities, whether sanitation and hygiene measures or biomedical interventions. It did not involve the production of knowledge about the disease per se—such as its prevalence, rate of spread, or severity. Rather, the policy focused on the systems underpinning social and economic life. As Newsom’s executive order put it, the “assets, systems, and networks” of the sixteen infrastructure sectors listed in the federal guidance “are considered so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect” on security, safety, or public health. At the heart of the essential-worker policy was an assumption that the well-being of the collective depended on securing the continuous flow of resources through a set of vital, vulnerable systems. “The supply chain must continue,” stated Newsom’s order. As we will see, the policy built on an existing framework of emergency

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government, one that sought to ensure the continued function of critical systems in the event of future catastrophe.

Targeting Essential Facilities This way of thinking about the security of the collective can be traced, at least in part, to early twentieth-century strategic reflection on the role of the airplane in modern war. In the era of total war, air war strategists argued that the continuous operation of a nation’s industrial-production complex—composed of power plants, rail networks, and key industrial facilities—was critical to its military power. The aim of air war should therefore be to disrupt the systems that were essential to the industrial economy of the enemy nation. As the air power theorist William Sherman wrote in 1926, “industry consists of a complex system of interlocking factors, each of which makes only its allotted part of the whole,” and “this very quality of modern industry renders it vulnerable” to targeted attack.9 Sherman argued that air power should target the enemy’s “system of supply”—the complex of industrial facilities, energy infrastructures, and transportation networks that underpinned a nation’s military power. In World War II, economists specializing in the flow of resources in an industrial economy worked with allied air force units to put this strategy of “precision bombing” into practice.10 In the early Cold War, U.S. national-security planners became concerned that the Soviet Union would target key industrial facilities and essential services in a future attack. They transposed methods of understanding the “complex system of interlocking factors” underpinning the flow of resources in the

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national economy from air targeting and industrial mobilization to domestic vulnerability analysis.11 In response to this threat, mobilization planning began to focus on the postattack management of resources to ensure the survival of the population and the capacity for economic rehabilitation.12 Such plans envisioned the structure of a future emergency government and listed the actions, in specific resource areas, that emergency government agencies would need to take in order to ensure the nation’s survival and recovery. Thus, “Mobilization Plan D-Minus,” completed in 1957, was organized according to eight “resource categories” in which emergency actions would be taken: telecommunications, food, housing, industrial production, manpower, raw materials, power and fuels, and transportation.13 Cold War preparedness specialists also understood that workers would be needed to operate services like transportation and electric power systems and to staff key industrial plants. To ensure the survival of sufficient personnel in the aftermath of a thermonuclear attack, they proposed building a national system of blast and fallout shelters and establishing large stockpiles of essential supplies, such as medicine and food. While the impetus for investment in such nuclear preparedness efforts faded over the decades that followed, this framework for emergency government was gradually extended to address a range of other threats, including natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and, eventually, pandemics.14 The task of planning for future emergencies was assigned to a series of different federal agencies where “all-hazards planning” was instituted as the basis for preparedness.15 Beginning in the mid-1990s, national security experts argued that, in response to new forms of vulnerability arising from dependence on information and communications technology, the federal government should undertake a major initiative on “critical infrastructure protection.” Over two

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decades later, the resulting initiative—in the form of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—would spawn the federal government’s essential worker policy. The premise of the initiative was that “certain of our infrastructures are so vital that their incapacity or destruction would have a debilitating impact on our defense and economic security.” A presidential commission was charged to “study the critical infrastructures that constitute the life support systems of our nation, determine their vulnerabilities and propose a strategy for protecting them into the future.”16 In its final report, issued in 1997, the commission argued that government policy must “assure the availability and continuity of the critical infrastructures on which our economic security, defense, and standard of living depend.” Reducing infrastructural vulnerability would require “coordinated effort within and between the private and public sectors,” and a partnership between the federal government and state and local governments. The report identified eight critical systems—similar to those identified in Cold War mobilization planning—”whose incapacity or destruction would have a debilitating impact on our defense or economic security.”17 And it proposed the establishment of an office that would “oversee and facilitate infrastructure assurance policy formation,” including risk assessment, integrating public and private sector perspectives, and proposing new infrastructure protection measures. The Critical Infrastructure Protection program was eventually housed in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In 2006, DHS published the National Infrastructure Protection Plan (revised in 2013), which laid out a familiar vision of the dependence of social and economic life on the continued function of the nation’s vital systems. “Our national wellbeing depends upon secure and resilient critical infrastructure—those assets, systems and networks that underpin society,” stated the plan.18 It warned

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that “growing interdependencies across critical infrastructure systems have increased the potential vulnerabilities to physical and cyber threats.” Given the limited federal role in regulating private-sector infrastructural systems, the “primary mechanism” for advancing critical infrastructure protection would be voluntary collaboration between private sector operators and “their government counterparts.”

Pandemic Response At around this time, a new threat came to the attention of the government’s emergency planners: Whether due to a bioterrorist attack or the emergence of a novel and deadly pathogen, public health and security experts argued, the nation was ill-prepared to deal with the onset of a catastrophic “biological incident.” It was necessary to prepare for the potential impact of such an incident on critical infrastructures. As the 2005 National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza put it, “movement of essential personnel, goods and services, and maintenance of critical infrastructure are necessary during an event that spans months in any given community.” DHS was charged to work with private-sector operators in developing “continuity of operations plans that ensure essential services remain functional and essential goods remain available in the event of a pandemic.”19 The agency developed a “biological incident annex” as the “organizing framework for responding and recovering from a range of biological threats” across the federal government.20 This annex laid out a series of objectives in the event of a future public health emergency: securing infrastructure systems, restoring “transportation pathways to facilitate supply chains and the movement of people,” and facilitating the delivery

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of supplies critical to response and recovery. The federal role in the response would include “prioritization of medical countermeasure dispensing to critical infrastructure operators,” but there was no discussion in these planning documents of the question— which would become so critical during the COVID-19 pandemic emergency—of how decisions would be made about the classification of essential workers in the event of stay-at-home orders. With this background, we can see the March 2020 guidance on the identification of essential workers—and in particular, its emphasis on the need “to maintain the services and functions Americans depend on daily and that need to be able to operate resiliently” during the pandemic response—as part of a long trajectory of emergency planning in the United States. The guidance allowed for interpretive flexibility on the part of state officials, leading to a flurry of lobbying activity by operators of potentially critical infrastructures. From the perspective of those classified as “essential,” in turn, critical questions included, first, whether one had the choice not to be exposed to risk and, second—if one remained on site—whether sufficient protection would be offered. For those infected on the job, there was the question of whether treatment would be accessible or compensation offered. Finally, for critical analysts, the category of the “essential” could be understood as a new form of social classification, one that interacted in complex ways with existing forms of social inequality. A mechanism that was put in place to reduce vulnerability at the level of the system had generated a novel form of risk at the level of individuals and communities—the risk of being classified as essential.

NOTES 1. Editorial Board, “ ‘You’re On Your Own,’ Essential Workers Are Being Told,” New York Times, April 20, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020 /04/20/opinion/osha-coronavirus.html. In late October, Vice President

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

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“The Supply Chain Must Continue”

Mike Pence assumed the mantle of “essential worker” in order to continue campaigning after several of his staff members were diagnosed with COVID-19. “Health Experts Question Pence Campaigning as Essential Work,” Los Angeles Times, October 25, 2020. Adie Tomer and Joseph  W. Kane, “How to Protect Essential Workers During COVID-19,” Brookings Institution, March 31, 2020, https://www . brookings . edu /research / how - to - protect - essential -workers - during -covid-19/. Christopher  C. Krebs, “Memorandum on Identification of Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers During COVID-19 Response,” U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security, March  19, 2020, https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default /files/publications/CISA-Guidance-on-Essential- Critical-Infrastructure -Workers-1-20-508c.pdf. Ari Natter, “ ‘Essential’ Label Stirs Business Frenzy to Make Trump’s List,” Bloomberg News, April 14, 2020, https://news.bloomberglaw.com /coronavirus /essential -label - stirs - business -frenzy -to -make -trumps -list; Valerie Strauss, “The Trump Administration Declared Teachers ‘Essential Workers.’ Here’s What That Means,”  Washington Post, August  21, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com /education/2020/08 /21 /trump -admini stration- declared-teachers - essential-workers -heres -what-that-means/. Shawn Hubler, Thomas Fuller, Anjali Singvia, and Juliette Love, “Many Latinos Couldn’t Stay Home. Now Virus Cases Are Soaring in Their Communities,”  New York Times, June  26, 2020, https://www.nytimes .com/2020/06/26/us/corona-virus-latinos.html. The historical material in this essay is based on a collaboration with Stephen Collier on the genealogy of emergency government in the United States. A detailed discussion appears in Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff, The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021). Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, “Guidance on the Essential Critical Infrastructure Workforce: Ensuring Community and National Resilience in COVID-19 Response,” March  19, 2020, https:// www . cisa . gov /sites /default / files / publications /CISA - Guidance - on -Essential-Critical-Infrastructure-Workers-1-20-508c.pdf. Executive Department, State of California,  Executive Order N-33-20, March  19, 2020, https://covid19.ca.gov/img /Executive-Order-N-33-20 .pdf.

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9. William Sherman, Air Warfare (New York, 1926), cited in Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff, “Vital Systems Security: Reflexive Biopolitics and the Government of Emergency,”  Theory, Culture, and Society  32, no. 2 (2015): 19–51. 10. Barry M. Katz, Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services, 1942–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 11. Peter Galison points to the mirroring process through which civil defense experts applied the lessons of World War II strategic bombing to U.S. urban planning. “War Against the Center.” Grey Room no. 4 (Summer 2001): 5–33. 12. Collier and Lakoff, The Government of Emergency, traces the relation of Cold War mobilization planning to contemporary emergency government. 13. These resource categories were replicated—with the addition of health, water, and government operations—in the 1964 National Plan for Emergency Preparedness. 14. For a discussion of the use of civil defense resources for other forms of disaster planning during the Cold War, see Scott Gabriel Knowles, The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 15. These agencies included the Office of Defense Mobilization of the 1950s, the Office of Emergency Preparedness in the early 1960s, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, established in 1979. 16. Robert T. Marsh, chairman, Critical Foundations: Protecting America’s Infrastructures: A Report of the President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection, October 1997. On the emergence of the field of critical infrastructure protection, see Myriam Anna Dunn and Kristian Soby Kristenson, eds., Securing the ‘Homeland’: Critical Infrastructure, Risk, and (In)Security. Routledge, 2008. 17. The initial set of critical infrastructures were: telecommunications, electrical power, oil and gas, banking and finance, transportation, water supply, emergency services, and government services. 18. Department of Homeland Security,  NIPP 2013: Partnering for Critical  Infrastructure Security and Resilience, 2013, https://www.cisa .gov /publication /nipp-2013-partnering-critical-infrastructure-security-and -resilience. 19. Homeland Security Council, National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza, 2005, https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/pdf/pandemic-influ enza-implementation.pdf.

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20. Department of Homeland Security,  Biological Incident Annex to the Response and Recovery Federal Interagency Operational Plans, 2017, https://www.fema .gov/media-library-data /1511178017324-92a7a7f808b3f 03e5fa2f8495bdfe335 / BIA_Annex_Final_1–23–17_(508_Compliant_628-17).pdf.

THE ENDURING DISPOSABILITY OF LATINX WORKERS NATALIA MOLINA

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remember the first time I cried in an archive. I was doing research in 2001 in the Archives of the Secretary of Exterior Relations in Mexico City, which houses the papers of Mexican consulates in the United States. I came across a 1916 document about the quarantine station at the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso. The document described how Mexicans who lived in Juárez and crossed the border every day to their jobs in El Paso were regularly stripped naked and forced into showers while their clothes were washed in kerosene—all at the direction of the U.S. Public Health Service. The stated rationale for this practice was that Mexicans were the cause of a typhus outbreak in the United States, even though Mexicans had only been associated with four cases in the previous months. When a local jail adopted the same practice, using a kerosene solution to deal with an outbreak of lice, someone lit a match and the explosion killed all twenty Mexican prisoners.1 I cried because of the cruelty and dehumanization. But I also cried because these conditions were not the exception but the rule for Mexican laborers at the turn of the century. I was well into writing my first book, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939, and I knew that workers would continue

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to be treated as either the solution or the problem, depending on demand for cheap labor in the United States, for decades to come. Mexicans provide a ready supply of inexpensive labor in times of plenty, but they regularly suffer from disease and injury due to the lack of clean and safe working conditions. In both cases, Mexican workers’ lives are treated as disposable. Today Latinx workers, especially immigrants, are concentrated in the frontline occupations of health care, food service, transportation, agriculture, and meat processing.2 Yet while we now call these occupations essential, the actual workers are considered just as expendable as they were one hundred years ago, and the emergence of COVID-19 has only highlighted that reality. In California, the Latinx community composes 39 percent of the population but represents 55 percent of coronavirus cases. Meatpacking was dangerous even before COVID-19. Low-wage workers endure crowded, cold, and noisy conditions and face punishment for absences and no sick pay, which encourages them to work when they are ill. With the arrival of the pandemic, these dangerous conditions have been exacerbated by a failure to provide personal protective equipment (PPE) and sanitation stations and a drop in the number of safety inspectors.3 The conditions are often just as bad for agricultural laborers, who are exposed to pesticides, live in crowded and inadequate housing, and lack PPE and sanitation stations. Yet far from joining together in outrage, most Americans tacitly accept these conditions for a few so that the majority can continue their lives uninterrupted. The Wisconsin Supreme Court justice Patience Roggensack recently provided a pungent example of how ingrained in society this “otherness” is. She explained that one county’s surge of COVID cases—from 60 to 800 in two weeks—was “due to the meatpacking.” “That’s where Brown County got the flare. It wasn’t just the regular folks in Brown

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County.” In other words, “regular folks” are not diseased; Mexicans are. For over a century, we have excused systemic inequalities, justifying them by pointing to Mexicans’ difference from “us.” In the early twentieth century, employers, particularly those in agriculture and railroad construction in the Southwest, relied heavily on Mexican immigrant labor. Agribusiness leaders argued that Mexicans should be exempt from immigration quotas because they were biologically suited to perform stoop labor in 110-degree heat that would overwhelm other workers.4 This argument foreclosed any discussion of workplace conditions and justified giving these workers the worst jobs, at the worst wages, in the worst conditions. Although immigrant labor was eagerly exploited when demand was high, immigrants were quickly redefined as an unwanted and diseased population when the economy soured. During the Great Depression, officials deported approximately a million Mexicans and Mexican Americans—including many U.S. citizens—in part on the pretext that they were diseased and liable to become public charges. Health officials who had once focused on assimilation suddenly began to argue that Mexicans’ biological inferiority precluded their inclusion in the U.S. body politic. The officials had once interpreted high infant mortality rates among Mexican immigrants as evidence of the need for public health education, but in the cost-conscious 1930s, the same statistics were treated as evidence that Mexicans were genetically flawed. No amount of education could ameliorate this deficiency, they declared, concluding “We Can No Longer Ignore the Problem of the Mexican.”5 The oscillation between open arms toward and hostile treatment of Mexican immigrants has played out again and again. When World War II created labor shortages, the U.S. government sought help from Mexico. The result was the Bracero Program

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(1942–1964), a guest worker system that brought 4 million Mexican men to the United States to perform farm labor.6 As before, little attention was paid to dire working and living conditions permitted by employers. The lack of adequate and hygienic employee housing ranked among the laborers’ most frequent complaints.7 And the health care that was available served as a means more of relieving employers of unproductive workers than of safeguarding worker health. Those who were injured or fell ill were often deported to Mexico and easily replaced with fresh recruits.8 Employers in the program faced no consequences for violating their contractual obligation to provide laborers with safe and sanitary working and living conditions. As a result, despite the appearance of having strict health standards, the Bracero Program perpetuated the view of Mexicans as bearers of disease while disregarding the systemic conditions that gave rise to disease.9 The welcoming of immigrants flipped to rejection once again in California in the 1990s. For years, Mexican immigrants had been received to fill circumscribed roles as low-wage workers in agriculture, manual labor, housekeeping, and child care. Yet once California was in the maelstrom of a recession and an election year, a familiar narrative was repeated: immigrants were a drain on society. Immigrant maids and nannies, once deemed economic necessities, were now depicted in nativist campaigns as disease carriers and burdens on public health, education, and welfare programs. This narrative was adopted in political discourse, ultimately driving legislation in the form of California’s landmark Proposition 187, which sought to deny public health services, social services, and public education to undocumented immigrants. Proposition 187 applied to all undocumented immigrants, but within California’s political and cultural climate, it was understood that

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Mexicans were the true targets. And because the proposition mandated that all public employees, including health care workers, report anyone suspected of being an undocumented immigrant, dark skin, an accent, or a home address in a certain part of town might be enough to mark an individual as potentially deportable. Proposition 187 was shut down by the courts on constitutional grounds, but the fact that it passed by an overwhelming majority underscores that most California voters were willing to yet again dispose of Mexican workers.10 And today, in the era of COVID-19, essential workers, many of them Latinx, are in the same rickety boat. Most have few options for medical care: they lack employer-sponsored health insurance, cannot afford health coverage options under the Affordable Care Act, or are not eligible for public benefits.11 Just as concerning, undocumented immigrants fear a COVID test will bring them to the attention of Homeland Security, despite assurances to the contrary. When employers do not provide PPE, testing, sick pay, or job protection for those who take sick leave—and the federal government proposes shielding them from liability when employees fall ill at work—the message is clear: Latinx laborers are not only “not us,” they’re faceless and expendable. But treating workers as disposable, discarding the sick like so many dirty tissues, does not keep the rest of the population safe. COVID’s exponential growth allows it to rapidly spread beyond the Latinx workforce, meaning it is not just “their” problem.12 COVID has exposed meatpacking plants and agricultural farms as hotbeds of disease—and despite the insistence of people like Justice Roggensack, the culprit is not “dirty” or “inferior” Mexican immigrants but these businesses’ unjust practices of exploitation and disposal. When we ignore that reality, falling back on the notion that Mexicans are different from “us,” we construct social and cultural

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borders. Disease tropes strengthen those borders by intensifying immigrants’ otherness, creating a culture that justifies exclusion and demonization. But the importance of providing access to health care and proper workplace conditions for Latinx immigrants does not end at those imagined social borders—the “us” this nation insists on reifying depends on it. Not only out of integrity but in the interest of self-preservation, we must as a society recognize the humanity of Latinx immigrants. Twenty years ago, I wept in an archive. I cried again recently. I was listening to a press conference from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. He told the story of Santos Barahona, an immigrant from El Salvador who worked as a janitor at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) and had passed away from complications of COVID. Garcetti described Barahona as the face of Los Angeles.13 In Barahona’s honor, the iconic light towers that line the entrance to LAX went dark for one night. What a contrast to how so many workers before him had not been memorialized or even remembered. Barahona was not seen as someone separate from “regular folks.” Nor had he died nameless and faceless, like the Mexican workers who perished in the El Paso bordercrossing-station fire. He had a name, he had a family, he was a person.

NOTES 1. Alexandra Minna Stern, “Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood: Medicalization and Nation-Building on the U.S.-Mexican Border, 1910–1930,” Hispanic American Historical Review 79, no. 1 (1999); Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 2. Stephanie Lai and Rong-Gong Lin II, “California Fails to Protect Latino Workers as Coronavirus Ravages Communities of Color,” Los Angeles Times, July  15, 2020 https://www.latimes.com/california /story/2020-07 -15 /california -fails - to - protect - latino -workers - coronavirus -ravages

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-communities-of-color; Rong-Gong Lin II, “Latinos Now Twice as Likely as Whites to Get Coronavirus in L.A. County,” Los Angeles Times, July  10, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/california /story/2020-07-10/l-a - countys -latino -residents - contracting- coronavirus -faster-than - other -groups; Muzaffar Chishti and Jessica Bolter, “Vulnerable to COVID-19 and in Frontline Jobs, Immigrants Are Mostly Shut Out of U.S. Relief,” Migration Policy Institute, April 24, 2020, https://www.migrationpolicy .org /article/covid19-immigrants-shut-out-federal-relief. Wozniacka Gosia, “Poor Conditions at Meatpacking Plants Have Long Put Workers at Risk: The Pandemic Makes It Much Worse,” Civil Eats, April 17, 2020, https://civileats.com/2020/04/17/poor-conditions-at-meat packing-plants -have -long-put-workers -at-risk-the -pandemic-makes -it -much-worse/ and Michael Haedicke, “To Understand the Danger of COVID-19 Outbreaks in Meatpacking Plants, Look at the Industry’s History,” The Conversation, May 6, 2020, https://theconversation.com/to -understand-the-danger-of-covid-19 -outbreaks-in-meatpacking-plants -look-at-the-industrys-history-137367. Mark Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow: Mexican Immigrant Labor in the United States, 1900–1940 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976). Ideologies rooted in prevailing scientific understandings of race have shaped U.S. conceptions of Mexicans from the time they were incorporated into the country in the wake of the U.S.-Mexico War (1846–48). See Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). For example, both the infant mortality rate and the death rate from tuberculosis were high for Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles (the TB rate was twice as high in Mexican neighborhoods as in the rest of the city). Health officials established a tuberculosis clinic in East Los Angeles, as well as parenting clinics for “ignorant Mexican mothers,” on whom the high infant mortality rate was blamed. Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?, chap. 3 and 4. Kitty Calavita, Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the I.N.S. (New York: Routledge, 1992). Ruben Salazar, “Braceros Cast in Complex Role,” Los Angeles Times, November 26, 1962. On the enduring legacy of migrant workers’ poor working and health conditions, see Seth  M. Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

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9. Natalia Molina, “Fear and Loathing in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: The History of Mexicans as Medical Menaces, 1848–Present,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 41, no. 2 (2016). 10. Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California’s Proposition 187 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Daniel Martinez HoSang, Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 11. Ruqaiijah Yearby and Seema Mohapatra, “Structural Discrimination In COVID-19 Workplace Protections,” Health Affairs Blog, May  29, 2020, https://www.healthaffairs.org /do/10.1377/hblog20200522.280105/full/. 12. “Many Latino Workers Fear Getting Tested for COVID-19. A San Francisco Program Aims to Change That,” Los Angeles Times, July 21, 2020, https://www. latimes .com /california /story /2020 - 07 -21 /new -program -targets-latinos-who-fear-covid-19-testing. 13. Response Update from Mayor Garcetti, July  17, 2020, https://www .facebook .com/MayorOfLA.

FAST FOOD, PRECARIOUS WORKERS MARCIA CHATELAIN

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onald McDonald believes that Black lives matter. And now that he has proclaimed it, his burger empire has been trying to convince us of it at every turn. After first tweeting in solidarity with protests for Black lives, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, McDonald’s has tried to convince the public that they indeed mean it. McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski offered that the company loves Black lives so much that it has “probably” created more Black millionaires than any other corporation.1 After a summer of protest, McDonald’s announced a partnership with rapper Travis Scott and even named a meal after him. Black dollars also matter to Ronald, and McDonald’s hoped the collaboration, featuring bacon-topped burgers, action figures, and a few pieces of apparel, would help it regain lost ground with its “younger African-American and multicultural consumers.”2 But Black millionaires and denim shorts emblazoned with the Golden Arches may not entirely retire the question of whether the clown from McDonald’s indeed values the Black lives of Earth. And despite all of the claims and donations being made by the brand, there is good reason to have doubts.3

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Across every industry and sector, corporations are sending the business equivalent of “thoughts and prayers” to the masses of people engaged in the most recent fights to dismantle white supremacy and prove that another world is indeed possible. Yet McDonald’s may be the most practiced in capitalizing on the chaos that accompanies racial uprisings. Since its reorganization as a franchising machine—a franchise is a corporate entity that leases the right to operate individual restaurants under predetermined terms—under the direction of Ray Kroc in 1955, McDonald’s has been ingratiating itself with Black consumers through its network of Black franchisees. McDonald’s has used 1968 as a reference point in its stance that it can deploy its business as a force for racial justice. After the assassination of Martin Luther King  Jr., McDonald’s was inspired by Richard Nixon’s Black capitalism funding for Black businesses, while also forced to mitigate the anxieties of white franchise owners in the center of the urban crisis. Black franchisees of McDonald’s promised that their locations would provide much needed jobs and support to Black communities languishing at the end of the Great Society and the beginning of Nixon’s law-and-order regime. So, in Chicago, Detroit, St.  Louis, and the other worlds made out of racial segregation, a Black McDonald’s was born out of confrontations and held within it the possibilities of Black economic power and community investment and maybe even real change. But until revolution came, a hot hamburger and a cold drink enjoyed in a somewhat Black-owned business would suffice. Since the first Black businessman franchised a McDonald’s in 1968, many have pointed to Black franchisees’ relative proximity to the customers they serve and to the corporation’s philanthropic interventions on behalf of Black organizations as evidence that McDonald’s has always been on the right side of Black history. Franchisees are not quite independent small-business

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owners, and they are still vulnerable to the same market forces that can shutter a locally owned operation. But from the perspective of those who argue that more Black businesses can ensure more prosperous Black communities—an idea that has been invigorated due to the despair over the property damage suffered by Black neighborhoods this summer—a Black-owned McDonald’s franchise becomes a sign of Black ownership. Yet on the main streets of Black America, whether it be South Michigan Avenue in Chicago or Georgia Avenue in Washington, DC, an independently owned Black business is unlikely to be able to hire the number of employees that the Black-franchised one down the street can. There are roughly 2 million Black-owned businesses in the United States, but only 107,000 of them have employees. Meanwhile, at the Black-owned McDonald’s, where employees often start out making minimum wage, all of the dollars earned at that drive-through flow outside of the neighborhood in licensing fees, rents, equipment leases, and advertising funds. Both businesses allow locals to “buy Black,” but the extent to which businesses actually can enrich Black lives is a question that is all too often not uttered in the rush to offer business support as a means of supporting Black people. McDonald’s has long understood that and has pointed to its small but mighty core of Black franchisees as the proof that its enterprise does, in fact, care. The corporation deploys Black elites within its ranks and holds up its most prosperous Black franchisees—and invests in the pipeline programs and diversityrecruitment fairs, and partners with pro-Black business forces, from Black media outlets to the Small Business Administration—to counter any charge that racism exists in McDonaldland. This sleight of hand has worked more effectively in the past. Q Q Q

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The hot summer of 2020 led pundits to ask if the nation was reliving the horrors of 1968, and smartly, historians have argued against such facile comparisons.4 The sites of civil unrest were different than the ones in 1968, with affluent shopping districts and neighborhoods bearing some of the consequences of property damage. The virulent white supremacists in the White House, coupled with their indifference toward the COVID-19 crisis, may have also radicalized more people and pushed them to take action because they saw how the racial profiling and killing of Black people were symptoms of a broken, racist nation. Yet there has been continuity—a prized attribute of fast food—in how McDonald’s has related to a moment of chaos and tension: it has sent a message that McDonald’s has something of substance for Black communities, if only Black people were willing to believe it when it says that they do matter. Today, as was the case in 1968, it remains to be seen if Ronald’s pivot toward racial justice will mean anything for how his beloved McDonald’s treats its scores of Black workers, who have been at the forefront of demands to improve wages and working conditions for decades.5 While cashiers and cooks are walking out of restaurants and organizing socially distant car protests, the company’s former Black executives and Black franchisees—many of whom have built lucrative careers in the McDonald’s system—are using the courts and curious media outlets to expose its practices of racial discrimination among its upper echelons.6 This aggrieved group claims that McDonald’s—often heralded as a leader in corporate diversity due to its long history of recruitment programs for white-collar workers of color—has constricted advancement opportunities at its headquarters and in the field in its assignment of Black franchisees to less profitable areas for business. McDonald’s, like the rest of us, had a really long summer. As the global fast-food powerhouse contended with the ongoing

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crises of 2020—the coronavirus and the aftermath of the George Floyd protests—it scrambled to respond to a slew of accusations. McDonald’s was not alone in that endeavor; U.S.-based companies all leaned on marketing and communications teams and consulting firms to respond to challenges to long-standing practices. Social media provided a real-time chronicle of the complaints from current and former McDonald’s employees who seized the moment to add their anecdotes to the collection of counternarratives tweeted and posted regularly, unveiling the hypocrisy of corporate shows of solidarity with Black Lives Matter and other racial-justice struggles. Q Q Q

A few years after the opening of the first Black-owned McDonald’s franchise in Chicago, a local disaster captured the ways in which McDonald’s was appearing in Black life beyond being the delivery vehicle for Big Macs and Happy Meals. One April morning in 1974, the residents of the Altgeld Gardens Homes publichousing development on Chicago’s far south side looked up to the sky to see a cloud of tetrachloride, from a local chemical-storage facility, hovering about them. One of the massive, state-run housing complexes built in the 1940s to accommodate Black World War II defense-industry workers, Altgeld Gardens had fallen into disrepair by the 1970s, like the similarly situated towns within towns designed to maintain segregation in major cities. The surrounding chemical plants and factories made residents vulnerable to a number of illnesses and incidents, like the industrial accident in 1974. An adviser to the state’s Environmental Protection Agency called for an evacuation of Altgeld that afternoon, but the city and state failed to take any serious action until late that evening. Evacuees fashioned masks out of cloth rags and

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were eventually taken to as many as three different shelter sites before they could try to get some sleep that night. There was no certainty that their homes would remain intact in their absence. In the midst of a day that highlighted the worst of state failure, environmental racism, and housing inequality, the Altgeld residents acknowledged the one entity that seemed to be helpful: McDonald’s. After a terrifying day, the residents gathered at a local high school auditorium to hear updates on where they would spend the night, while feasting on a thousand hamburgers and drinks donated by their neighborhood Black McDonald’s franchisee. Later, the national body of Black McDonald’s franchise owners issued a statement about the leak and offered: “We can always be counted upon in a crisis.” Who can be counted upon in our current crisis? In the context of a global pandemic exacerbated by a reckless head of state, and in a moment when people are regularly taking to the streets to protest racial injustice, this is a difficult question to answer. But corporations and other agents of the private sector have consistently pretended that they are answering the many questions that this crisis has prompted. Just think to the years the Black pundit Tavis Smiley partnered with the notoriously discriminatory lender Wells Fargo to offer economic-empowerment seminars to Black and brown audiences, before being pressured to sever ties with the bank.7 Or, more recently, the cavalcade of rappers, from Kanye West to Ice Cube, who have tried to convince Black Americans that President Trump had their best economic interests in mind—citing his commitment to Black entrepreneurship—even as Trump also promised white suburban housewives that he would protect them from nonexistent fairhousing initiatives and disparaged majority-Black cities and congressional districts.

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McDonald’s is no different. Over the past few months, its corporate heads have received reports that some franchisees were failing to offer workers sufficient personal protective equipment.8 They’ve also been the target of criticism for their failure to extend the corporate-owned stores’ policy of offering paid sick leave to workers who need to quarantine to more than 90 percent of franchised locations. And yet McDonald’s continued to ignore the cries of its workers while celebrating other frontline workers with free meals and advertisements overflowing with gratitude. By summer, worker concerns were drowned out as the killing of George Floyd forced McDonald’s to focus on its Black Lives Matter messaging. Its raised fist came by way of a text-only social media video that invoked the names of Trayvon Martin and Breonna Taylor and announced donations to the NAACP and Urban League (two recipients of McDonald’s’ corporate giving for decades). Q Q Q

Fast food promises efficiency and consistency to consumers. So when natural disaster strikes or a pandemic upends everyone’s way of life, the industry goes into overdrive to ensure that it can return to what it has established as normalcy as soon as possible. McDonald’s has made a particular habit of boasting about its ability to recover quickly from disruption. In 1992, after Los Angeles was set ablaze in the aftermath of the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of Rodney King, the CEO of McDonald’s proudly declared that the company was spared property damage because it had amassed so much racial goodwill over the years by employing Black workers and making Black franchise owners wealthy. What McDonald’s left out from

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this narrative—which was not wholly true, since McDonald’s was, in fact, hit but recovered more quickly and suffered less damage than its business neighbors—was that they did more than enjoy the benefit of trickle-down Black empowerment. During the Los Angeles rebellion, McDonald’s remained open to serve National Guardsmen dispatched to the city, and a local franchise owner provided lunches to a local school because truckers could not or would not deliver food to the area. Since the spring, our televisions, computer screens, and telephones have offered a seemingly endless stream of commercials assuring us that our favorite and not-so-favorite brands are standing beside us during the pandemic. McDonald’s released a video entitled “Still the Same” to assure customers that a burger and a side of French fries can fill us with the same joy at home. But even McDonald’s wasn’t spared the sting of COVID-19, and in closing 200 of its restaurants—the majority of them in Walmart stores—it is conceding that some forces are greater than it is. And yet McDonald’s continues to survive in crises that it makes no real substantive or structurally based attempt to alleviate. Nearly half a century after the Altgeld Gardens incident, the nation finds itself in a situation similar to that of the evacuees— among them the matriarch of the environmental justice movement, the community organizer Hazel Johnson, who taught a young Barack Obama about organizing—making masks and searching for leadership and guidance in the face of a health crisis, which illustrates the depths of racial inequality in the United States. And as was the case in 1974, the fast-food industry has found a way to imagine itself a first responder in troubled times. In fact, fast food and crisis have gone hand in hand at pivotal moments in the twentieth century, and when each crisis passes, lessons about labor, capitalism, and race remain unabsorbed.

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Fast food is in the business of providing temporary relief from a number of conditions—a sudden bout of hunger while you’re traveling on a highway, an urge to use a restroom during a protest, a need for a job right now despite the risks and the low wages, a desire for something resembling the playground or senior center unavailable in your neighborhood—and it’s long been in the business of representing itself as having the capacity to meet the challenges of crisis. This time around, perhaps the tide will turn and the people, in community and in a relentless stance of refusal of corporate offers of relief, will know that we are the ones we can count on.

NOTES 1. Amelia Lucas, “McDonald’s CEO Says the Chain Has ‘Probably’ Created More Black Millionaires Than Any Other Corporation,” CNBC, June 16, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com /2020/06/16/mcdonalds-ceo-says-it-has -probably- created -more -black-millionaires -than-any- other- company .html. 2. Kate Taylor, “ ‘Being Silent Is Not an Option’: Inside McDonald’s Response to the George Floyd Protests,” Business Insider, June 5, 2020, https:// www . businessinsider . com / inside - mcdonalds - response - to -george-floyd-protests-2020–6. 3. McDonald’s (@McDonalds), “They were one of us: Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Alton Sterling. Botham Jean. Atatiana Jefferson. Ahmaud Arbery. George Floyd,” Twitter, June 3, 2020, 7:59 a.m., https:// twitter.com/mcdonalds/status/1268165315415900160?lang=en. 4. “Stop Comparing Today’s Protests to 1968,” Washington Post, June  11, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook /2020/06/11/protests-1968 -george-floyd/. 5. Fran Marion, “If I Caught the Coronavirus, Would You Want Me Making Your Next Meal?,” New York Times, March  19, 2020, https://www .nytimes .com /2020/03 /19/opinion /mcdonalds -paid-leave - coronavirus .html. 6. Alina Selyukh, “52 Black Former Franchisees Sue McDonald’s Alleging Discrimination,” NPR .org, September  1, 2020, https://www.npr.org

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/sections/ live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/09/01 /908019394 /52-black-former-franchisees-sue-mcdonalds-alleging-discrimination. 7. Adaline Fritz, “Tavis Smiley Says He’s Cutting Ties to Wells Fargo,” Washington Independent, July 31, 2020, https://washingtonindependent .com/60181/tavis-smiley-says-hes-cutting-ties-to-wells-fargo/. 8. Yamile Osoy, “McDonald’s Workers Like Me Are Fighting for Our Health and Safety. Meanwhile, the Company Is Paying Shareholders Nearly $1 Billion,” Time, June 17, 2020, https://time.com/5853732/mcdon alds-covid/.

MOTHERS, MENTAL HEALTH, AND THE PANDEMIC MICHELLE CERA

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t’s a perpetual nightmare . . . I’m waiting for the zombie apocalypse,” Madison told me, half-laughing and half-crying. Madison is a mother of two children under five living in a small apartment in New York City with her husband. She works a fulltime job in marketing from home while taking on the bulk of parenting responsibilities. Her story is like those of the dozens of parents I spoke to over the past few months in a study of how couples with children are managing domestic work during the pandemic. Mothers across a diverse range of ages, races, and classes are in a state of chaos, struggling with changes to their labor in both the domestic and public spheres. Mothers lost work hours or their jobs. Those that remain employed don’t feel they can do their jobs properly. They are cooking all the meals for their family members who are now home all day. They clean the bathroom while participating in conference calls. They are teachers to their children and maids after dinner time. All while maintaining a smile on their face to keep the family afloat. Hazel remarked, “As we all hear, ‘It takes a village,’ but it’s often moms that are creating and staffing and cleaning up the village.” Mothers have been the “village” throughout the pandemic.

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Despite significant advances for women over the past few decades, division of labor in the home remains gendered, and the pandemic has made this inequality crystal clear. At the same time, the weight of these mounting responsibilities makes mothers’ mental health suffer, yet gendered stereotypes and stigmas relating to domestic roles and emotional well-being allow disparities in both labor (at work and in the domestic sphere) and mental health to go unaddressed. Gender can predict poor mental health.1 The mental health gap across genders makes conditions such as depression more than twice as common in women, and these disparities persist from youth throughout adulthood. 2 The study we conducted as part of a larger sociological investigation of the pandemic explores how the compounding nature of inequality has contributed to the intensification of the mental health gap. Disparities in work magnify disparities in domestic labor, both of which have negative consequences for mental health. Workplace inequality is well documented. Women are more likely to experience poverty, discrimination at work, and job loss. They face multiple barriers to employment in part due to persisting gendered stereotypes. For example, women are seen as ill-suited for leadership positions, and employers tend to value stereotypically masculine qualities such as assertiveness over stereotypically feminine qualities such as sensitivity.3 As of 2020, they receive about 82 cents to a man’s dollar for the same work.4 While research on workplace inequality highlights important lived experiences, it often fails to make the link between psychological health and socioeconomic conditions. This inattention points to a broader pattern of neglect within academia. Topics deemed “emotional” tend to be sidelined. Yet the connections between inequality and mental health are unmistakable. Workplace inequality has not only continued during the pandemic—it too has intensified. Mothers’ work hours fell over five

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times as much as fathers’ work hours in 2020.5 Of the parents we interviewed, mothers were also more likely to report losing their jobs during the pandemic. The majority of interviewees have jobs that allowed them to work remotely. In all likelihood, the loss of hours and employment has been far worse for those who cannot work from home. Sometimes the loss of work hours for mothers in this study was an employer decision, although it was not uncommon for mothers to decide on their own to cut their hours to accommodate increased work in the domestic sphere. Whether they kept or lost work, balancing jobs and parenting during the pandemic forced mothers to make difficult compromises. Many mothers struggled with paying rent, putting food on the table, and keeping up with bills; they struggled to keep their children entertained and engaged in their schoolwork. Mothers that kept their jobs and regular hours were unable to give it their best effort. Anna, a lawyer with a three-year-old child, told me that her son interrupted a Zoom meeting with her boss to report that he had an accident and was unable to make it to the bathroom. Mariah, a school counselor with a ten-year-old and a six-year-old child, discussed setting up two screens side by side in her room; one for her son so she can monitor his Zoom classes and one for her legal work. Her coworkers noticed her eyes darting back and forth frequently, and she eventually had to have her six-year-old son do his schoolwork on his own. Even when mothers maintained employment, their productivity was severely hampered by having to balance work and parenting in the same space. Unsurprisingly, mothers were the most likely to report concerns about the future of their careers. They worried—and later came to realize—that their bosses and coworkers would punish their lack of productivity. Mothers who requested fewer work hours worried about seeming dispensable to their companies. They were simply unable to keep up with tasks and deadlines

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amid the chaos in the home. For many, the biggest concern was that the difficulties experienced during the pandemic would mark them for the rest of their career. In addition to their jobs and childcare, mothers take on a disproportionate share of the “cognitive labor.”6 When Kayla’s three young children threw a tantrum about plans for summer camp, they went straight to their mother: “My husband is here, but they look past him. They want mommy.” In other words, they must anticipate the needs of their family, plan to meet those needs, and do emotional work such as keeping the family in high spirits. This form of labor is one of the more invisible aspects of their domestic work. Our failure to recognize this cognitive burden leads to negative stereotypes. Mothers are often labeled “worriers” when they are simply responding to the demands of cognitive labor. Increases in childcare, cognitive labor, and concerns about work in combination have led to declines in mental health for mothers. Yet this effect on mental health goes unnoticed. The fathers I spoke to struggled with work as well, yet only one father reported losing his job. Their work hours were also unaffected. Because mothers took on most of the childcare, cooking, and cleaning, fathers did not have to worry as much about work productivity. Fathers who started to contribute more to the domestic sphere were certainly the minority. One father let me know that he went into his home office at eight a.m., closed the door, and stayed there until five p.m. It was almost like he continued to be away at work all day despite being in his home. Both mothers and fathers often justified this domestic labor gap by arguing it was “just how things fell into place.” Q Q Q

It became clear early on in the interview process that mothers were struggling with mental health issues far more than fathers.

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Several mothers found it difficult to even speak about parenting during the pandemic without crying. Overwhelmed by increased physical and mental labor, mothers are suffering from unwelcome changes to their mental health with little to no useful coping mechanisms. The most commonly reported conditions were depression and anxiety. Some mothers are experiencing depression and anxiety for the first time while others have had their preexisting symptoms magnified. Molly, a mother of three, let me know that she went on anxiety medication for the first time. Danielle, a mother of a newborn, began taking antidepressants and commented, “I am medicated, just like everybody else is right now.” Interestingly, mothers recognize their own deteriorating mental health but are also intimately aware of the struggles of others in their position. This broader attention to the interconnectedness of emotional well-being and external work and life pressures was an important finding given that mental health issues get sidelined both within academia and in popular culture. Some mothers did not explicitly use the words “depression” or “anxiety,” yet they discussed notable changes to mental health. They reported feeling more exhausted, lethargic, and burnt out than ever. Several mothers told me they found it difficult to get out of bed in the morning (if they were able to sleep in the first place). They felt disoriented at work. They struggled to do elementary-level math with their children in the evening after what seemed like a never-ending day. Mothers also reported changes to physical health. Although physical condition is different than mental health, the two are often related. Patricia, a mother of five, discussed how picking up her children, running back and forth across the house, and lack of access to the gym have all made her feel physically unwell throughout the day. On the other hand, Maria said that her stationary lifestyle has made her chronic back pain far worse. Like

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mental health, complaints made by women regarding physical health are viewed with skepticism by friends, family, and even doctors.7 Although they are often ignored, physical and mental health issues undoubtedly interact to erode overall well-being. During normal times, mothers have outlets to deal with mental and physical stress. However, without things like “social gatherings, getting my hair done, and going to the gym,” mothers like Kayla feel that “there is never a break.” Traditional coping mechanisms that kept mothers stable are now inaccessible. They miss their friends and family, they feel isolated, and they do not know where to turn. Q Q Q

How do we make sense of disparities in mental health, domestic work, and the labor force? Put together, the stories these parents tell force us to confront the intersection of material conditions and psychological well-being. The pressures from two sources— work and parenting—have significantly increased throughout the pandemic, showing how disparities emanating from different sources influence and magnify one another. Therefore addressing inequalities in one arena means tackling all of its forms. One way to address these interconnected disparities is to trace those connections. The vicious circle where mothers’ concerns about the future of their careers and well-being of their children lead to depression, anxiety, and feelings of inadequacy and back around again has weighed on mothers since they were allowed to enter the workforce in the twentieth century, yet the seriousness of these mental health concerns continues to get downplayed or neglected altogether. Mental health is seen as a feminized issue; its gravity is trivialized. While the glaring link between mothers’ increased labor and psychological burdens got

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left out of conversations, even amid a global crisis, the interviews we conducted for this study allowed mothers to make their personal troubles heard, and the commonalities in their stories show how linked their collective struggles are. Changes to mental health are a private concern of public importance. Q Q Q

Despite their circumstances being “just how things fell into place,” the mothers I spoke with had concrete solutions to their mental health concerns. They feel left behind by their employers and the government. They have very little workplace protection or assistance with parenting. Those with newborns face inadequate maternity leave policies. They feel their struggles are invisible on a structural level. Therefore their solutions typically involved regulation and policy changes. These changes are not unimaginable. Several mothers pointed right across the border to Canada and to countries in Europe who handle maternity policies far better than the United States. For example, Finland gives all parents seven months of paid leave regardless of gender.8 With those countries in mind, mothers in this study advocated for at least three months of fully paid maternity leave, protections for pregnant mothers in the workplace, and better health-care plans. They also discussed additional stimulus payments for people with children and government-funded daycare programs. These and other government-funded policy changes could be enormously beneficial to mothers trying to keep themselves and their families stable. Although having both parents in the home should have ideally produced a more equal division of labor, the opposite has been the case, reifying tired gendered stereotypes. Mom cooks, cleans, worries, and hops on a Zoom work call while Dad toils

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unbothered. This study led by Eric Klinenberg underscores the need for changes to work-family arrangements and exposes this gender gap in the domestic sphere. Since the confluence of multiple inequalities allow for these enduring gaps, policy change must tackle gender inequality in its multiple forms. As Natalie mentioned, physical health, mental health, and “even survival” are at stake.

NOTES 1. Jill Astbury, “Gender Disparities in Mental Health,” Mental Health Ministerial Round Tables, 54th World Health Assemble, WHO, Geneva, Switzerland (2001): 73–92. 2. R. Kessler et al., “Lifetime Prevalence and Age of Onset Distributions of DSM-IV Disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication,” Archives of General Psychiatry 62, no. 6 (2005): 593–602. 3. Jeanine L. Prime, Nancy M. Carter, and Theresa M. Welbourne, “Women ‘Take Care,’ Men ‘Take Charge’: Managers’ Stereotypic Perceptions of Women and Men Leaders,” Psychologist-Manager Journal 12 (2009): 25–49. 4. National Partnership for Women and Families, “America’s Women and the Wage Gap” (2020), https://www.nationalpartnership.org /our-work /resources /economic -justice /fair-pay/americas -women -and -the -wage -gap.pdf. 5. Caitlyn Collins, Liana Christin Landivar, Leah Ruppanner, and William  J. Scarborough, “COVID‐19 and the Gender Gap in Work Hours,” Gender, Work, and Organization 28 (2021): 101–12. 6. Allison Daminger, “The Cognitive Dimension of Household Labor,” American Sociological Review 84, no. 4 (2019): 609–33. 7. Anne Werner and Kirsti Malterud. “It Is Hard Work Behaving as a Credible Patient: Encounters Between Women with Chronic Pain and Their Doctors,” Social Science and Medicine 57, no. 8 (2003): 1,409–19. 8. Finland Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, “Family Leave Reform Aims to Improve the Wellbeing of Families and to Increase Gender Equality,” Valtioneuvosto, February 5, 2020.

WORKING IN CHINA IN THE COVID-19 ERA GILLES GUIHEUX, RENYOU HOU, MANON LAURENT, JUN LI, ANNE- VALÉRIE RUINET, AND YE GUO

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hina shut down its factories, offices, shops, and transport systems in late January 2020 in order to stop the spread of COVID-19; as a result, its population was strictly confined to their homes for weeks on end.1 However (as has been the case in other countries that have implemented a lockdown), not everything came to a standstill. In Wuhan, where the pandemic began, 12 percent of the working population continued to work throughout the lockdown. Nationwide, 10 percent of employees were still working at the end of January during the Chinese New Year; 36 percent returned to work in February, and 28 percent in March.2 But at what cost was this proportion of the country’s economic activity maintained, and under what conditions? Who had to keep working? And how were they persuaded or compelled to do so? These are the questions that this essay—focusing on those who remained at work during the weeks of confinement—seeks to answer.3 Examining the conditions under which some people continued to work offers a better understanding of how the Chinese economy will resume and could herald what lies ahead for many other countries. This is all the more crucial in China given that

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employment is a major issue for the regime, which is legitimized by social stability.

Bringing Invisible Professionals to the Fore In China, as has been the case elsewhere, the workers mobilized during the pandemic have been those who tend to be almost invisible under normal circumstances. This is particularly true of women in low-level jobs, who were celebrated on March 8, when the People’s Daily published a series of photos on its Weibo account, accompanied by the following text: “She is a police officer, keeping the country safe. She is a cleaner who is still going to work. She is a nurse sent to Wuhan on New Year’s Eve. She is the architect responsible for building a hospital. . . . They are on the front line in the fight against the pandemic; they carry huge responsibilities on their shoulders. Today, as we celebrate International Women’s Day, let’s send them a message of tribute!”4 As of March 29, this message had been seen over 30 million times and attracted over 20,000 comments from internet users. The corresponding post was one of the focal points of efforts to boost the visibility and recognition of workers during the COVID-19 era. Healthcare workers—also known as “the angels in white” (ⲭ 㺓ཙ֯), a term that was widely used during the SARS crisis of 2003—find themselves on the front line in the fight against the pandemic. Wuhan was well equipped with health-care professionals; however, reinforcements were sent in from all over the country. Nursing staff were asked to work on a voluntary basis; so numerous were the volunteers that some party members were disappointed not to have been chosen.5 Two-thirds of the staff sent were women, and although their faces were concealed by goggles and masks and their bodies by

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protective clothing, the press celebrated their “beauty” (㖾) in an attempt to glorify the sacrifice of their social roles as wives and mothers. Even so, the recognition of female health workers involves them sacrificing their femininity, as a photo of a medical team from Gansu province suggests, showing fourteen women with shaved heads and only one man, still with his hair.6 Despite noting their physical beauty, the press did not report on their skills or on the conditions under which they collaborated with the Wuhan teams. However, as a token of appreciation, when the female health workers started leaving the province (as of March 17), various celebrations were organized in the public sphere—including parades, local police escorts, and the presentation of souvenirs—a great tradition in countries with authoritarian governments. This rhetoric of sacrifice used to celebrate the female health workers is reminiscent of soldier Lei Feng (䴧䬻), the selfless hero—fabricated in 1962—who was believed to have spent the entirety of his short life helping others. There is also a clear Maoist reference, with the photos of women published on March  8 accompanied by a hashtag that translates as “they are holding up half the sky in this battle against the pandemic.” This hashtag references the famous Maoist slogan “women can hold up half the sky” (ྷྣ㜭亦ॺ䗩ཙ). What differs is that today’s heroic women no longer physically resemble the earlier “iron women” (䫱ခ၈), who were the model workers of the 1950s. Social norms in the Mao era meant desexualization, whereas today, it is the sacrificing of femininity that is celebrated.

Increased Social Control One Maoist Chinese institution that played a leading role in fighting the pandemic was the residents’ committee (ትငՊ),

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responsible for ensuring that members of the population were properly confined to their homes.7 Residents’ committees were first introduced in 1949, but their role has been strengthened since the reforms of the 1980s. Today, their tasks include those previously assigned to working units (which have been discontinued) dealing with matters such as neighborhood security, the distribution of welfare benefits, and family planning. That these tasks were shifted into the realm of the residents’ committees means that the population was no longer monitored in the workplace, but rather in the home. The committees’ employees were originally often retirees. But as a result of the rise in the number of tasks for which they are responsible, the institution has taken on a more professional dimension over time, especially by recruiting young social workers. And so in the context of the COVID-19 health crisis (just as was the case during the SARS outbreak of 2003), residents’ committees have been on the front line in implementing the lockdown, prevention, and control measures. They take the temperatures of those entering and exiting buildings, quarantine suspected cases, inform residents of new measures, disinfect public spaces and corridors, discourage residents from gathering, and shop for those families unable to leave their homes. For example: Liu Xuqing, head of a residents’ committee in Dalian, keeps a close watch on just over 10,000 people with the help of his staff.8 Thanks to their knowledge of the field, these committees gather the information needed to adjust lockdown measures in real time and as close as possible to the source: the population itself.9 And while these committees have full-time salaried staff, they are also reliant on volunteers (ᘇᝯ㘵), given the magnitude of the

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work at hand.10 Volunteers are also being used to channel and register cars at motorway tollbooths; deliver donated protective gear, meals, and health-care workers to hospitals (especially following the closure of public transport in Wuhan); assist airport customs authorities in translating epidemiological information for foreign passengers; deliver distance learning courses to children of health-care workers; register volunteers for vaccine clinical trials; and help farmers promote unsold produce by filming videos that are then posted online. Outside the committees, volunteers (in some cases) have even replaced paid workers.11 This mobilization of volunteers within companies, described as “temporary workers on production lines” (⭏ӗ㓯кⲴѤᰦᐕ), recalls other episodes during which this happened, such as the Great Leap Forward of 1958, when the emphasis was on “doubling production efforts” to “catch up with Great Britain.”

Everyday Heroes Dressed in orange overalls and equipped with masks and gloves, cleaners are another category of workers who are being asked to go the extra mile. Based on a systematic grid that is structured by neighborhood, each administrative level (province, municipality, city, district, or village) organizes cleanup teams made up of the usual municipal teams, often reinforced by teams from other districts. Large numbers of individuals have been called into action to clean. The Chongqing municipality, for example, deployed some 55,000 people as cleaners;12 Jiangxi province reported an additional

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80,000 people; and the municipality of Wuhan claimed to have rallied some 23,000 individuals, all to take part in a “mass cleanup on day 1.”13 Sanitation work has involved sweeping, as well as washing down and disinfecting main and secondary roads, alleyways, dead ends, street furniture, buses, underground platforms, public toilets, and the like. Meanwhile, the number of daily refuse collections has been increased, and special attention is paid to collection points for used masks, as well as to the bins at hotels used for quarantine. Cleanup operations have been described with military rhetoric recalling other battles that the party has fought. The agents involved in the war against the pandemic have operated in squads, for example; the city is crisscrossed by a number of “lines of defense”14 made up of “workers on the front line against the enemy.”15 The entrances and exits of cities are strategic points, which these cleaners cum “soldiers” (ᡈ༛) have defended in an old-fashioned war, in which “they used brooms as spears and shovels as shields to become anti-epidemic warriors.”16 In the framework of this relentless battle, inaccessible places have become a major issue in strategic cleanup plans, where “the enemy must be tirelessly hunted down, wherever it lurks,” to ensure that “the virus has no way out”;17 with this in mind, “cleaning is a painstaking task that requires the precision of a goldsmith.” In this race against the virus, emergencies can occur at any time, forcing cleaners to sleep at their workplaces.18 And here too, reports and articles have paid tribute to cleaners by drawing on the Maoist rhetoric of self-sacrifice and devotion, combined with the figure of soldier Lei Feng. Those concerned sacrifice their personal lives for the common good, modest citizens becoming civilian heroes (ᒣ≁㤡䳴) or everyday heroes

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(ᒣࠑ㤡䳴), who continue their mission despite the pandemic, giving the city and its inhabitants peace of mind. These people find themselves on the front line in the fight against the virus, working while the rest of the city sleeps, watching over its inhabitants and keeping them safe from danger. Cleaners are hard workers who get up very early (as early as fourthirty a.m.) and do not take any days off.19 Some work ten hours a day. They have a real sense of responsibility. They devote themselves body and soul to the community, dealing with the danger themselves to give others peace of mind. When there is a shortage of masks, they go without, so that nursing staff can use what resources are available.20 And while they may fear for their own health, they continue to perform their duties, even going so far as to hide from their families the nature of their work and the danger of contamination they face.21 Their position on the social ladder in no way diminishes their devotion or sense of responsibility; quite the contrary, in fact, because even though this is not the case for all of them, “being a member of the Party begins with the smallest of gestures.”

Platform Workers “Serving the People” The health crisis has accelerated the expansion of urban services involving platform workers, a sector that was already growing rapidly. Delivery has proven to be a vital activity during the lockdown. But unlike health-care workers, residents’ committee employees, and cleaners, who are employed directly or indirectly by the state, platform workers are governed entirely by commercial logic.22

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As a result of the crisis, tens of thousands of unemployed individuals have become delivery drivers, from small business owners who had to close their shops to employees who were laid off and those who previously worked on a casual basis. These rural workers in unstable jobs are the real workhorses in China’s urban growth. The press refers to such workers in terms of both their sense of sacrifice—using the sort of political logic we have already encountered— and the efficiency of the service they offer— representing the economic logic of the capitalist economy.23 On March 6, during a visit to a logistics center in Beijing, Li Keqiang paid tribute to the role that these workers have played, addressing the delivery drivers present as follows: “This epidemic has meant that many industries have been shut down, but you don’t get any rest. You are straight out on the streets every day, meeting the needs of thousands of households and businesses. Your deliveries are not only necessary for the people, but they are also truly heart-warming. You are out there facing the epidemic, and you are our everyday heroes.”24 The mass distribution sector has also been recruiting en masse, with Hema, Suning, Carrefour, and Walmart all offering temporary contracts to help deal with the increase in their remote business. Distribution giants have also, at times, negotiated the loaning of staff, known in Chinese as “talent sharing” (Ӫ᡽‫ޡ‬ӛ) or “staff sharing” (‫ޡ‬ӛઈᐕ),25 a practice that was relatively uncommon until now, with other companies in the catering and hospitality sectors that have been forced to halt work. The health crisis has also boosted business for a different kind of service company, which offers ancestral worship honoring the deceased in the event of a death, given that the family will be unable to travel (ԓ⾝ᴽ࣑). These services were developed in the late 2000s and aimed at migrants living abroad, but demand failed to meet expectations.26 During the recent Ancestors’

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Day on April 4, the Ministry of Civil Affairs and its provincial branches strongly encouraged the use of such services, and demand consequently grew significantly.27 Over 15,000 collective celebrations honoring various deceased individuals and some 419,000 individual celebrations were held in different provinces.28

Risks and Challenges of Working During an Epidemic The issue of the intensification of work affects everyone. While replacement ancestral worship staff have been depicted in the many photos published, little is said of the overtime they work or the psychological suffering they endure. In Canton, for example, one such worker will bow before graves over five hundred times in a single day;29 in Ha’erbin, two employees working as a pair will wipe headstones and perform the rites at ten to twenty gravesides a day;30 elsewhere, one employee in charge of communicating with the relatives of the deceased works until eleven p.m. and has even received calls at two a.m. on occasion.31 Delivery and cleaning staff, of course, also face long working days. During the crisis, active workers have also been exposed to psychological risks, and lockdown measures implemented by residents’ committees have not always been well received. A video has been released illustrating the sort of resistance encountered, with residents in various cities expressing their distrust, frustration, and even anger.32 In Taiyuan, for example, one man drove his car into the temporary outdoor office of the residents’ committee,33 and a man in Dalian has been depositing dog excrement there at night.34 Many weeks after lockdown measures were introduced, those working for residents’ committees are exhausted

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and in psychological danger.35 Liu Xuqing has even been having nightmares of residents shouting at her. The significance of the matter led to the central government publishing a “new work plan for psychological counseling” in mid-March.36 Matters relating to wages and pay conditions have been another major issue during the crisis, with the authorities taking the lead by outlining a series of recommendations. Shaanxi province, for example, requests that “wages be paid on time and overtime paid in accordance with employment law” and that “collective housing options such as dormitories be provided for agents drafted in from other areas.”37 The actual situation out in the field is still unclear. According to one professional site, delivery drivers have found themselves in a difficult position: those who usually work in now-deserted business districts have seen their income decrease by 50  percent or more, and those covering more residential areas, where families have been confined under lockdown measures, have seen an increase in their workload.38 Difficulties in getting to customers, longer waiting times, and increased competition thanks to the arrival of new employees, however, have had the opposite effect. Social stability today depends on companies complying with orders issued by the authorities and maintaining a decent income for employees.

Conclusion The situation that has developed among Chinese workers in the COVID-19 era and the way they have been portrayed in the press reveals certain facts and strategies that are not unique to the People’s Republic. What is specific to China, however, is the regime’s

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use of the media and the simultaneous coexistence of both political and commercial logics. This is especially significant because the political logics recall certain other moments in China’s history since 1949 when the Communist Party has used mass mobilization to boost economic development, fight its political enemies, improve hygiene, and fight other epidemics. With this in mind, Xi Jinping’s China still has institutions capable of supervising the population, including the Communist Party, the Federation of Trade Unions, the Communist Youth League, the Women’s Federation, and the residents’ committees. These social control tools have helped by finding volunteers and helping companies to recruit replacement workers and have praised one another’s efforts. The rhetoric of how the reality of employment is represented is also classic, portraying workers as being selfless and sacrificing their personal lives for the common good. At the same time, private employers have relied even more heavily than before on precarious platform workers who are paid by the job, have no protection in the event of an accident, and are generally not entitled to any social benefits. Chinese capitalism has left some workers, mainly migrants from rural areas, without protection, and this irregularity has certainly intensified. What does the crisis have in store for the future of employment in China? The digitalization of the economy has certainly accelerated, to the benefit of the Chinese web giants, and the crisis has also revealed a number of invisible factors, as a result of which some professions should see their status improve. Some are also calling for more public funding for health care. In midMarch 2020, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, together with the National Bureau of Statistics and other administrations, published a revised version of the professional code. Delivery drivers are among the sixteen new professions now included, which will have certain consequences in terms of

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the development of skills standards and vocational training.39 The development of staff-loaning schemes between companies has also been highlighted as one possible way to stabilize the labor market, though it is unclear whether such loans would depend on the agreement of the employees concerned. The country is facing immense challenges in terms of employment. And the crisis has only served to highlight that the country’s political logics, which seek to control society, coexist with market logics, which seek to serve the powerful interests specific to Chinese capitalism.

NOTES Translated from the French by Tiam Goudarzi. 1. This text was produced as part of a research seminar on labor issues in China facilitated by Gilles Guiheux and held at Université de Paris. 2. https://ln.qq.com/a/20200316/040317.htm. 3. The estimated 200 million employees working from home were excluded from the survey. See Raphael Bick, Michael Chang, Kevin Wei Wang, and Tianwen Yu, “A Blueprint for Remote Working: Lessons from China,” McKinsey Digital, March 23, 2020, https://www.mckinsey.com / business -functions /mckinsey - digital /our -insights /a - blueprint -for -remote-working-lessons-from-china. 4. https://k .sina.cn/article_2403752844_p8f465b8c02700qgv2.html. 5. In Fujian province, meanwhile, a nurse described the difficulties she encountered, crying, “I am a member of the party, let me play my part!” https:// k . sina .com .cn /article_2595230622_9ab0139e02000rqgw. html. Many nursing staff who were not yet members applied for membership before leaving for Hubei, using the phrase “join the party in the firing line” (⚛㓯‫)ފޕ‬. Guangxi province consequently sent 962 nursing staff to Hubei, including 884 party members, 474 of whom were new members, meaning that the Communist Party has also taken advantage of the health crisis to boost its membership. http://news.gxnews.com.cn/static pages/20200422/newgx5ea01692-19470954.shtml. http://www.xinhuanet .com/politics/2020–04/27/c_1125913583.htm. 6. http://gansu.gansudaily.com.cn/system/2020/02/15/017354838.shtml. 7. http:// bj.people.com.cn/n2/2020/0224/c14540–33823410.html.

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8. Ye Ruolin, “Abused and Stressed, China’s Community Workers Seek Help,” Sixth Tone, March  10, 2020, https://www.sixthtone.com/news /1005291/abused-and-stressed,-chinas-community-workers-seek-help. 9. https://cn.chinadaily.com.cn/a /202002/13/ WS5e45160aa3107bb6b579f5bf .html. 10. As was the case during the Beijing Olympics (2008), the World Expo in Shanghai (2010), and the G20 Summit in Hangzhou (2016), the authorities have relied heavily on volunteers and volunteer staff to help fight the pandemic. A platform (known as “Beijing volunteers,” ᘇᝯेӜ, https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Fzxrl6Ti5bovg0rCYUOlHA) has been used to gather data relating to activity in the capital. As of April 1, 5,428 projects had been set up involving over 92,200 volunteers who had put in an average of 62 hours per person since January 27. Among the volunteers registered on the platform, 24 percent are members of the Communist Party (four times more than among the population as a whole), and 16 percent are members of the Communist Youth League. Over half are over 45 years of age, and 57 percent are women. Although young people are less strongly represented than their elders, it is the under-30s who are the most celebrated by the press, as if to counter the stereotype of a generation of overly spoiled only children. The majority of volunteer activities are therefore undertaken on a neighborhood level, in collaboration with residents’ committee employees. 11. In the village of Fuxi in the coastal province of Zhejiang, the efforts of volunteers called in by the Hangzhou Communist Youth League allowed market gardeners to sell over 6,000 kg of fruit in the space of just three hours on March 5, the day on which the nation commemorates Lei Feng (https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/nsifo2Nevis16TrmuvbyJw). Volunteers in urban areas were called upon to work in factories, with some in Shanghai producing masks and gowns for nursing staff. In the Songjiang district, meanwhile, a night team of twenty volunteers made up of foreign business executives, company directors, and students managed to produce 300,000 masks in just twelve hours (http://www.xinhuanet.com /local/2020–02/03/c_1125527696.htm), and young people in Pudong joined a company that manufactures protective clothing for nursing staff (http://sh.people.com.cn/n2/2020/0323/c134768–33898064.html). 12. https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_7025774. 13. http://www.qstheory.cn/2020–04/07/c_1125823422.htm. 14. http://zjt.jiangxi.gov.cn/csgl/csglc/202002/t20200207_777693.htm. 15. http://www.fsonline.com.cn/p/274524.html. 16. http://zjt.jiangxi.gov.cn/csgl/csglc/202002/t20200207_777693.htm.

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17. http://www.fsonline.com.cn/p/274524.html. 18. https:// language.chinadaily.com.cn/a /202003/11/ WS5e686ad6a310128217 27e2a5.html. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. http://www.fsonline.com.cn/p/274524.html. 22. Seventy-five million people, the overwhelming majority of them men, are believed to work for transport and delivery platforms, and a recent report (April  2020, http://www.zjjdjx.net/p/20200413486.html) claimed that Eleme’s 3 million delivery drivers, affectionately known as “little courier brothers” (ᘛ䙂ሿକ), were generally young (47  percent under the age of 30) and from rural backgrounds (80 percent). Over half of them (56 percent) were working at least one other job or studying at the same time— 26  percent of them micro-entrepreneurs, 21  percent skilled workers, 11  percent taxi drivers, and 20  percent students. Julie Yujie Chen, “The Mirage and Politics of Participation in China’s Platform Economy,” Javnost: The Public, Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture 27, no. 2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2020.1727271. 23. In the southeast of the country, in the capital of Yunnan, meanwhile, “the weather in Kunming is getting warmer, it’s mild and sunny and it’s not hard to get out on the road.” One delivery worker explained that he was “very proud to allow customers to enjoy hot meals and ensure that they lead a normal life. . . . A lot of people think that the takeaway industry is very taxing and that you can’t stick to this job for too long, but I think it’s a very good job. I am very proud to be able to serve others” (Ѫ࡛Ӫᴽ࣑) (http:// society.yunnan.cn/system/2020/03/18/030619866.shtml). This expression, which represents the party’s core mission, is among the most famous in communist China, calligraphed by Mao Zedong and reproduced time and again in the public sphere. 24. https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_6370345. 25. http://yuqing.people.com.cn/n1/2020/0323/c209043–31644635.html. 26. http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2009–04–03/074715412834s.shtml. 27. Minstry of Civil Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, http://www .mca.gov.cn/article/xw/mtbd/202004/20200400026462.shtml. 28. Minstry of Civil Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, http://www .mca.gov.cn/article/xw/mzyw/202004/20200400026674.shtml. 29. http://mzj.gz.gov.cn/dt/mtgz/content/post_5794836.html. 30. https:// baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1663044443798977977fr=spideror=pc. 31. http://mzj.gz.gov.cn/dt/mtgz/content/post_5794897.html.

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32. “Wuhan Residents Express Hopelessness Amid Coronavirus Outbreak,” Epoch Times, March 9, 2020, YouTube video, 2:02, https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=UE1ee2jiydQ. 33. https://m.weibo.cn/status/4474691631185391. 34. Weibo, https://m.weibo.cn/status/4478412649782152. 35. Ruolin, “Abused and Stressed.” 36. http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/2020–03/19/content_5493050.htm. 37. http://js.shaanxi.gov.cn/zcfagui/2020/2/109602.shtml?t=2031. 38. Yunshuren.com, https://www.yunshuren.com/article-22342.html. 39. https://www.jfdaily.com/news/detail?id=223743.

INDIA IN COVID-19 A Tragedy Foretold MARINE AL DAHDAH, MATHIEU FERRY, ISABELLE GUÉRIN, AND GOVINDAN VENKATASUBRAMANIAN

I

n December  2019, while Wuhan province was witnessing the beginning of the actual COVID-19 pandemic, India was facing massive and violent uprisings. Hundreds of thousands of Indians protested all over the country against the discriminatory anti-Muslim citizenship law that had just been passed by its parliament—the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA)—and as a backlash, violent attacks occurred on universities and in Muslim working-class neighborhoods by armed vigilantes.1 Months later, the authorities were negating the presence of community transmission of the virus—despite the first cases appearing way back in January—to finally declare a twenty-one-day lockdown at midnight on March 24, with only a four-hour notice.2 This announcement in India, as in France, has triggered migration from the cities to the countryside, but of a completely different nature: in India, the internal migrant workers, day laborers, and the poor—deprived of resources—have decided to return to their native villages.3 This tragic and deadly exodus of migrants fleeing cities is the most visible stigma of the profound health, economic, and social crisis that this threefold essay analyzes.

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Accessing Health Care Under the Lockdown This pandemic has brutally exposed the vulnerabilities of some of the world’s best health systems.4 For the Indian health system, one of the most burdened and least funded in the world, this could be a critical moment, as government facilities are already overstretched in a highly fractured, underfunded, and geographically uneven health system.5 This invites us to examine how the current crisis risks enhancing long-lasting health inequalities and how dysfunctional health infrastructures may collapse under the strain of the coming dramatic spike in COVID-19 cases in India. Until the national lockdown, the government’s testing strategy6 was relying on the assumption that no community transmission was happening in India and that there were only foreign, imported cases.7 Basing the testing strategy on this assumption and testing only people coming from infected areas abroad may have had unintended consequences on the spreading of the epidemic. Indeed, with the lockdown, a large amount of workers migrated internally from existing hotspots, like Mumbai and Delhi, toward their home states, like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Failure to acknowledge the presence of COVID-19 infections in the community and failure to test all symptomatics in Mumbai or Delhi may have exposed these states to the diffusion of the virus and led to a potential explosion of cases in places where health infrastructures are already poorer. At the beginning of its national lockdown, India simply did not have enough testing kits, and even if the government has given licenses to private companies to sell them in India, the constraint on testing lay in the very low number of laboratories.8 On

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March 23, India had 118 accredited labs for a population of 1.3 billion with huge geographical inequalities; Arunachal Pradesh (1.5 million) and Nagaland (3.3 million) had no testing centers; Bihar had only one accredited lab for a population of 110 million. Even if states were supplied with an infinite number of testing kits, government labs would not be able to utilize them, as their testing capacity was around ninety samples per day. In three months, India has massively increased its testing capacity to reach 901 accredited labs, but that is still insufficient for its population, and important geographic disparities remain.9 Considering the high price of private testing10 and all the logistical problems associated with the lockdown, most Indians still depend on the public system to get tested. In an already stretched and underfunded public healthcare system, money spent on the coronavirus tests leaves less for other public-health problems, as India spends only 3.7 percent of its total budget on health. India’s health budget is far too limited to respond to the massive need for intensive care that has been necessary in countries already impacted by COVID-19. If India has a lower proportion of elderly people than other countries, its government health-care facilities are limited and disproportionately burdened with patients having comorbidities— such as undernutrition, tuberculosis, diabetes, and chronic respiratory and cardiovascular diseases11—that could aggravate the COVID-19 death toll for India. Among all infected people, the death rate is hovering around 1 to 3 percent, but among the critically ill, it climbs as high as 62 percent.12 There are great disparities in accessing intensive-care beds, as hospital beds per one thousand people for the twelve poorest states in India (which comprise 70  percent of India’s population) are lower than the national average, which stands at 0.7 beds per one thousand (compared to 11.5 in South Korea, 6.5 in France, and 3.5 in Italy).

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Even by most conservative estimates, experts were predicting that 75  percent of Indian provinces would run out of beds for coronavirus patients by June. In Mumbai and Delhi, that was already the case the first week of May. Given the severe challenges faced by the public-health system and the dominance of unaffordable private health care in many Indian states,13 the response to the COVID-19 crisis must prioritize the strengthening of an affordable and accessible health-care system for all, whether rich or poor, Hindu or Muslim, from Bihar or Kerala. But this pandemic also revealed the extreme and appalling vulnerability of most Indians to a catastrophe that goes far beyond health care. In addition, and far beyond the risk of infection, the measure taken to contain contagions—the lockdown—will have disastrous consequences for a large part of the population.

Making a Living Under the Lockdown What does “lockdown” mean in a context where people, not just the poorest, depend on mobility and sociability to make a living? Using culturalist clichés, many media pieces have highlighted the “cultural” difficulty of accepting the principle of social distancing. Long before being a “cultural” issue—if that argument is even valid—in economies where informal employment is the rule rather than the exception and where social stability remains the privilege of a minority, social connection and movement are simply necessary for survival and protection. India is characterized by the extent of informal employment, estimated at 80 to 90 percent of the labor force.14 These jobs are informal in the sense that they exclude any form of protection,

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contract, and guarantee of continuity. India is also characterized by the crucial roles of internal migration and circulation.15 Largely underestimated by official statistics, these displacements are thought to affect up to 150 million workers.16 While these workers have been mobile for a long time, their movements have undoubtedly increased to meet the needs of a capitalist economy always in search of cheap and disciplined labor. Internal migration includes long-distance, interstate migration, with massive flows from the poorest states in northeastern India to the most employment-intensive states located in the west and south. Internal migration also includes short-term commuting from villages to nearby towns. With the massive decline in agriculture in recent decades,17 and even as India resists the rural exodus, many villagers survive by moving daily to nearby urban centers. Some of these migrants settle in cities, swelling the miserable mass of slums, but most remain attached to their home villages. The Indian labor force, men in particular, is thus caught in a continuous flow, moving with the seasons and years according to opportunities, networks, and, above all, the needs of the capitalist system while regularly returning home. The latter remains the locus of family and village roots and identity.18 Movement is not just about finding jobs. These generate incomes that are both low and unpredictable. At the same time, households face incompressible and ever-increasing expenses: eating;19 maintaining housing, which is often precarious and therefore requires constant renovation and improvement; sending children to school;20 paying for electricity and sometimes water and gas; observing social and religious rituals;21 and stocking durable consumer goods (such as mobile phones or twowheeled motor vehicles) that are now required, including for work. To these regular and incompressible expenses are added

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unforeseen ones: health shocks, the sudden loss of a job, legal fees, theft, seizure of land following a conflict or an unpaid debt, and so forth. To cope with this mismatch between income flows and expenditures, individuals, both men and women, mobilize complex portfolios of financial practices in which debt is central. Savings are not completely absent, but among the poorest and for a large part of the rural population, they rarely take the form of monetary savings. Jewels, grains, livestock, as well as “social investments” (reciprocal gifts or loans) are much more common. Any surplus liquidity is often reinjected into the social network. Debt is thus a central component of daily survival.22 Given the crucial importance of movement and sociability, we can therefore imagine that the lockdown will have absolutely devastating consequences, as it already has. Testimonies collected by phone over the first three months of the lockdown in rural South India (Tamil Nadu) point to a risk of widespread impoverishment.23 Nonfarm income, typically the main source of household survival, has come to a halt, and most migrants have returned to their homes. Not only do they have no job prospects, but some are already heavily in debt since they were recruited on the basis of wage advances.24 Those who fare best are those who depend on farm income, either as wage earners or farmers. And those who depend on subsistence crops (which have been in decline for several decades) do much better since the products are sold locally. Most sales of cash crops, which depend on middlemen, transport, and agribusiness, have been halted. With regard to debt, another condition for daily survival, most of the usual sources have dried up. The “formal” sources (which account for only a small share of total debt) are frozen, following a moratorium by the Reserve Bank of India. Informal sources, most often based on interpersonal knowledge and trust,

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are also frozen. While usually the slightest surplus is lent or given away, what is observed at present is a complete withdrawal. From landowners to housewives, all testimonies converge: given the prevailing uncertainty, everyone tends to keep their stocks, whether of cash or grain. The loss of confidence in the future causes the loss of trust in others. In such a context, how do people manage? For now, they are “adjusting,” as we are told. They are drawing on the few savings available. While monetary savings are limited, many families, often through women’s efforts, have a few hundred or even a few thousand rupees secretly hidden, intended to cope in case of a hard blow. To get some cash, people pawn their jewelry, their vessels, sometimes even their land. They seek the protection of the local landlords, from whom they had earlier tried to extricate themselves through migration. They save on food. But this coping strategy is not sustainable.

Dying of Hunger Under the Lockdown Upon the lockdown announcement, middle-class Indians were seen rushing to shops and markets to buy food provisions. This was particularly triggered by the lack of official efforts to reassure people that they would still be able to access food shops under the lockdown.25 But others simply did not have the advance funds to save for food, and the phrase “I won’t die of corona. Before that, I will surely die of hunger” crudely summarizes many poor people’s precarious condition.26 During any economic shock, the lack of savings and the high share of food in total spending are two ingredients of a nascent humanitarian tragedy. Looking at food security reveals how

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vulnerable Indian households are. The average share of food in total household spending amounts to 43 percent in urban India and rises to 53 percent in rural India.27 As a point of comparison, French households spent about 20 percent of their total expenditures on food and beverages in 2014.28 According to Engel’s law, the poorer a household, the larger the share of total expenditures spent on food. India’s poorest 5 percent of households in rural areas dedicate about 61 percent of their total spending to food, while in urban areas, for the 5 percent richest, this share was only 28 percent. Any economic shock is very likely to impact access to food, particularly among the poor. In the present context, two economic consequences with regards to food are expected. The first and most dangerous consequence applies to all households that are losing their source of income. With little savings, those households who belong to the poorest segments of society are the first to be affected by the situation. This cohort includes the daily wage earners and especially urban migrants, who have often been left without any resource or even shelter. A second expected effect will apply to all segments of society: the chain of food supply has been disrupted.29 The harvest of the spring crops was complicated because it happened right after the lockdown, and the usual agricultural laborers could not take part in it. Besides, excess rainfall in March and April is also likely to have resulted in crop losses. Due to difficulties in food transport and export, many producers of perishable items (such as milk, fruits, and vegetables) found their revenues falling and their production lost. This has also been due to the restriction of operations in wholesale markets (mandis), which sometimes had to close because of the spread of infections. As a consequence, while

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procurement prices for farmers have fallen, retail prices for consumers have increased. First reports of hunger crises cannot let anyone remain indifferent: in Bihar, an eight-year-old kid died of hunger just six days after the lockdown started. Since then, the database of COVIDrelated deaths maintained by the Impact of COVID-19 Policies in India website has reported 138 deaths as a direct result of economic distress or hunger.30 More cases are unfortunately expected given India’s nutritional situation, characterized by chronic malnutrition (lack of food balance) and, to some extent, by acute malnutrition (a visible form of undernutrition).31 To fight against hunger and malnutrition, India has a long history of in-kind social programs, which were placed under the umbrella of the National Food Security Act (also known as the Right to Food Act) in 2013. Given the current emergency, Central Minister of Finance Nirmala Sitharaman announced measures reinforcing these existing social programs and other schemes a few hours after the lockdown declaration. The package, called the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana (the Prime Minister’s Poor Welfare Scheme), covers about 25 billion dollars. More recent announcements are mostly focusing on loans delivered to the private sector. These measures have met with criticism from economists. Jayati Ghosh, for example, deemed these schemes “embarrassing” given the small amount put on the table and “inadequate” because it is not targeting the most in need.32 Ultimately, Ghosh accused the central government of being “sadistic.”33 The Indian Society of Labour Economics, comprising leading economists, wrote a letter to the prime minister and state chief ministers noting that the assistance needed amounted to 523 billion dollars, more than twenty times the amount in the planned scheme.34

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Jobless and, for many, still stuck in urban areas, migrant workers are the worst hit and cannot claim any social benefits. This is particularly stunning concerning food transfers: access is conditional on owning a ration card, which most of them do not possess. The Public Distribution System has accumulated a large excess of food grain because it is hoarding much more than usual, but it cannot deliver the grain since there is no universal delivery of rations.35 In the end, this excess amount may spoil because it cannot be adequately stored. While ration cards and biometric authentication systems are meant to avoid corruption, it would certainly make much more sense to universalize the food distribution system, at least temporarily. Facing the emerging crisis, private initiatives from NGOs, organized food points in urban areas, or Sikh temples hosting and feeding the homeless have flourished.36 Yet not only has the voluntary sector considerably dried up over the last two decades, but without huge public support, local initiatives are not sufficient. The paradox is certainly that after chasing NGOs away in recent years, the central government had to ask for their help.37 As Jean Drèze warns the government: “Poor people are used to taking a lot of things lying down—when people are hungry and feeble, they are not necessarily well placed to revolt. But food riots could happen, who knows.”38

Conclusion In such a historic moment, one would expect national unity to be prioritized above all and stigmatization—as well as religious, ethnic, and caste- and class-based polarization—to be relegated to the backstage. But nothing is less certain. As migrants return

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home, they face attacks and are ostracized by fear of infection. And it was not long before hateful discourses surfaced in this crisis, with Muslim, northeastern, tribal, or Dalit Indians all being accused of spreading the virus.39 It is yet to be seen whether and how the government will take the opportunity of this crisis to further divide or reunite its people. The immediate concern is for the well-being of the poor and the minorities, who, as we have seen, will be the first to suffer from this crisis. For them, the consequences of the lockdown will be dramatic. They will die at home, in silence, maybe from a much deadlier thing than the virus: the profound socioeconomic inequalities that divide Indian society. Given the large diversity of situations on the Indian subcontinent, regional public responses seem more adequate to circumvent the economic and humanitarian tragedy. Several states have been at the forefront, implementing ambitious emergency solutions for the most needy, including Kerala, Delhi, Odisha, and West Bengal, even though their actions are partly thwarted by stalled cash transfers from the central government. The informal sector, though badly hit by the lockdown, has also proved incredibly resilient in past crises, and this provides hope in these unprecedented circumstances. But this will obviously come at the cost of reinforcing already deep inequalities.40 Beyond the impoverishment due to the lockdown, some Indian states have already deregulated certain labor laws in order to boost economic recovery after the lockdown.

NOTES 1. Christophe Jaffrelot, “Violence in Delhi Is Intended to Polarise as Well as to Teach a Lesson,” Indian Express, February 29, 2020, https://indian express.com /article/opinion/columns/remaking-the-riot-delhi-violence -1984–2002-gujarat-6291698.

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2. “Coronavirus: Why Does India Deny COVID Community Transmission?” BBC News, June 12, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia -india-53018912. 3. Partha Mukhopadhyay, Mukta Naik, and Yamini Aiyar, “The Coronavirus Pandemic: Why Are India’s Migrant Workers Walking Home?” Centre for Policy Research, podcast audio, April  3, 2020, https://www .cprindia.org /news/8604. 4. La Rédaction, “The Faces of the Pandemic,” La Vie des Idées, March 12, 2020, https://laviedesidees.fr/Les-visages-de-la-pandemie.html. 5. Veena Das, Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015); Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); Sarah Hodges and Mohan Rao, eds., Public Health and Private Wealth: Stem Cells, Surrogates, and Other Strategic Bodies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 6. Testing is crucial to gauge the extent of COVID-19 transmission in any country. India has one of the lowest ratios of testing in the world, which may have masked coronavirus cases. 7. “ICMR Initiated Sentinel Surveillance to Detect Community Transmission of COVID-19,” Indian Council of Medical Research, March  19, 2020, https://www.icmr.gov.in/pdf/press_realease_files/PressRelease_ ICMR_19March2020.pdf. 8. Soutik Biswas, “Coronavirus: Why Is India Testing So Little?” BBC News, March 20, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-519 22204. 9. As of June 16, the country conducted 4.29 COVID tests per one thousand people, the lowest rate among the BRICS countries. South Korea carried out 21.35 per one thousand people; the United Kingdom, 70.7; the United States, 73.96; and Italy, 77.66. Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata .org /grapher/full-list-cumulative-total-tests-per-thousand-map. 10. The government has allowed private players to conduct COVID-19 tests; as of June  15, 27  percent of accredited labs are private ones. Unfortunately, the price cap of 4,500 INR (around US$60) per test in private labs is too high for most Indians. 11. In 2018, India accounted for a quarter of the global tuberculosis burden with 2.15 million active cases and an estimated total of 450,000 TBrelated deaths. Diabetes and chronic respiratory and cardiovascular diseases were estimated to account for 3 percent, 11 percent, and 27 percent of all deaths. Sources: World Health Organization, “Noncommunicable Diseases (NCD) Country Profiles, 2018,” https://www.who.int/nmh

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13.

14.

15. 16.

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/countries/2018/ind_en.pdf ?ua=1; Central TB Division, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, “India TB Report 2019,” https://tbcindia.gov .in/ WriteReadData /India%20TB%20Report%202019.pdf. On the malnutrition burden, see the detailed analysis provided in the section of this article called “Dying of Hunger Under the Lockdown.” Most deaths are due to hypoxia, an insufficient supply of oxygen to the body’s tissues, or multiorgan collapse. Around 5 percent of the infected patients in India will require intensive care, and half of those admitted to the intensive-care unit will require mechanical ventilation; up to one million ventilators at the peak of the COVID-19 epidemic may be needed. As per Ministry of Health estimates, as of March  24 there were 8,432 ventilators in public hospitals, a number that could reach 50,000 if we factor in private hospitals. Even the meager numbers quoted above hide extreme disparities in access. Intensive-care facilities, especially ones that offer mechanical ventilation, are concentrated in big urban areas and richer provinces; Mumbai alone has one thousand ventilators and Kerala five thousand, which means there is a significantly smaller number of ventilators available in some of the poorest and most rural provinces of the country. Dimple D Rajgor, Meng Har Lee, Sophia Archuleta, Natasha Bagdasarian, and Swee Chye Quek, “The Many Estimates of the COVID-19 Case Fatality Rate,” The Lancet 20, no. 7 (July 1, 2020), https:// www.thelancet .com /journals/ laninf/article/PIIS1473–3099(20)30244-9/ fulltext; Zunyou Wu and Jennifer M. McGoogan, “Characteristics of and Important Lessons from the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Outbreak in China,” JAMA Network, February 24, 2020, https://jamanetwork .com/journals/jama /fullarticle/2762130. Knowing that the average cost of private hospitalization in 2017 was 31,845 INR (roughly US$430), that India’s monthly per capita income stands at 11,254 rupees (roughly US$150), and that a majority of Indians do not have any health insurance, the majority of patients will not be able to afford private care once the modest public facilities are overwhelmed. Barbara Harriss-White, “The Modi Sarkar’s Project for India’s Informal Economy,” The Wire, May 20, 2020, https://thewire.in/political-economy /the-modi-sarkars-project-for-indias-informal-economy. Jan Breman, Labour Bondage in West India: From Past to Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Ravi Srivastava, “Migrant Labour in the Shadow of the Pandemic,” Institute for Human Development, webinar event, May 2, 2020, http://www . ihdindia .org /mailer/webinar/ IHDISLE -Webinar - Covid -19 -its -Impli cations-Economy-Work-Livelihoods.html.

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17. According to NSSO data, in 2011 and 2012 the agricultural sector accounted for 62.7 percent of India’s employment, against 77.6 percent in 1993–94. “India Labour Market Update,” International Labor Organization, 2016. 18. David Picherit, “Labour Migration Brokerage and Dalit Politics in Andhra Pradesh: A Dalit Fabric of Labour Circulation,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2018). 19. Self-consumption, long a pillar of food security for rural families, has declined sharply over the last decades; see the next section. 20. Schooling rates have risen sharply in recent decades, including for girls, the lower castes, and Adivasi, and this is to be welcomed, but it entails significant expenses, even when school is free, as a large share remains the responsibility of families (transport, school materials). 21. Often presented as “unsustainable” or “superfluous” expenses, these expenses turn out to be real investments that make it possible to maintain the social networks that people sorely need to protect themselves. 22. Yet debt implies movement and sociability, either on the part of a family member who has to move to meet a lender or on the part of a financial provider since some provide doorstep services. Financial-diary methods, aimed at tracing all of a household’s financial flows over a given period, confirm the intensity of movements related to financial transactions. This is even more true for women, since they are often the ones in charge of managing family budgets. A survey of this type conducted in 2017 and 2018 in the states of Pondicherry and Tamil Nadu shows that the number of transactions (borrowing, repaying, lending, getting repaid, giving, receiving) can reach peaks of thirty transactions per week for women, twenty for men. Elena Reboul, Isabelle Guérin, Antony Raj, and G. Venkatasubramanian, “Managing Economic Volatility. A Gender Perspective,” Working Papers CEB 19-015, ULB (2019). 23. A comparable analysis in slums and refugee camps can be found at https://journals.openedition.org /echogeo/19357?lang=en. 24. In some sectors, such as brick molding or sugar-cane cutting, recruitment and control of the workforce is based on a wage advance. This advance is usually repaid over the course of the season, depending on the productivity of the workers. Since the season had barely started (January), most of these migrants find themselves with a debt between 70,000 and 100,000 INR (or six to eight months’ salary for two workers). Fearing that they will not be reimbursed, employers and recruiters are claiming workers’ property titles.

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25. Rohan Venkataramakrishnan, “Coronavirus: What Does It Say When PM Modi Has to Tweet ‘Don’t Panic!’ After His Own Speech?” Scroll .in, March  25, 2020, https://scroll.in/article/957164/coronavirus-what-does -it-say-when-pm-modi-has-to-tweet-dont-panic-after-his-own-speech. 26. Harsh Mander, “State’s Measures to Fight Coronavirus Are Stripping the Poor of Dignity and Hope,” Indian Express, March  27, 2020, https:// indianexpress . com /article /opinion /columns /coronavirus - covid -19 -lockdown-poor-6333452/. 27. The “Consumer Expenditure Survey” data from the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) provides the most comprehensive householdexpenditure data to look at and dates back from 2011 and 2012. Unfortunately, more recent data from the NSSO are not available. Even though a newer household-consumption survey was conducted in 2017 and 2018, the data were never released, despite explicit demands from the research community. Scroll Staff, “Consumer Spending: Angus Deaton, Thomas Piketty, 200 Other Academics Seek Immediate Release of Data,” Scroll.in, November  21, 2019. https://scroll.in/latest/944431/consumer-spending -angus - deaton-thomas -piketty-200 - other-academics -seek-immediate -release-of-data. The central government took the pretext of surveyinstrument biases to never release the complete raw data of the most comprehensive survey to study household consumption in India. But, in fact, press reports leaked that the total household spendings between the last two surveys fell for the first time in four decades. The impact of the 2016 demonetization may have affected Indian households’ expenditures in the long run, a point that the government is reluctant to acknowledge. More recent surveys from other institutions do not have the same methodological robustness, geographical coverage, or access to detailed results. These figures are derived from, from the report Level and Pattern of Consumer Expenditure 2011–2012, tables 6C-R and 6C-U, pp. 106–7. 28. This figure is based on INSEE estimates from Brigitte Larochette and Joan Sanchez-Gonzalez, “Cinquante ans de consommation alimentaire: une croissance modérée, mais de profonds changements,” Insee, October 9, 2015, https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/1379769. 29. Vikas Rawal, Manish Kumar, Ankur Verma and Jesim Pais, “COVID-19 Lockdown: Impact on Agriculture and Rural Economy,” International Development Economics Associates, June  2, 2020, https://www.net workideas.org /featured-themes/2020/06/covid-19-lockdown-impact-on -agriculture-and-rural-economy/. 30. Umesh Kumar Ray, “COVID-19 Lockdown: 8 Year Old Dies of Hunger as Family Struggles to Make Ends Meet,” The Wire, March  30, 2020,

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33.

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https://thewire.in/rights/ bihar-starvation-deaths-lockdown; “Impact of Covid-19 Policies in India,” https://coronapolicyimpact.org /. According to the latest 2019 estimates, India ranked 102 out of 117 countries on the Global Hunger Index, the lowest among South Asian countries (despite higher GDP per capita). The 2019 edition of the State of the World’s Children from UNICEF (https://www.unicef.org /reports/state -of-worlds-children) points out the enduring problem of hunger in India: about half of all deaths among children under five are attributable to undernutrition. Child underweight, measured as “weight-for-age,” which entails aspects of both chronic and acute malnutrition, was at a 36 percent high in 2015–2016 (the World Health Organization stipulates that a level of underweight higher than 30 percent reflects a “very high prevalence”). These figures conceal important regional and socioeconomic disparities. Underweight is noticeably higher in north central and especially eastern states of India, in Jharkhand (48  percent) and Bihar (44 percent), but nothing compared to Kerala (16 percent). Clearly, some regions face a heightened burden in the present lockdown. Akshay Swaminathan et al., “Burden of Child Malnutrition in India,” Economic and Political Weekly 54, no. 12 (2019), https://www.epw.in/journal/2019/2 /special-articles/ burden-child-malnutrition-india .html. Note: the figures are computed from the National Family Health Survey 4 (2015–2016) and are plotted by district. Child underweight is computed following this definition: weight for age < −2 standard deviations of the WHO Child Growth Standards median. Population of interest: all children below five years old. Authors provided. Jayati Ghosh, “Indian Economy Was Rolling down a Hill. With COVID19, It’s Falling off a Cliff,” Quartz India, April  2, 2020, https://qz.com /india /1830822 /coronavirus -may-push-indias -struggling- economy- off -the-cliff/. Jayati Ghosh, “India’s Response to Covid-19 has been Sadistic,” International Development Economics Associates, June  11, 2020, https://www .networkideas .org /news -analysis/2020/06/indias -response -to -covid-19 -has-been-sadistic/. In the announced package, cash support was set up using existing directtransfer schemes, in particular the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), a cash program that provides one hundred days of guaranteed paid work for rural dwellers to fight against underemployment. But the announced increase in MNREGA wages is pointed to as just adjusting for an already planned one. This program could benefit internal migrant workers left without economic

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resources but only under the condition that they manage to get back home, where they are administratively registered. Besides, recent reports from villages in different parts of the country are wary of the effective implementation of this program. As for in-kind measures, the government wants to expand the Public Distribution System (PDS), by supporting the main food-calorie intakes in India: cereals (more than 50 percent of the total calorie intakes) and pulses (about 12 percent, an important source of protein in a country consuming few animal products). But the promises may not be enough to cover the needs. Officials have also pointed out that this stock will be difficult to deliver, since private millers are facing a shortage of labor. Yogima Seth Sharma, “Indian Society of Labour Economics Urges Govt to Give Cash Transfers, Free Ration to Informal Worker Household,” Economic Times, April  1, 2020, https:// economictimes .indiatimes .com /news /economy/policy/indian -society -of-labour-economics-urges-govt-to -give-cash-transfers-free-ration-to -informal-worker-household/articleshow/74932925.cms. Vikas Rawal and Manish Kumar, “COVID-19 Lockdown: The Public Distribution of Foodgrain,” Impact of Covid-19 Policies in India, https:// coronapolicyimpact.org /2020/05/24/covid-19-lockdown-and-the-pds/. Ashwin Parulkar and Mukta Naik, “A Crisis of Hunger: A Ground Report on the Repercussions of COVID-19 Related Lockdown on Delhi’s Vulnerable Populations,” Centre for Policy Research Report, March 27, 2020. Deeptiman Tiwary, “FCRA Licences of 6,600 NGOs Cancelled in past Three Years: Govt to Lok Sabha,” Indian Times, March 18, 2020, https:// indianexpress .com /article /india /fcra-licences - of-6600 -ngos -cancelled -in-past-three-years-govt-to-lok-sabha-6319507/. Jean Drèze and Kaushal Shroff, “When People Are Hungry and Feeble, They Are Not Well Placed to Revolt: Jean Drèze,” The Caravan, March 30, 2020, https://caravanmagazine.in/policy/no-one-should-be-condemned -to-starvation-jean-dreze. See, for instance, the controversy around a caricature published in The Hindu identifying Islamic terrorists with the virus, now taken down, or a Muslim gathering identified as a virus hotspot, as analyzed in Billy Perrigo, “It Was Already Dangerous to Be Muslim in India. Then Came the Coronavirus,” Time, April  3, 2020, https://time.com/5815264 /coronavirus-india-islamophobia-coronajihad. Also read Prabhjit Singh, “Muslims Beaten Up and Abused in Rural Punjab,” Corona Policy Impact, accessed August  6, 2020, https://coronapolicyimpact.org /2020 /04 /09/punjab -muslims -families -hide -in-riverbed -after-being- driven

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-from-hoshiarpur-villages/. A testimony on the rise of stigmatization against northeastern people in New Delhi can be read here: Rinchen Norbu Wangchuk, “Stop Calling People from the Northeast Coronavirus. It’s Unacceptable,” Better India, March  18, 2020, https://www .thebetterindia .com /220430/india-coronavirus-covid19-delhi-northeast -racism-unacceptable-opinion-nor41/. 40. Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty, “Indian Income Inequality, 1922– 2015: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?,” Review of Income and Wealth 65 (2019): S33–S62.

PANDEMIC SECURITY AND INSECURITY IN THE GULF NEHA VORA

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n order to enter a grocery store in Qatar, as of May 22, 2020, you pass a temperature scan and then present a green Ehteraz status on your smartphone.1 A green status shows you are negative for COVID-19 and have not been in recent contact with anyone who has tested positive. If you don’t have a smartphone or don’t have Ehteraz installed, you could face heavy fines. Ehteraz is the contact-tracing application that all residents are now required to carry when leaving their homes. Ehteraz links with a person’s Resident ID number to find their health status. Almost immediately upon its launch, residents started reporting on Twitter and local blogs that they were having trouble downloading the app because their phones were not current enough or because it didn’t recognize their ID numbers. In addition, some newly arrived immigrants and business travelers on long stays were without ID numbers, and others had expired visas, all making the app unusable. Ehteraz also requires access to other information on your phone, such as photos and contacts, which raises concerns about privacy and safety. Members of a Qatar expatriate group that I am part of bypassed this problem by purchasing new phones solely to run the app. However, those without the ability to purchase

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multiple smartphones risk their privacy and their safety if they decide to leave their homes. Those unable to afford smartphones with newer operating systems are stuck at home without access to basic services or risk fines if they leave. Ehteraz highlights how security measures surrounding COVID-19 have permeated practically all aspects of everyday life in the Gulf in ways that exacerbate existing inequities of citizenship, race, and class. Qatar, along with other Gulf countries, faced a quick rise in COVID-19 cases starting in March 2020, unsurprisingly considering their status as international hubs of tourism, immigration, transit, and trade. However, their small size, large-scale spending capacities, and centralized governance structures allowed Gulf countries to make swift decisions about public health. Gulf countries were quick to shut down schools, close borders, and initiate mandatory quarantines, checkpoints, and lockdowns.2 They swiftly adopted new technologies such as heat-sensing cameras in shopping malls and airports and contract-tracing applications, like Ehteraz, which track both residents’ health status and their location. These new forms of security blur the line between public health and securitization, and many Gulf residents have felt the adverse effects of these decisions. As existing fault lines between security and insecurity intensify, new ones may open up. Specifically, COVID-19 and the heightened security measures it has prompted and enabled produce a range of insecurities for Gulf immigrants, especially Asian and African immigrants who already live under precarious conditions. Many immigrants live without legal status, often with food and housing insecurity, which makes them more vulnerable to labor exploitation.3 This is compounded by another crisis: that of oil. As the world shut down, so did the demand for Gulf petroleum.4 Prices have plunged, and many foreign workers have been laid off and deported.5

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“Security” in the Gulf is both a promise to lure desirable immigrants and a technology to control the mobility of less desirable ones; in the wake of the pandemic, this tension takes on new forms. Citizenship in these societies is limited in order to keep benefits for citizens high. But these benefits, too, are linked to oil prices. The countries of the Gulf Cooperative Council have historically invested the great amount of wealth from petroleum resources in public works, infrastructure, social welfare (primarily for citizens but also to some extent for their large foreign resident populations), health care, and cutting-edge security systems. Yet at times when oil prices have decreased, Gulf leaders have imposed austerity measures on their citizens. Recent years have seen an overwhelming rhetorical shift in development plans away from social welfare toward neoliberal citizenship production. The Gulf states do not allow for naturalization or permanent residency and require their immigrant residents, who often outnumber citizens many times over, to hold temporary renewable work visas or be listed as dependents of those who hold such visas. Precarity therefore marks the condition of every Gulf immigrant and particularly those who are lower wage. Most working-class immigrants cannot migrate with family members, often live in crowded company housing on the outskirts of the city, and are not welcome in malls and other semipublic spaces; they have trouble shifting jobs and may even have their passports and pay withheld from them by exploitative employers. Despite citizenship and migration policies in the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf states, there are diasporic populations of Indians as well as other South Asians, Arabs, and Filipinos wellsettled in the downtown neighborhoods of Dubai, Doha, Kuwait City, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Muscat, Manama, and other Gulf cities. South Asians are today the largest immigrant population in the

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Gulf, far outnumbering citizens in several countries. Gulf governments make attempts to include certain immigrant populations, namely business owners and the upper middle class, with less regard for lower-wage workers. They actively hail foreign residents as part of the nation through multicultural imagery and rhetoric; free zones offer the ability to purchase housing and own businesses without a local partner (which come with a residency permit). Children of immigrants can now attend college in the Gulf with the opening of several international campuses and in Qatar are offered student loan forgiveness if they stay on to work in-country. The UAE has even initiated a pseudo–“green card,” called the golden visa, which comes with long-term residency and 100 percent business ownership for the uber-wealthy, and just recently it announced that it will be initiating dual citizenship for some high-skilled immigrants.6 In addition to these financial, educational, and citizenship incentives, Gulf cities play first-run Indian films and welcome temples, churches, and other places of worship for non-Muslims as well as a plethora of South Asian restaurants, groceries, and other businesses; South Asian languages are commonly spoken. South Asian immigrants of all classes, but especially businesspeople, commonly discussed with me their preference for the Gulf over other diasporic locations, even within a condition of precarity. For many of them it is preferable to their home countries, as well, because the Gulf offers all of the cultural conveniences with higher pay and increased cleanliness and security. South Asians, both tourists and immigrants, often told me during my research in Dubai and Doha that cleanliness and security drew them to visit, work, reside, and raise families in these cities. But of course, as anthropologists and other scholars around the globe

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have shown, “security” for some populations means increased policing, marginalization, and precarity for others.7 Ironically, the labor of security falls to those who are among the most insecure. In the Gulf, security guards are usually young men from a handful of national backgrounds that command some of the lowest salaries in the racial hierarchy of Gulf employment, yet these men are tasked on a daily basis with policing the mobility of wealthy patrons in hotels, shopping malls, and housing complexes. It is not surprising that they face a lot of hostility and have trouble asserting authority over Western expatriates and Gulf nationals. This was a common theme in conversations I had with Indian and Pakistani security guards when I conducted research in Dubai and with Kenyan and Filipino security guards in Education City and other parts of Doha. Security guards usually live in company housing, which is often in the same area as other low-wage workers’ dormitories on the edges of the city; in Doha, many are housed in or near the industrial area and bused into work. When the COVID-19 crisis hit, many faced increased labor precarity even as they were tasked with longer hours and more stressful work conditions, having to scan people all day long and contend with argumentative customers. Even though Gulf governments have claimed they are taking care of foreign workers by taking care of struggling businesses, there is little oversight, and stories of unpaid wages and poor working and living conditions are all too common.8 As temperatures intensified in the summer months of 2020, the thermo-scanners started to malfunction, and friends who reside in the Gulf reported having to be scanned more than once before entering shops, which in turn was leading to longer lines and hotter tempers. While Gulf governments have the spending power for high-tech monitoring, technology implementation has

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not accounted for the excessive labor these technologies require of low-wage workers. With these new forms of surveillance, existing disparities among Gulf residents are only exacerbated. It is not surprising that those hit hardest by the pandemic in the Gulf, both by the illness and by the uneven application of prevention measures, are low-wage migrant workers, particularly those who live in crowded dormitory-style housing at the edges of the city. A lockdown of Doha’s industrial area meant access to food and other resources, including health care, became spottier, and the risk of infection, higher. Meanwhile, Amnesty International has reported that before lockdowns went into effect, some low-wage migrants were illegally detained and deported.9 Many migrants have not been paid or provided the benefits promised as part of their work packages. With no clear end in sight to the COVID-19 crisis, immigrants are torn about whether to stay or leave.10 Yet after both Gulf governments and the Indian government closed borders and initiated lockdowns, internal and international travel became almost impossible. In the Gulf, entry was suspended even for those with residency visas starting in March (it has since reopened), meaning foreign residents who were traveling were left unable to return to their jobs. On May 7, India began allowing repatriation flights from the Gulf, and the consul general of India in Dubai reported 350,000 Indians had signed up for these flights, amounting to a tenth of the UAE’s Indian expatriate population.11 These repatriation flights are taking place in other Gulf countries as well and for other national groups. Such large return migrations could have long-lasting economic and social impacts on Gulf cities, as well as on home countries. However, the number of people actually taking these flights appears to be much lower than those who have signed up. Many

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have a change of heart at the last minute, perhaps choosing to wait and see if job prospects will open up, perhaps finding it difficult to return to hardships at home. Others have realized that these flights are quite costly and not usually covered by the return-ticket benefit that is promised upon hire by employers. Yet the rush of people who have decided to leave anyway signals a potential shift away from the sense of security that Indians once enjoyed in the UAE. That diminishing sense of security might also relate to heightened tensions between groups in the Gulf, as xenophobia is on the rise. In many countries, migrant workers have been blamed for spreading the virus, and conversations about immigration rates and who “really” belongs have intensified on social media platforms. Rising anti-immigrant sentiments could potentially account for the decisions people are taking to return to their home countries, even though economically hard-hit Gulf countries are also making gestures of belonging to their wealthier and high-skilled immigrant populations. Another indicator of a shift in the Indian diaspora’s affinities with the Gulf region has been a heightened online presence of Hindutva agitators within Gulf social media, especially in the wake of the pandemic. The prominence of right-wing Hindu nationalists in India and in its diaspora is well known, but in the Gulf region, even though Hindus still constitute the majority of the Indian expatriate population, Muslims make up a disproportionate number compared to other contexts, and many choose to immigrate to the region because they feel more comfortable there. Even among non-Muslims, I have found more respect and knowledge of Islam in the Gulf than within diasporic communities elsewhere. Therefore, I was surprised to see news of multiple Indians being fired for posting Islamophobic messages on social media in the weeks following the coronavirus outbreak. In India,

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the Hindu right has claimed that Muslims are intentionally spreading the disease to Hindus as part of a “jihad,” conspiracy theories that started to appear on some Indian expatriates’ Twitter accounts, which led to their being reported and ultimately fired and deported.12 The public outrage prompted by these messages was so great that it led to statements by the Indian government denouncing them—highlighting the importance of the relationship between India and the Gulf even amid the economic precarity wrought by the pandemic.13 Since the trade relationships between Gulf countries and India relies upon labor migration, they often praise and accommodate the other’s interests. Yet the pandemic has created tensions between India and the UAE, with each country blaming the other for a poor response. It is unclear whether these flare-ups of Islamophobia mark a new element within the Gulf’s Indian diaspora, or if current events have merely emboldened public expressions of existing Hindu nationalism. COVID-19 might be just another crisis in the Gulf region from which these societies will rebound to their former cartography of migration, citizenship, and belonging. But the shifts in the way immigrants experience life on the ground under heightened security and insecurity suggest a remapping of immigrant belonging and exclusion. After the 2008 global recession, some of the demographics of Gulf cities shifted as immigrants lost their jobs and left in large numbers.14 But even though South and Southeast Asian workers left in droves, even more were hired and migrated to the region in the following years. Postrecession housing prices skyrocketed in cities like Dubai and Doha, and many middle-class immigrants now face housing precarity due to gentrification and redevelopment of traditionally South Asian neighborhoods.15 What the lost jobs, repatriations, and new forms of surveillance will bring has

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yet to be seen, but as with other crises, COVID-19 highlights both the transnational interconnectedness of the Gulf region and the inequities that mark daily life for the majority of its residents.

NOTES 1. Mix, “Qatar Forces Residents to Install its Coronavirus Tracker— or Face the Consequences,” Next Web, May  19, 2020, https://thenextweb.com /insider/2020 /05 /19 /qatar -forces -residents -to -install -its - coronavirus -tracker-or-face-the-consequences/. 2. Nawafel Shehab, “Exploring Gulf responses to COVID-19,” International Institute for Strategic Studies, June 25, 2020, https://www.iiss.org / blogs /analysis/2020/06/mide-gulf-covid-19. 3. Staff Reporters, “Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants Soon,” Gulf News, May 26, 2020, https://gulfnews.com/uae/amnesty-for-illegal-immigrants -soon-1.388422. 4. Neil Edwards, “What Negative Oil Prices Mean to the Top Exporting Countries,” Forbes, April  21, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/neiled wards/2020/04 /21 /what-negative-oil-prices-mean-to-the-top-exporting -countries/; Natasha Turak, “Saudi Arabia’s Austerity Drive Seen as ‘Decisive and Necessary,’ but Could Delay a Consumer Recovery,” CNBC, May 11, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/11/saudi-arabias-austerity - drive - decisive -and -necessary-but- could - delay-a - consumer-recovery .html. 5. Davide Barbuscia and  Marwa Rashad, “ ‘What’s the Point of Staying?’: Gulf Faces Expatriate Exodus,” Reuters, May  7, 2020, https://www .reuters .com /article /us -health-coronavirus -gulf-jobs /whats -the -point -of-staying-gulf-faces-expatriate-exodus-idUSKBN22J1WL. 6. Ashleigh Stewart, “UAE to Allow Dual Citizenship for First Time to Boost Coronavirus Hit Economy,” The Telegraph, January  30, 2021, https:// w w w . telegraph . co . u k / news / 2021 /01 / 30 / uae - a l low - dua l -citizenship-first-time-boost-coronavirus-hit/. 7. Society for Cultural Anthropology, “Security,” https://journal.culanth .org /index.php/ca /catalog /category/security. 8. Hazar Kilani, “Bernard and the ‘Greedy Boss,’ ” Doha News, June 2, 2020, https:// medium . com /dohanews / bernard - the - greedy - boss - e0ddd b740d5c. 9. Amnesty International, “Qatar: Migrant Workers Illegally Expelled During COVID-19 Pandemic,” April 15, 2020, https://www.amnesty.org

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/en / latest /news /2020 /04 /qatar -migrant -workers -illegally - expelled -during-covid19-pandemic/. Andrea Wright, “No Good Options for Migrant Workers in Gulf COVID-19 Lockdown,” Merip, April 30, 2020, https://merip.org /2020/04 /no-good-options-for-migrant-workers-in-gulf-covid-19-lockdown/. Gillian Duncan, “Coronavirus: Next Wave of UAE Repatriation Flights to India to Begin this Week,” National News, May 24, 2020, https://www .thenationalnews .com /uae /transport /coronavirus -next-wave - of -uae -repatriation-flights-to-india-to-begin-this-week-1.1023958. Bilal Kuchay, “Why Arabs Are Speaking out Against Islamophobia in India,” Al Jazeera, April 30, 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020 /4/30/why-arabs-are-speaking-out-against-islamophobia-in-india. Nayanima Basu, “Discrimination Against Our Moral Fabric: India to Its Citizens in UAE After Anti-Muslim Posts,” The Print, April  20, 2020, https://theprint .in /diplomacy/discrimination-against-our-moral-fabric -india-to-its-citizens-in-uae-after-anti-muslim-posts/405538/. Priyanka Debnath, “The Impacts of the Global Economic Crisis on Migration in the Arab World,” Middle East Institute, April  18, 2010, https:// www . mei . edu /publications /impacts - global - economic - crisis -migration-arab-world. Bhoomika Ghaghada, “Karama: An Immigrant Neighborhood Transformed,” Jadaliyya, January 19, 2021, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details /42250/Karama-An-Immigrant-Neighborhood-Transformed.

HIDDEN VULNERABILITY AND INEQUALITY The COVID-19 Pandemic in Singapore SULFIKAR AMIR

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esearchers of disaster resilience commonly understand that the ability of institutions to respond to a crisis lies, to a great extent, in their past experiences in encountering similar crises. Once the crisis is overcome, adaptive institutions will supposedly have enough time to learn from it and take the necessary measures to step up their capacity in anticipation of the next crisis. However, there are situations in which, despite all lessons learned and all measures taken, the new crisis, similar in nature to the previous, spawns an unprecedented exigency, resulting in a prolonged disruption of society in spite of the great amount of preparedness and mitigation plans. This is the case of Singapore, a small island country in Southeast Asia that has been severely hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. The crisis was not due to the country’s lacking strict measures nor adequate health infrastructures to handle an outbreak. It’s strong confidence in its planning led to leaders ignoring a small vulnerability lurking within society. When the novel coronavirus began to spread from Wuhan, China, back in December 2019, it instantly rendered Southeast Asia most vulnerable due to its proximity to the epicenter of the outbreak. During the early days of the pandemic, over a dozen direct flights brought hundreds of passengers

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every day from Wuhan to major cities in Southeast Asia. Singapore was one of the cities to first recognize the threat of infection when it discovered that two people from Wuhan had been infected with SARS-CoV2 when they were visiting the country. This discovery triggered an instant response from Singapore’s health authorities. Despite a short period of panic buying, one month into the outbreak saw a relatively stable situation as the Singapore government mobilized resources to handle infection cases one by one. At that point, people were optimistic that the country would remain safe. However, an unforeseen problem suddenly emerged, indicated by an explosion of infection cases among migrant workers. COVID-19 had uncovered a vulnerability Singaporean officials had not considered.

Housing Migrant Workers There is something peculiar about Singapore. Its economy stands out among its neighbors, as its GNI per capita ranks as one of the top in the world. Heavily concentrated in advanced manufacturing, finance, and services, Singapore is a city-state that has successfully transformed its economy and enjoyed steady growth for many years. But Singapore’s stable economic indicators and massive achievements in science and technology are bolstered by a large pool of migrant workers who work as cheap labor across various sectors. These migrant workers make up a bulk of Singapore’s nonresident population. Malaysia has been the traditional source of workers. But for the past ten years more migrant workers are drawn from Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Burma, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan. Also, there is a large number of migrant workers from the People’s Republic of China.

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Today, there are 5.7 million people living in Singapore. Citizens and permanent residents account for 4.03 million. The rest are considered nonresident. Most low-paid migrant workers are categorized as Work Permit Holders, who makeup 41 percent of 1.68 million nonresidents. This group of foreigners is allowed to work generally in five sectors: construction, manufacturing, shipbuilding, processing (e.g., the manufacturing of petroleum and petrochemicals), and services. The starting salary is SGD18 an hour (US$13 an hour). A few of them manage to obtain higherpaid jobs, such as project managers and chief technicians, but the large majority remains at the bottom throughout their work contracts. When it comes to housing, Singapore is touted as a success of story. It is one of the countries with high rates of home ownership. However, the past decades have seen a steep rise in house prices due to land scarcity but also market factors. As a result, the country is listed among the most expensive cities in the world. For this reason, it is not financially possible for migrant workers to be accommodated in housing similar to what average citizens and residents enjoy. Depending on their jobs and countries of origin, some migrant workers live in rented, public-housing HDB flats.1 But the majority is provided by their employers with accommodation in so-called  Purpose-Built Dormitories.2 Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower requires every employer to build this type of facility for their foreign workers. The rent is extremely cheap compared to housing market prices, but it comes with a caveat. There are forty-three dormitories located in eight areas across the island. Each dormitory area consists of a few apartment blocks of four to five floors. Room sizes vary. As mandated in government documents, “the developer is required to provide a minimum of 0.05 sq. m. per worker up to a maximum of 0.10 sq. m. per worker, if there are more than 500 workers and up to 5,000 workers

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housed in the dormitory.”3 In reality, all dormitories are packed and crowded as each room is used for ten to twelve people. Overcrowding in migrant worker housing contributed significantly to Singapore’s COVID-19 crisis.

Early Responses The first confirmed case of COVID-19 infection in Singapore was announced on January 23, although the government health agencies had begun reporting suspected cases two weeks earlier. The index case was a Chinese tourist from Wuhan. One week later, a total of thirteen confirmed cases were reported. They were all Chinese nationals who were visiting Singapore. It was not until January 31 that the government reported a confirmed case involving a Singaporean. One week later, the number of accumulated cases had grown to thirty-three, a significant hike that prompted the government to raise the nation’s Disease Outbreak Response System Condition (DORSCON) level from yellow to orange. Despite massive contact tracing, testing, and quarantine measures, by the end of February, the health authorities had reason to believe that local transmission had occurred as new cases continued popping up. In early March, the government began to sense that the situation had turned worse than they had anticipated. This became clear when a new infection cluster grew rapidly among migrant workers. Most of the early cases originated at the Mustafa shopping center, a favorite venue among migrant workers from South Asia. In no time infection cases exploded among migrant workers living in the dormitories. At the same time, the government discovered an increase of unlinked cases due to asymptomatic infections that were hard to detect. This posed the risk of a huge cluster of infections. The growth of COVID-19

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transmission was so unexpected that the government decided to lock down the entire country. This resulted in a “circuit breaker,” referring to the closure of workplaces, schools, and public facilities. Only a small number of essential sectors were allowed to continue operating. The circuit breaker lasted for eight weeks, and it aimed to suppress local transmission but especially to respond to the crisis unfolding in worker dormitories. Although some foreign media characterized the rapid infection within migrant worker dorms as a government failure, the quick and coordinated responses of the Singapore government deserves appreciation. Within days after the circuit breaker started, all migrant workers in dorms were given paid leave. Some of the dorms with high infection rates were isolated. Workers in the quarantined dorms were provided with food, internet access, and medical assistance. In the meantime, testing was rapidly escalated among this population group. Every day 3,000 PCR tests were administered in all dorms. Not surprisingly, the number of cases skyrocketed. The peak was on April  20 when Singapore broke a record of 1,396 cases. It instantly made Singapore one of the countries with the highest rates in Asia after being touted as COVID-19 safe. In the following two weeks, infection cases began to drop slowly. By early May, the rate became stable, and new infection cases among Singapore citizens and residents remained very low. By this point, the situation seemed to be under control, prompting the government to begin easing restrictions on June 2.

Inequality Matters How can we explain what happened in Singapore? The country had a traumatic experience with SARS back in 2003. The SARS outbreak caused thirty-three deaths and forced Singapore to close

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its border for over two months, suffering a loss of approximately US$50 billion. Learning the lessons from SARS, Singapore improved its health-care system and biosurveillance to anticipate similar outbreaks. This resulted in the creation of the National Center for Infectious Diseases (NCID), a special agency akin to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In addition, funding was pumped into research projects on medical science, biotechnology, and virology. Thus, when COVID-19 started to break out from Wuhan, Singapore had everything prepared, from tight airport biosurveillance to enhanced testing capacity and intensive care units in hospitals across the city. And it worked perfectly, as indicated by the very low fatality rate. The fact that so few health-care workers were infected and none of them died from coronavirus shows how diligently the country had prepared to respond to a pandemic. However, the creation of new institutions and the strengthening of surveillance technologies could not outweigh the prejudices inherent in the society, missing a key group. Despite disaster researchers and policy makers learning and adapting from the previous crisis, new circumstances always arise that were not planned for. In my analysis of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown disaster, I discuss certain “hidden vulnerabilities” similar to what Singapore experienced.4 The failure of Japanese nuclear authorities in recognizing a seemingly benign design flaw in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station’s emergency system eventually caused a series of meltdowns with lingering impacts on the people and environment. Vulnerabilities are hidden when institutions fail to identify potential risks emanating from tightly coupled assemblages of people or systems. In some cases, it is attributed to a lack of expertise, in others it is due to an institutionalized ignorance, especially in complex sociotechnical systems that are easily plagued by insensibility.

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Applying this framework of hidden vulnerabilities to Singapore, I found similarities in the fiasco of the migrant worker cluster in Singapore’s attempt to contain COVID-19. The condition of migrant workers in dormitories was a vulnerability that remained hidden, not because Singapore does not have the scientific and institutional capacity to recognize it but because the focus was on other aspects of the looming pandemic. It was primarily prompted by institutional bias and the interests of Singapore’s government in protecting its own citizens first and foremost. This is where hidden vulnerability becomes deeply entangled with inequality. Reflecting on the reasons behind the unexpected increase in COVID-19 cases among the migrant population and Singapore’s inequality has prompted a heated debate among Singapore scholars and policy researchers. They have different takes on why Singapore failed to prevent this big cluster of transmission from happening. From an economic point of view, the economist and nominated parliament member Walter Edgar Theseira notes that the crisis is rooted in Singapore’s addiction to cheap labor.5 It has been dependent on the labor that migrant workers provide without acknowledging their value as part of Singapore’s population. The sociologist Paulin Straughan adds a cultural perspective to broaden the spectrum of the problem.6 She argues that the housing conditions of migrant workers have also been partly caused by a collective reluctance among many Singaporeans to accept migrant workers as part of their society. Prejudice and even racism toward migrant workers are prevalent among Singaporean citizens mostly due to language difference and pervasive public attitudes.7 Thus, a gap emerges between the ideas of Singapore as a cohesive society and migrant workers as transient bodies. The underlying issue is the striking presence of inequality between the local people of Singapore and migrant workers. Not only is their presence socially and culturally ignored by local Singaporeans,

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but their labor is financially underappreciated and they are in a weak bargaining position. While inequality does exist among Singaporeans, inequality between Singaporeans and foreign workers is far wider, and those who depend on their labor pay little attention to it. They are simply part of the global structure of labor markets that considers these workers disposable.

NOTES 1. HDB stands for Housing and Development, a government agency specially assigned to plan and develop Singapore’s subsidized housing estates. 2. Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower, “Various Types of Housing and their Specific Requirements,” https://www.mom.gov.sg /passes-and-permits /work-permit-for-foreign-worker/housing /various-types-of-housing. 3. Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Agency, “Amenity Provision Guidelines for Workers’ Dormitories,” https://www.ura.gov.sg /-/media / User%20Defined / URA%20Online/circulars/2016/Sep/dc16–14 /dc16–14 -Appendix-D.pdf ?la=en. 4. Sulfikar Amir, “Hidden Vulnerability: The Long Making of Nuclear Disaster in Fukushima Daiichi,” paper presentation, 2019 Annual Meeting of Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), Milan, October 24–27, 2019. 5. See IPS Online Forum on Migrant Workers: Policy Responses and Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic. Video is available at  https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=k8SBYZRt04g. 6. IPS Online Forum on Migrant Workers. 7. See for example Catherine Gomes, “Xenophobia Online: Unmasking Singaporean Attitudes towards ‘Foreign Talent’ Migrants,”  Asian Ethnicity 15, no.1 (2014): 21–40.

ADDRESSING THE IMPACT OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC ON GENDER INEQUALITY AND GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE IN SOUTH AFRICA SHERIHAN RADI

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andy’s fear for her life grew with each day of lockdown. Trapped indoors with her husband threatening to destroy her and her hairdressing business, she described the heightened tensions in confinement as a “volcanic explosion.”1 Sandy, who asked for her real name not to be used, was not alone. During the first three weeks of the lockdown imposed on March  27, 2020, more than 120,000 abuse victims contacted Safe House, South Africa’s national domestic violence helpline, doubling their typical call volume. Gender-based violence was pervasive in South Africa well before the pandemic. In a 2012 study by Gender Links, where 5,621 South African men and women in four provinces were surveyed, 78 percent of men in Gauteng and 41 percent of men in KwaZuluNatal revealed they had perpetrated violence against women. In Limpopo and Western Cape, 48 and 35  percent of men, respectively, admitted to committing violence against women. The most common form of gender-based violence occurred within intimate relationships; between 29 and 51  percent of women reported an experience of domestic violence in their lifetime.2 Now the COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed a surge of domestic violence in South Africa, because the intersections of

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existing gender and class inequalities deepen in the face of a global economic and public health crisis. With work scarce, access to technology abysmal, and childcare nonexistent, women’s safety and mental health suffer a heavy toll. As witnessed with viruses like HIV and Ebola, pandemics create an empowering environment for violence against women.3 Protections imposed to slow transmission make it even more difficult for women living with abusive partners to seek help and support from professionals, family, and friends.4 On the other hand, the overcrowding, stigma, stress, movement restrictions, and income loss created by the COVID-19 pandemic increase the severity and risk of violence against women.5 Confinement under stay-at-home orders aggravates tensions about money, security and health, exacerbating violent behavior behind closed doors.6 This frustration and anxiety came to a head for workers in the informal economy, where one in three already economically and socially disadvantaged people who earned an income in February 2020 did not earn one in April 2020.7 Since 35.9  percent of women in South Africa make up this informal economy, they also lost their financial independence and security due to COVID-19,8 making it difficult to escape their violent partners. Even if they were able to leave, the increase in domestic violence meant shelter space was limited, as Kathy Cronje, head of Safe House’s shelter reported.9 While economic strains do not excuse violent behavior, they certainly contribute to this dramatic wave of gender-based violence. The COVID-19 lockdown threatened the income opportunities of 3 to 5 million informal traders in South Africa. These workers depend on limited income, receive no social protection from the government, and are excluded from essential services.10 Therefore, lockdown measures deprived them of income for their basic needs. They were left stuck between two choices: to suffer from hunger

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or from COVID-19.11 Also, many do not have decent housing or access to sanitation and water services. All these factors contribute to the rise of domestic and gender-based violence against women. According to Police Minister Bheki Cele, more than 87,000 cases of gender-based violence were reported across the country within the first week of the COVID-19 lockdown alone.12 As work, life, and childcare blur into a nightmare for many South African women, addressing gender-based violence becomes more urgent with each crisis. As COVID-19 turned the world on its head, transformations in the nature and future of work contributed to tensions in the household. As a result of lockdowns and social distancing guidelines meant to prevent the spread of COVID-19, remote forms of working became a necessity aimed at protecting employees’ health and safety. However, the nature of work during the current pandemic varies from one country to another and its trajectory remains at best uncertain until an effective vaccine can be massproduced and made available. For instance, in countries of the Global South the digital divide and uneven information and communications technology penetration, distribution, and reach remain pertinent issues and are even more pronounced across the urban-rural divide. Remote work is not an option without infrastructure and access. Technological barriers have put a particular strain on those forced to work from home, making it altogether impossible for some. Access to dependable and affordable internet connectivity and power supply remain a widespread concern. Despite shifts to remote work, many South Africans, especially those in poorer or more remote regions, are still excluded from the digital vision of the country’s National Development Plan.13 To make matters worse, South African women have been obliged to turn their bedrooms into home offices and their kitchen

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tables into classrooms to homeschool their children.14 Women working from home and living with nonabusive partners also suffer from stress, as they have to deal with the homeschooling of their children, as well as taking care of the household and working remotely. As confirmed by the United Nations, with the closure of childcare institutions during the lockdown and women bearing the burden of childcare, their ability to work remotely has become limited.15 The lack of a workspace at home could also be a challenge, as many employees are forced to share a common room with their family members while working remotely, often with children present. In order to protect women against domestic violence during this difficult time, a gender-responsive strategy should be implemented and prioritized. This initiative should include legal, economic, and educational components if it hopes to redress violence and change the deep-rooted thinking related to the traditional roles that regard men as providers and holders of power and women as submissive nurturers performing the bulk of domestic work. Promoting gender-equality projects that aim at improving gender equality and promoting female empowerment is highly recommended. These projects include offering vocational training that develop farming, sewing, and tie-dyeing skills; providing adult literacy; quality education; and offering business opportunities to women such as establishing their own small home-based sewing businesses through providing them with the necessary equipment and assisting them in accessing markets to sell their products in order to enable them to gain economic independence as well as becoming earning members of their families. On the other hand, these projects will also broaden their equal access to resources such as productive resources for female farmers that include fertilizer and seeds to increase their level of productivity. These projects will increase the women’s income and enhance

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their life quality. They will also provide support on health and education of girls and women in South Africa to assist them in maintaining their health and personal safety as well as building their self-confidence and self-belief. Boys should also be included in these projects to change their stereotypical thinking in relation to the male superiority over females through the participation in workshops, activities, and discussions that aim at overcoming gender biases and male-dominance pressure created by society. This will contribute in redefining behavior patterns for this and the coming generation. These necessary projects will not only aid economic growth but also model respect for women’s rights and equality, thereby addressing gender and class inequalities that exacerbate violence.

NOTES 1. AFP, “ ‘It Just Got Worse’: Domestic Violence Surges Under SA Lockdown,” Eyewitness News, April 29, 2020, https://ewn.co.za/2020/04/29/it -just-got-worse-domestic-violence-surges-under-sa-lockdown. 2. “The War @ Home: Findings of the Gender Based Violence Prevalence Study in Gauteng, Western Cape, KwaZulu Nataland Limpopo Provinces of South Africa,” https://genderlinks.org.za/wp-content/uploads /imported /articles/attachments/21537_the_war@home_4prov2014.pdf. 3. KIT Royal Tropical Institute, “When Home Is Not a Safe Place: Exposing the Intersections of Domestic Gender-Based Violence During COVID-19,” November  9, 2020, https://www.kit.nl/when-home-is-not-a-safe-place -exposing-the-intersections-of-domestic-gender-based-violence-during -covid-19/. 4. Anna, “Domestic Violence in South Africa,” The Circle, July  1, 2020, https://thecircle.ngo/domestic-violence-south-africa/. 5. KIT Royal Tropical Institute, “When Home Is Not a Safe Place.” 6. KIT Royal Tropical Institute, “When Home Is Not a Safe Place.” 7. Azarrah Karrim, “Millions Have Lost Their Jobs During the Lockdown, Impacting Social Welfare and Food Poverty,” News24, July  16, 2020, https://www.news24 .com /news24 /southafrica /news/millions -have -lost -their-jobs - during-the -lockdown -impacting-social -welfare -and -food -poverty-20200716.

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8. Anna, “Domestic Violence in South Africa,” The Circle, July  1, 2020, https://thecircle.ngo/domestic-violence-south-africa/. 9. AFP, “ ‘It Just Got Worse.’ ” 10. Isaac Khambul, “The Effects of COVID-19 on the South African Informal Economy: Limits and Pitfalls of Government’s Response,” Loyola Journal of Social Sciences 34, no. 1 (2020): 91–109. 11. ANA Reporter, “Workers in SA Are Experiencing Extreme Hardship During Covid-19 Lockdown, Says Numsa,” IOL, May  1, 2020, https:// www.iol .co.za /news /politics /workers -in-sa-are - experiencing- extreme -hardship-during-covid-19-lockdown-says-numsa-47458145. 12. Sandisiwe Shoba, “Increase in Rape and Assault a Grim Marker of Rising Levels of Gender-Based Violence,” Daily Maverick, August  3, 2020, https://www.dailymaverick .co.za /article /2020 - 08 - 03-increase -in-rape -and-assault-a-grim-marker-of-rising-levels-of-gender-based-violence/. 13. Shamira Ahmed, “How COVID-19 Exposes the Defects in South Africa’s Digital Economy,” Research ICT Africa, March  26, 2020, https:// researchictafrica .net /2020/03 /26/ how-covid-19 -exposes -the -defects -in -south-africas-digital-economy/. 14. Toyana Mfuneko, “Power Cuts Return, adding to Frustrations in COVID-Weary South Africa,” Reuters, July  22, 2020, https://fr.reuters .com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-safrica-power-idAFKCN24N10K. 15. Kate Power, “The COVID-19 Pandemic Has Increased the Careburden of Women and Families,” Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy 16, no. 1 (2020): 67–73.

PART III Policing and Protest

CIVIL RIGHTS INTERNATIONAL The Fight Against Racism Has Always Been Global KEISHA N. BLAIN

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n June 13, 2020, Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square to call for the eradication of racism and white supremacy. With their fists raised high, the activists, mostly dressed in black, chanted, “Black power!” Were it not for the face masks, which they wore to help stop the spread of COVID-19, the scene could have been taken straight from the 1960s. In that earlier era, activists around the world connected their own struggles to those of African Americans who challenged segregation, disenfranchisement, poverty, and police brutality— just as their successors do today. Meanwhile, Black American activists agitated for human rights and called attention to the devaluation of Black lives not only in the United States but all over the world, including in places under colonial rule. Many tend to think of that era’s push for civil rights and Black power as a distinctly American phenomenon. It was, in fact, a global movement—and so is BLM today. By linking national concerns to global ones, BLM activists are building on a long history of Black internationalism.1 Indeed, Black Americans have always connected their struggle for rights to fights for freedom in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and elsewhere.

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Although surges of Black internationalism have often been led from the top—through the efforts of politicians and diplomats— some of the most dynamic and enduring movements have developed at the grassroots, often led by Black women and involving working-class and impoverished Black people.2 During the twentieth century, Black internationalists organized on the local level, frequently in urban centers, to give voice to the concerns of ordinary people. Using diverse strategies and tactics, they articulated global visions of freedom by working collaboratively and in solidarity with Black people and other people of color across the world. BLM activists have carried on this tradition, often using social media as a vehicle to forge transnational alliances. Although much has changed since the 1960s, racism continues to shape every aspect of Black life in the United States. The troubling pattern of police killings of unarmed Black Americans sparked the current uprisings, but it represents only part of the problem; such killings, horrific though they may be, are merely symptoms of the deeper diseases of anti-Black racism and white supremacy. As BLM activists have emphasized, these problems are not contained within the borders of the United States: they are global scourges, and addressing them requires a global effort.

Footsteps to Follow BLM was launched in 2013 by the activists Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi after the acquittal on murder charges of the man who killed Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old African American boy, in Florida the previous year.3 Following the 2014 police shooting of another Black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, BLM evolved into a nationwide and global

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protest movement. In a matter of months, activists had established BLM chapters in several major cities outside the United States. In Toronto, for example, Janaya Khan and Yusra Ali cofounded a chapter in October 2014 following the police killing of Jermaine Carby, a thirty-three-year-old Black man, in nearby Brampton, Ontario.4 A few months later, a diverse group of activists in Japan launched an Afro-Asian solidarity march called “Tokyo for Ferguson” in the wake of a grand jury’s acquittal of the police officer who gunned down Brown.5 Displaying signs in both English and Japanese, hundreds of protesters marched through the streets of Tokyo. In the months that followed, BLM demonstrations swept cities across Europe, including Amsterdam, Berlin, London, and Paris. In 2016, Tometi  delivered a speech  before the UN  General Assembly and issued a statement emphasizing an “urgent need to engage the international community about the most pressing human rights crises of our day” and pointing out that by internationalizing the movement, BLM was following “in the footsteps of many courageous civil and human rights defenders that came before.”6 Over the past several years, BLM activists in the United States have indeed forged meaningful alliances with activists and human rights campaigners elsewhere. The movement’s internationalization was made visible with the massive demonstrations that erupted in the wake of the police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade, and other Black Americans earlier this year. In establishing such links, BLM is very much following in the footsteps of previous movements against racism. In the early twentieth century, civil rights activists often called on African Americans to see their interests as tied to those of people of color elsewhere. In January 1919, for example, the Black journalist John Quincy Adams published an open letter to President Woodrow

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Wilson in  The Appeal, an influential Black-owned newspaper, demanding that the United States seek to protect the rights and recognition of people of color everywhere. “Through the centuries,” Adams noted, “the colored races of the globe have been subjected to the most unjust and inhuman treatment by the so-called white peoples.”7 At around the same time, Madam C. J. Walker, a business pioneer who rose to fame after making a fortune marketing beauty and hair products for Black people, established the International League of Darker Peoples with several other well-known Black activists, including the Jamaican Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, the labor organizer A. Philip Randolph, and the Harlem clergyman Adam Clayton Powell Sr. During World War I, the ILDP provided a platform for Walker and her associates to advocate for the rights and dignity of marginalized groups across the world and to tap into surging anti-imperialist and anticolonial fervor. In January  1919, Walker coordinated  a historic meeting  in New York City between a delegation from the ILDP and S. Kuriowa, the publisher of the Tokyo newspaper  Yorudo Choho.8 At the meeting, members of the ILDP asked Kuriowa to encourage Japanese officials to advocate racial equality at the Paris Peace Conference, which was scheduled to take place several days later. They received a favorable response from Kuriowa, who assured them, “The race question will be raised at the peace table.” Western officials ultimately sidelined the issue of racial prejudice at the conference. But Walker’s actions laid the groundwork for a new generation of Black activists and intellectuals who sought international support in the decades that followed. The 1930s saw the rise of a number of grassroots political organizations through which African Americans built alliances with activists of color from other countries in the global struggle against white supremacy. During the early 1930s, Pearl Sherrod, a

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leader of an organization called the Development of Our Own, became an early proponent of solidarity among poor nations, identifying the common interests between Black Americans and nonwhites in colonies across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America.9 In a 1934 editorial in the  Detroit Tribune Independent, she reminded readers that “the greater part of the colored world is today under white political control,” even though the majority of the world’s inhabitants were nonwhite. Echoing Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others, Sherrod called on people of African descent in the United States to forge transracial political alliances. “Then, and only then will we get power,” she wrote.10 Sherrod’s internationalist vision mirrored those of other Black intellectuals and activists, including members of the Peace Movement of Ethiopia, the largest Black nationalist organization established by a woman in the United States.11 Founded by Mittie Maude Lena Gordon in Chicago in December 1932, the PME advocated universal Black liberation, economic self-sufficiency, racial pride, and Black unity and attracted around 300,000 supporters during the 1930s and 1940s. Deeply attuned to developments elsewhere, Gordon sought out alliances with activists from abroad. In December  1940, for example, after reading in the  Richmond Times about Akweke Abyssinia Nwafor Orizu, a Black nationalist from eastern Nigeria, she invited him to speak before an audience of PME supporters in Chicago. For ten days in March 1941, Orizu held a series of public meetings with Gordon and her supporters, addressing African nationalism and the emigration of Black Americans to Africa. Like Sherrod, Gordon saw a direct link between manifestations of white supremacy in the United States and those in Asia, arguing in 1942 that the “destruction of the white man in Asia is the destruction of the white man in the United States.” In particular, she emphasized the connection between the challenges

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facing Black Americans and the plight of Indians under British colonial rule. “The complete freedom of India will bring complete freedom to the American black people,” she wrote, “because the same men are holding them in slavery.”

Freedom in the Motherland The Black internationalist movements and organizations that formed in the first half of the twentieth century laid the intellectual groundwork for the civil rights and Black Power movements of the second half. Many of the African American leaders who emerged during the 1950s and 1960s adopted an internationalist vision. For some of them, Ghana—one of the first African countries to gain independence from European colonial rule—held particular significance. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his wife, Coretta Scott King, worked across national borders and forged solidarity with people of color across the globe. The Kings joined a cadre of Black activists and artists—including Randolph, the actress and vocalist Etta Moten Barnett, and the political scientist and diplomat Ralph Bunche—on a trip to Ghana in 1957, just after the country won its independence from the United Kingdom.12 At the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s new prime minister, these African American activists participated in several events in the capital, Accra. During an interview he gave while in Ghana, King credited the visit with renewing his conviction in “the ultimate triumph of justice.” Ghana’s liberation, he said, had given him “new hope in the struggle for freedom.” The following year, the anticolonial activist  Eslanda Goode Robeson, the wife of the singer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson, joined Nkrumah, the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba,

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the U.S. labor organizer Maida Springer, and many other notable figures at the All African People’s Conference in Accra.13 At the conference, attendees advocated the immediate end of colonialism in Africa and emphasized the significance of pan-African unity. In subsequent years, several well-known Black American activists and intellectuals, including Du Bois, Maya Angelou, and Julian Mayfield, relocated to Ghana, drawn to the country by Nkrumah’s pan-Africanist vision and excited by the challenge of nation building in a postcolonial state. “I never dreamed to see this miracle,” Du Bois later explained. “I am startled before it.” During this period, activists skillfully leveraged their transnational alliances and global audience to bring international pressure on the United States to confront racism and discrimination. Against the backdrop of the Cold War, U.S. leaders wanted their country to be seen as a champion of equal rights and democracy and as a beacon of freedom. But efforts to draw a stark contrast between U.S. democracy and Soviet communism were undermined by the mistreatment of Black Americans. Black leaders took advantage of this tension to advance the struggle for civil and human rights.14 Less well-known and more radical African American activists also drew inspiration from overseas and built international networks. From 1957 to 1963, the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women, a grassroots organization led by the radical Black activist Audley “Queen Mother” Moore, brought together Black women in Louisiana to seek reparations, welfare rights, and legal aid for Black men in the United States who had been wrongly accused of rape.15 Moore emphasized the need to secure rights and freedom for “Africans everywhere at home and abroad,” and the UAEW  actively forged transnational relationships, including with the Kenyan labor leader and pan-Africanist Tom Mboya.

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Moore mentored a number of Black Power activists, including Malcolm X. Her dreams of global Black liberation influenced the internationalist ideas that defined his later years. In 1964, Malcolm X toured West Africa for six months, during which time he made  a pilgrimage to Mecca. When he returned to the United States, he established the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which became a significant vehicle for Black internationalist organizing in the 1960s. During his first public address on behalf of the new organization, Malcolm X—who had adopted the name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz following his trip to Mecca— explained that the new group would seek to organize “everyone in the Western Hemisphere of African descent into one united force” and, eventually, to “unite with our brothers on the motherland, on the continent of Africa.”16 Malcolm’s work inspired the activists in the Black Panther Party, originally established in Oakland, California, in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to challenge police brutality against African Americans—much like today’s BLM movement. And, like BLM, the BPP’s work in the United States sparked a global movement to confront anti-Black racism. By the late 1960s, BPP chapters could be found in  several cities across the globe, including Algiers and London.17 BPP leaders also maintained strong transnational alliances with activists in diverse places, such as Cuba, India, Israel, and New Zealand. From the late 1960s to the early 1990s, African Americans were actively engaged in the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa.18 Several organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Council of Negro Women, supported the antiapartheid movement through picketing, lobbying, fundraising, and other activities. Prominent African American celebrities, such as Harry Belafonte,

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Arthur Ashe, and Stevie Wonder, also lent their support, using their platforms to bring international attention to the issue. The collaboration between African American and South African activists highlighted the power and significance of Black internationalism as a political strategy. Activists in both countries endured some of the same challenges, including anticommunist smear campaigns waged by officials intent on suppressing Black resistance. Yet these transnational exchanges played a vital role in shaping the foreign policies of both nations. The political gains and successes, no matter how small, helped invigorate organizers, who drew inspiration from one another as they worked to dismantle racism and white supremacy. By linking local and national concerns with global ones, activists during this period set a precedent for future generations of Black internationalists, including members of BLM.

Black Lives Matter—Everywhere In  a recent interview, Cullors, one of the cofounders of BLM, described the current uprisings as “a watershed moment” in U.S. and global history. “The entire world is saying, ‘Black lives matter,’ ” she added. “The world is watching us,” remarked her fellow cofounder Tometi. “We see these rallies in solidarity emerging all across the globe, and I have friends texting me with their images in France and the Netherlands and Costa Rica, and people are showing me that they are showing up in solidarity.”19 BLM has become a vital force in the long history of Black internationalism. The movement now offers a significant platform for Black activists in the United States to forge and deepen

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transnational links with activists across the globe. Today, BLM has  a global network  of dozens of chapters. This number will likely grow exponentially in the coming years.20 The protests in the United States, in their strength, reach, and sheer magnitude, are unlike any the country has ever witnessed before. The COVID-19 pandemic—which has exacerbated already difficult conditions for Black people in the United States and abroad—has provoked a sense of urgency among protesters. As recent data have revealed, COVID-19 infection rates in Black communities are significantly higher than in predominately white communities. Owing to disparities in income, wealth, and access to health care, among other factors, Black people in the United States are dying from COVID-19 at a rate that far exceeds those for other racial groups, laying bare how racism shapes every aspect of Black life. As the 2020 U.S. presidential election looms, the uprising that began this past spring in the United States is likely to fuel new rallies and protests, which will probably expand across the globe, extending to new places and inspiring activists of all races and social backgrounds. Efforts to quell these movements will also intensify—including efforts that involve surveillance by local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. However, the urgency of the moment and the demands to dismantle anti-Black racism and white supremacy and the violence they yield will keep activists in the streets. Those in the United States can take heart knowing that people all over the world see their own struggles for rights and dignity reflected in the BLM movement.

NOTES 1. Brenda Gayle Plummer, “Civil Rights Has Always Been a Global Movement: How Allies Abroad Help Fight Against Racism at Home,” Foreign

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10. 11. 12.

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Affairs, June  19, 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united -states/2020-06-19/civil-rights-has-always-been-global-movement. Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). “Herstory,” Black Lives Matter, https:// blacklivesmatter.com/herstory/. Errol Nazareth, “Jermaine Carby Inquest Jury Makes 14 Recommendations Following 2014 Shooting Death,” CBC News, May  26, 2016, https:// www. cbc . ca /news /canada /toronto /jermaine - carby -inquest-1 .3601734. Martin Leroux, “Tokyo for Ferguson: Japan Protests Police Brutality,” Metropolis, December  24, 2014, https://metropolisjapan.com /tokyo -ferguson/. Lilly Workneh, “Black Lives Matter Calls for Global Change at United Nations Assembly,” HuffPost, July  21, 2016, https://www.huffpost.com /entry/ black-lives-matter-calls-for-global-change-at-united-nations-ass embly_n_57911e16e4b00c9876ce96df. John Q. Adams, “End Autocracy of Color,” The Appeal, January 25, 1919, https://www.newspapers.com/clip/35057980/the-appeal/. Yuichiro Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20thCentury Black America, Japan, and Okinawa (New York: New York University Press, 2013). Keisha N. Blain, “ ‘[F]or the Rights of Dark People in Every Part of the World’: Pearl Sherrod, Black Internationalist Feminism, and Afro-Asian Politics During the 1930s,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 17, no. 1–2 (2015): 90–112. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Worlds of Color,” Foreign Affairs, April 1925, https:// www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/africa /1925-04-01/worlds-color. Blain, Set the World on Fire. “Ghana Trip,” King Encyclopedia, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, https://kinginstitute .stanford.edu/encyclopedia /ghana-trip. Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). Ashley Farmer, “Reframing African American Women’s Grassroots Organizing: Audley Moore and the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women, 1957–1963,” Journal of African American History 101, no.  1–2 (2016): 69–96.

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16. Malcolm X, “Malcolm X’s Speech at the Founding Rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity,” June 28, 1964, BlackPast, October 15, 2007, https://www.blackpast .org /african-american-history/speeches -african -american-history/1964-malcolm-x-s -speech-founding-rally- organ iza tion-afro-american-unity/. 17. Sean  L. Malloy, Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism during the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017). 18. Nicholas Grant, Winning Our Freedoms Together: African Americans and Apartheid, 1945–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 19. Isaac Chotiner, “A Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Explains Why This Time Is Different,” New Yorker, June  3, 2020, https://www.newyorker .com /news/q-and-a /a-black-lives-matter-co-founder-explains-why-this -time-is-different. 20. Judith Ohikuare, “Meet the Women Who Created #BlackLivesMatter,” Cosmopolitan, October  17, 2015, https://www.cosmopolitan.com/enter tainment/a47842/the-women-behind-blacklivesmatter/.

RAGE AND UPRISING MUSTAFA DIKEÇ

None of this was doing anybody any good. It would have been better to have left the plate glass as it had been and the goods lying in stores. It would have been better, but it would also have been intolerable, for Harlem had needed something to smash. —James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

C

onsider the following incidents from Minneapolis, the city at the heart of the 2020 global uprising that erupted after a white police officer sat on the neck and slowly took the life of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man. In 2015, two police officers shot in the head and killed twenty-four-year-old Jamar Clark, another Black man, while he was handcuffed and lying on the ground, as Floyd was. Clark’s murder was followed, the next year, by that of Philando Castile, a thirty-two-year-old Black man who was shot at least five times and killed during a traffic stop, with his partner and little daughter in the car, in a suburb of Saint Paul, not far from the epicenter of the 2020 uprising. In 2017, Justine Damond, a forty-year-old white woman, was shot to death by

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a police officer responding to Damond’s emergency call to report a possible sexual assault. The following year, Thurman Blevins, a thirty-one-year-old Black man was shot in the back and killed in Minneapolis while running away from two police officers and yelling, “Please don’t shoot.” Castile’s murderer, who was of Hispanic descent, was tried and acquitted. No charges were brought against the white police officers involved in Clark’s or Blevins’s murders. Damond’s murderer, a Somali American, was sentenced to twelve and a half years. Such brutal taking of Black lives with white impunity is not restricted to Minneapolis, as we saw through other high-profile killings in the years leading up to the 2020 uprising. In 2017, Charleena Lyles, a thirty-year-old pregnant mother of four, was shot seven times and killed by two white Seattle police officers at her home, in front of her children, after reporting a burglary. A couple of months before the George Floyd uprising, Breonna Taylor, a twenty-six-year-old Black woman, was shot five times in her apartment and killed by three white police officers executing a “no-knock” entry in Louisville, Kentucky. Neither case resulted in charges against the police officers. Floyd’s murder was the trigger but not the only reason for the 2020 uprising. It was yet another act of violence that finally “overflowed the unimaginably bitter cup,” as James Baldwin wrote in his 1966 essay on police violence against Black lives.1 It is this violence that connects the current wave of urban uprising to previous ones in twenty-first-century U.S. cities. This violence is at the heart of the uprising that started in Minneapolis in May 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, as it was in those that followed Freddie Gray’s murder in Baltimore in 2015, Michael Brown’s in Ferguson in 2014, and Timothy Thomas’s in

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Cincinnati in 2001. Floyd, Gray, Brown, and Thomas were Black men, unarmed, whose lives ended at the hands of the police. But the violence that motivates the uprisings extends beyond literal killings. It is the kind of violence that is routinely visited upon Black and Brown lives in white-supremacist societies, reducing life chances, poisoning everyday lives, and, with shocking regularity, ending life with impunity. And we should remember that the names associated with the uprisings—Floyd, Gray, Brown, Thomas—are just the tip of the iceberg in the long history of routinized violence against Black and brown men and women. Urban uprisings are responses to this violence. They are eruptions of simmering rage, bent on survival rather than destruction, to paraphrase Audre Lorde. They may involve their own violence, mainly in the form of looting and burning, but this violence is episodic and not directed against people, as opposed to the routinized violence against Black and brown lives that produces it. A politics of rage does not equate emotions with irrationality or impulsive behavior but can affirm equality, claim agency, and ask for justice. The fact that calls for change have had to be expressed in rage through revolt, as we have seen in the past months, is a sign not of the moral failings of the individuals involved—even if a storefront was smashed in the process—but of our democracies’ failure to address recurrent wrongs and attend to the violence they routinely produce. Q Q Q

Among certain demographics, Minnesota is generally considered to be a desirable place to live, thanks to its good schools and housing, its regional transportation network, its several corporate employers, and its vibrant artistic community. As the scholar

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Samuel  L. Myers  Jr. put it, however, it is also “one of the worst places for blacks to live” because of what he calls the “Minnesota paradox.” Although Minnesota fares exceptionally well according to many indicators of economic and social well-being, African Americans living in the state are worse off compared to those living in almost every other state in the country. This gap has its roots in a history of racially discriminative policies, and it becomes starker in Minneapolis. As an article in the Washington Post put it, racial inequality in Minneapolis “is among the worst in the nation”: a typical Black family earns less than half as much as a white one; the homeownership rate for Blacks is one-third that of whites, such that only about 25 percent of Black families own their homes—one of the lowest Black homeownership rates in the country—whereas the rate for white families stands at 76 percent, one of the highest. Poverty amid plenty is a powerful source of resentment, as we have seen with other urban uprisings in the United States and elsewhere (for example, Cincinnati 2001, Ferguson 2014, Baltimore 2015, London 2011, Paris 2005, and Stockholm 2013, to take examples from countries considered to be developed and democratic). But the inequalities do not stop at economic and social indicators. Minneapolis police have a long history of racism, which adds another layer of hardship for Black people. The rate of police use of force against Blacks in Minneapolis is seven times the rate against whites. Police brutality is common and is not disciplined. More than 2,600 civilian complaints have been filed against Minneapolis police officers since 2012, but only a dozen cases saw disciplinary action, with forty hours of unpaid suspension being the harshest punishment. Derek Chauvin himself, the police officer who took Floyd’s life by sitting nonchalantly on his neck for almost nine minutes, had received at least seventeen complaints during his nineteen years in the force—almost one a

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year. He received two letters of warning regarding one case; the other sixteen were closed without any disciplinary action taken. These cases of police violence followed by impunity reflect a broader pattern across the country, as the data collected by Mapping Police Violence show. In 2019, there were only twenty-seven days on which police did not kill anyone. Between January 2013 and June  2020, police officers in the United States killed 8,263 people, and in 99 percent of these cases, the involved officers were not charged. Twenty-eight percent of those killed by the police since 2013 were Black, even though Black people make up only 13  percent of the population. Compared to white people, Black people are 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed yet three times more likely to be killed by the police. This racialized pattern of police violence across the country can help us understand how what happened in Minneapolis resonated strongly in other places, producing the largest urban uprising in U.S. cities since the 1960s. Although the extent and intensity of the uprising was exceptional, its context was similar to the conditions—stark inequalities and aggressive, racist policing— that produced the large uprisings earlier in the twenty-first century, in Cincinnati, Ferguson, and Baltimore. The uprisings were all responses to these problems, which are produced by policy choices rather than limited to the isolated or occasional actions of rogue police officers. The rage that erupts in urban uprisings is not an impulsive reaction to singular cases of bad practice; it is a response to systematic exclusion and oppression, which extend beyond police violence and into all areas of urban life, including housing, employment, social encounters, and political worth. None of this suggests a causal relationship between insurrections and the pathological disposition of those who participate in them. Yet references to “scum,” “criminals,” “feral youth,” “people with a

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twisted moral code,” and “marauders and marginals” are repeatedly made by politicians in power during the uprisings, as we have seen not only in the United States, but also in other countries that have increasingly experienced such revolts since the turn of the century. During the first two weeks of the Floyd uprising, President Donald Trump described the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets as “radical left bad people,” “rioters, looters, and anarchists,” “dangerous thugs,” “hoodlums,” “criminals and vandals,” and “angry mobs,” suggesting that the people who participated had no idea why they were doing this, that they were simply following the crowds. Although Trump is a loose cannon and would be expected to say the most peculiar things, this time he deployed a common and mainstream trope in denouncing urban uprisings: angry people who are allegedly not aware of why they are doing this and, instead, are rejoicing in a mindless frenzy of destruction. The outbursts of rage that mark urban uprisings are related to the structures and dynamics of society and how people see their place and future in it. When they feel excluded and are constantly reminded of their exclusion on a daily basis in their urban lives, what we get, these uprisings suggest, is a profound sense of disenfranchisement and resentment, to the point that people engage in acts that indicate they have little or no stake in their community. Rather than insisting on participants’ individual pathologies, it would be more politically progressive to look at the sources of their resentment. It would be a mistake, it seems to me, to let the spectacle of episodic looting and burning overshadow the deeply entrenched and routinized violence that so many nonwhites, Blacks in particular, suffer on an everyday basis. There are two possible, not mutually exclusive interpretations of the increasing frequency and expansion of urban uprisings and

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other forms of protest, one bleak and the other promising. The bleak version suggests that our urban lives are characterized by widening inequalities and increasing hardship for disadvantaged groups while wealth and power remain in the hands of a few. With no effective policies or procedures to address the grievances rising from this polarization, uprising and protest become key to expressing resentment and staging public appeals for justice and equality. This leads to the more promising interpretation: that people have had enough. This is evidenced by the unprecedented expansion of the Floyd uprising beyond Minneapolis, not just throughout the United States but around the world. This global spread of revolt and protest was truly exceptional, suggesting that the grievances brought into sharp relief with Floyd’s murder had a wider resonance across cities and communities in the United States and the world. A Floyd mural was created even in war-torn Idlib. This spread, coupled with palpably deepening support for the Black Lives Matter movement, is a promising sign that more people are now more aware of and sympathetic to the grievances of the oppressed and are willing to do something about it. They are angry for a reason, and their rage is justified. The demonization of the masses as unreasonable, angry, violent, and easily manipulated goes back to a now largely discredited sociological tradition that has its roots in nineteenth-century France with Gustave Le Bon’s ruminations on crowd psychology. This depiction of crowds also betrays an even longer history of unease about emotions in Western philosophy, where the alleged emotionality of the crowd signals irrationality as opposed to reason, threatening the ideal of the rational individual. But emotions have a rich cognitive and intentional content, and reason is not some pure power free from them. If the people participating in the uprisings are angry, their anger does not imply being irrational or without sense. To the

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contrary, it involves judgments and beliefs about what matters in life. Such judgments are based on certain beliefs and values— such as justice, equality, or freedom from oppression—which are all at play in urban uprisings. Perhaps more important, however, expressing anger—or its more intense form, rage—can be an assertion of subjectivity and equality that allows the oppressed to establish themselves as moral and political agents making judgments about and responding to wrongs. As Toni Morrison’s narrator in The Bluest Eye thought about the dehumanized Black girl Pecola: “Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.”

NOTE 1. James Baldwin, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” The Nation, July 11, 1966, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/report-occupied -territory/.

DEFUND THE POLICE AND REFUND THE COMMUNITIES KEEANGA- YAMAHTTA TAYLOR

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he United States remains locked in a vise of crisis. The pandemic continues to tromp through the country, surging unabated, raging like a California wildfire. More than 240,000 people have died as the nation now braces for a predicted fall and winter surge. Instances of police violence have been met with sustained protests that may last for days or weeks in one locality, only to give way to another publicized case of police abuse elsewhere, igniting a new round of local demonstrations and demands for change. While police brutality has been the sharpest edge of the country’s racial crisis, that crisis’s most enduring manifestations—in housing, education, health care, and employment—are getting worse as the pandemic recession deepens. These crises are not unfolding in parallel; instead they are linked in a national unraveling exacerbated by simultaneous avoidance and instigation by Donald Trump. Where Trump has consistently downplayed the significance of the virus, even when infected with it, and ignored the wider social crises that are becoming more entrenched the longer they remain unattended, he has just as vociferously demanded law and order, effusively praised the police, and egged on the violent right-wing fringe that

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makes up a portion of his base of supporters. The result has been to make a historically bad situation feel, at times, unbearable. New predictions warn that the United States could near 300,000 deaths by the end of the year. While a threat to the country as a whole, the virus’s spread is particularly dire for African Americans, as Black communities across the country have suffered the heaviest burden. Belying their minority status, Black Americans are massively overrepresented among the dead, dying at three times the rate of their white peers.1 By August  2020, COVID-19 had become the third leading cause of death for African Americans. The deep and pervasive inequities exposed by this government’s failed efforts to stem the extraordinary transmission of the virus were overlaid with the stresses of a crumbling economy that threatened to wipe out the meager wages and salaries that were keeping Black families above water. Nationally, unemployment stands at 6.9 percent, but for African Americans, it is nearly 11 percent. So the violence of police, which has been the main propellant pushing people into the streets, only underscores the inequities that continue to dog Black communities. The added burden of police harassment compounds the existing frustrations that circulate in place of opportunities robbed by racism. In the pandemic, the deprivation is raw, acute, deadly. Tensions are high, and tolerance for the typical humiliation of police interactions is decidedly short. This is a dynamic that will not easily be undone. The social mechanisms that should be in place to respond to these crises don’t exist and have not been invented. The scale of the crisis has surpassed the financial meltdown in 2008, yet our government, led by a cabal of narcissistic millionaires with a palpable hatred for even the idea that government resources would be used to help people, has dithered in the face of generational catastrophe.

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But to blame these issues on Trump alone would be to ignore how years of bipartisan-inspired wars, austerity, racism, and retrenchment have impaired and undermined the state’s capacities to respond in meaningful ways. At a time when millions of people need unprecedented public intervention to stave off the worst effects of these crises, the stewards of government struggle to pursue plans that can rescue those standing on the edge of a financial precipice. The dueling crises of the pandemic and police brutality have brought these problems—typically hidden or not a part of public conversation—to the surface of our society and made them impossible to continue to ignore. In their wake is the sobering possibility that the tools offered to fix these problems—whether they be temporary eviction moratoria, temporary enhanced unemployment payments, or culturalcompetency programming for police—are wholly inadequate to end the problems for which they are prescribed, thus creating the possibilities of ongoing, deepening, and widespread anger and bitterness. The pandemic, as well as police brutality and the protests it provokes, are the most urgent problems because they are the most disruptive to maintaining social equilibrium. But the deeper roots lie in persisting social, political, and economic inequality. When young activists speak of “dismantling systems,” these are the networks of destruction they are attempting to identify. Of course, no government in the midst of a global pandemic could guarantee the protection of everyone, but the U.S. government has barely tried. This is because doing so would require a rejection of principles deeply ingrained in this country’s governance over the last forty or so years as public aid and assistance have been demonized and treated as worse than the conditions they are supposed to cure. The result has been the diminution of public programs combined with a rigid call for greater personal

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responsibility as the surest prophylactic against the trials and tribulations of life in late capitalism. The imprint of this thinking couldn’t be clearer during the pandemic. Government mandates have been replaced by appeals to personal responsibility.2 Last July, when Tennessee experienced its highest single-day coronavirus-case increase yet, the governor, Bill Lee, blamed the citizens of his state: “When we have people dying in this state as a result of this virus, we should be taking personal responsibility for this.” The Republican governor of South Carolina insisted, “We cannot keep businesses closed forever. . . . What it boils down to is, we must be careful individually.”3 Millions of workers had to either return to jobs that threatened their health or risk losing their benefits. Here is where race and class violently intersect: working-class African Americans are concentrated in jobs that make them vulnerable to being exposed to the virus. Since the onset of the pandemic, these jobs have been arbitrarily described as “essential” even though the pay offered and protections available to those workers reveal these positions as more marginal than anything else. Meanwhile, American billionaires have become $583 billion richer since the onset of the virus while millions more ordinary people have lost health care, housing, jobs, and any sense of security. The optics are cruel: the well-off and elite take refuge away from the threat of the virus, buffered by the bodies of poor workers forced to labor under threat of disease. But without state and national governments’ imprimatur for coordinated guidelines and a massive deployment of federal resources that could allow people to safely isolate without fear of economic collapse, all of the personal willpower in the world could not prevent the spread of an airborne virus. That was never in the works. Instead, there was a one-time payment of $1,200 for those lucky enough to qualify. There was enhanced unemployment for

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those capable of navigating systems to apply for unemployment that had been sabotaged by public officials hoping to dissuade the unemployed from exercising their right to unemployment insurance. Perhaps most importantly, though, the state underestimated or completely failed to calculate how the virus’s disproportionate impact on Black communities would converge with existing frustrations and bitterness over racist police abuse and unleash the most violent and sustained uprising in a generation. They also underestimated the ways that white people would realize their own vulnerabilities, exposed through the spread of the virus, and join with Black people in revolt against a deadly, stultifying status quo. According to analyses from the New York Times, tens of millions of Americans have participated in Black Lives Matter protests.4 The protests were spread across 2,500 cities large and small, including mostly white cities like Portland, ME, and Boise, ID. This momentum not only points to a developing solidarity built over several years of Black activism demanding that white people take action against racism; it also speaks to the growing insecurity that pervades the lives of ordinary white people. The worst toll of these conditions has unquestionably fallen on Black communities. It can be measured in the weight of the growing numbers felled by the virus. But among working-class whites, the impact of this crisis is undeniable as the economy comes to a halt and our virtually nonexistent social-welfare state, with its appalling inadequacies, fails to function. When this reality is layered atop mounting student loan debt and medical-care debt, as well as a future that is so clouded by ambiguity and insecurity that it is impossible to see what it holds, Black protests offered a way out, a potential direction toward clarity and purpose. This realization among tens of millions has laid the foundation for a genuine resistance to the status quo we face today. It is

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an unprecedented outpouring. At its heart was the fury that fueled nights of fires and looting. But for stretches of days into weeks, there were peaceful protests involving dozens to tens of thousands of ordinary people. These protests were sustained by quickly generalizing beyond the specific issue of police brutality, just as the BLM movement in 2014–16 had done earlier. The movement has mostly come to focus on defunding police agencies and redistributing those resources to other, underresourced public services. Since an aversion to taxing wealthy individuals and corporations has left local governments ill prepared to effectively respond to local crises of poverty and unemployment, they turn to policing to manage the inevitable problems that arise in the absence of a robust economy and given a threadbare safety net. In cities across the country, then, law enforcement takes up enormous portions of local budgets. Cities have also become used to paying out tens of millions more to settle lawsuits in response to police killings or police brutality; those sums are written off as the cost of doing business. The pivot to “defund the police” operates on a visceral level and a practical level. The United States spends nearly $100 billion a year on policing alone. This does not include the tens of billions spent to maintain the criminal-justice system. Reducing funds for police may lower the numbers of police, which can limit the contact between law enforcement and those communities they occupy. Less contact lowers the possibility of police harassment, violence, and, in some cases, murder. Through this process, all of the racist assumptions that are reinforced by the presence of police may also be undermined. Those who claim that the demand to defund the police is too extreme fail to grasp the evolution of the demand. It is only because of the continued failure of more moderate strategies to

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rein in the police that activists are then drawn to “extreme” solutions. While the general public’s attitudes concerning police seem to have liberalized over the last several years, American police seem even more violent, racist, and impervious to the mildest of reform. In city after city, cell-phone recordings have captured brutish behavior by public servants tasked with defending the public good. Police in New York have driven their cars through throngs of protesters, mimicking a tactic popularized by a white supremacist in Charlottesville, VA, in 2017. Police have been captured on tape beating nonviolent protestors, fraternizing with white militia members, cavorting with white supremacists, and wantonly discharging tear gas, rubber bullets, and other weapons against unarmed residents. If one were to turn down the sound on the coverage, it would be impossible to spot the difference in lawenforcement tactics between the United States and Hong Kong or Belarus—all brutalizing a gathering public at the behest of authoritarian leaders. In the face of this repression, requesting fewer funds to choke the beast of racist police terror appears very reasonable to many activists. These calls for the redistribution of funds from policing to public services were easy conclusions to reach as the pandemic continued to push the broken parts of our society to the surface. Where states struggled to gather PPE for health-care workers, police in cities across the country were armed to the teeth and outfitted in the latest and most expensive gear and devices. But there have been other questions: Why are our public schools’ HVAC systems so outdated that schools are forced to remain closed because administrators cannot ensure the circulation of fresh air in the buildings? Why is there so little affordable housing that people must endure the threat of eviction in the midst of a public-health crisis?

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The contradictions and lies that connect the pandemic to the quotidian spectacle of racist police violence are blatant. Where localities struggled with the simplest forms of coordination between city and state and national government, the deployment of national-guard troops along with local police appeared to be done with ease and rapidity. The police state was cohesive and coherent in all of the ways that the public-health state and the broader social-welfare state had failed. We are, of course, a long way from defunding the police. But no social movement shapes its agenda by what is most pragmatic and least contentious. Instead, movements begin with what they want and believe to be necessary. If the pandemic has revealed what is broken in our society, then redistributing public dollars away from law and order and back toward treatment and care is the solution. We need public schools, housing, hospitals, and libraries that are funded akin to how cities and states fund their police departments and pay for their prisons and jails. These redistributed funds would not be enough to finance an ailing public sector or to help create the kinds of jobs that are necessary to restore hope and excitement about the future. But they would be a step in the right direction and away from the violence of the police. The scale of the protests and the intensity of the anger can be terrifying and exciting, as both illuminated a way out of the darkness of this long winter threatening never to end. But the frenzy of a June uprising brought spring and all of its hope and expectation for renewal, vitality, life.

NOTES 1. Niall McCarthy, “Nearly Three Times as Many Black Americans Are Dying from COVID-19 Compared with White People as Pandemic Death Toll Surpasses 150,000,” Forbes, July 30, 2020, https://www.forbes .com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/07/30/nearly-three-times-as-many-black

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-americans -are -dying-from-covid-19 -compared-with-white -people -as -pandemic-death-toll-surpasses-150000-infographic/?sh=763df59b328d. 2. Robert L. Woodson Sr., “Personal Responsibility and the Coronavirus,” Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/personal -responsibility-and-the-coronavirus-11588611762. 3. Kimberlee Kruesi, “Governors Stress ‘Personal Responsibility’ Over Virus Orders,” WFMY News 2, July  4, 2020, https://www.wfmynews2 . com /article /news / health /coronavirus /governors - stress - personal -responsibility-over-virus-orders/507-a941fd1b-a797–46f5-a408–34b7 fa7 3d4dd. 4. Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui, and Jugal K. Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” New York Times, July 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd -protests-crowd-size.html.

POLICING’S HISTORY ARGUES AGAINST REFORM SIMON BALTO

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his summer, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, calls to defund or abolish police departments rose up in cities across the United States. The response from the political center and center-right was swift: the best way forward was not to respond to police misconduct by cutting budgets but instead to enact varying degrees of police reform. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which House Democrats passed in June, skirted the issue of defunding or abolition, prioritizing instead more expansive accountability for police misconduct through reform measures like limiting qualified immunity as a defense to liability in a civil action against a law enforcement officer, banning chokeholds, and ending racial profiling.1 Senate Republicans claimed that bill went too far and countered with a plan for far more modest and less enforceable reform measures.2 Neither legislative package has gone anywhere since the summer, and both appear to have been largely forgotten in Washington, DC, in the chaos of election season.3 This despite the fact that the policing crisis has not gone away. To take the case of one American city, we might look to Chicago, which spends more than 1.8 billion dollars on its police force in

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an average year.4 That price tag includes the official budgetary allotment to the Chicago Police Department (CPD) from the city, as well as bond money the city borrows to pay for the exorbitant costs of police brutality settlements. Despite city officials’ heavy investments in policing, by many measures, the CPD is not good at making the city safer. Last year, for instance, the department made no arrests in 78 percent of the city’s first-degree homicide cases.5 Over the past decade, it has made no arrests in 80–90 percent of sexual assault and abuse cases.6 And on top of that, each year on average over the past three decades, Chicagoans officially log about eight thousand misconduct allegations against CPD officers for everything from bribery to use of force.7 The vast majority result in no disciplinary action against accused offending officers, leading to widespread assertions that the police are not accountable to the citizenry they supposedly serve.8 In what other context would citizens and policy makers tolerate such a miserable return on such a major investment? What other publicly funded institution could cost so much, prove so inefficient, and have elected public officials across all layers of government and most of the political spectrum suggest that the best way to fix it is through mild, modest, and, in many cases, unenforceable reform? The case against reformist approaches to America’s policing crisis is obvious to me as a historian of policing. American police have been reformed over and over again throughout the course of their existence. In the past, they were reformed in response to corruption, ineffectiveness, politicization, and more. In part because police have ensured that such would be the case, these reforms have never successfully held police accountable to the larger public they supposedly serve or lessened the disproportionate burden of police harassment and violence on communities that are poor, immigrant, or nonwhite. Instead, they have

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offered police departments more tools, more policies, and, importantly, more power and enhanced credibility in the broader public consciousness.9 To know the history of American policing, from departments’ origins to past efforts to reform them, is to reckon with the fact that something more than reform is needed if we are truly to confront and solve the policing crisis in this country. Q Q Q

Orlando Wilson was superintendent of the Chicago Police Department for most of the 1960s, and he was the most earnest and important reformer the department has ever had. One of the country’s leading criminologists; a dean at the University of California, Berkeley; and a dedicated technocrat, Wilson was hired in early 1960 to clean up a seemingly hopelessly corrupt Chicago Police Department in the wake of yet another embarrassing public scandal.10 And upon his arrival in Chicago, he began trying to do just that, working to fix the department largely through the implementation of assorted reforms intended to make the CPD more efficient and accountable. He immediately confronted a conundrum, however, in that his own officers would accept only certain types of reform. In particular, they embraced measures that expanded their power (for example, the formal implementation of stop-and-frisk) while rejecting any reforms that threatened it.11 It was, for instance, Wilson who tried to establish an Internal Investigations Division for the first time in the department’s history.12 That attempt was met with rebellion from the department’s rank and file, led by the Chicago Patrolmen’s Association, which worked tirelessly to try to get Wilson fired in retaliation. His Internal Investigations Division did get implemented despite officers’ outcry, but it was never effective: most police

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didn’t buy into its legitimacy, critics within and outside the department dismissed it as an “eyewash” reform that officers needn’t really fear, and it has remained essentially toothless ever since.13 Reforms that police didn’t want, in other words, didn’t work. The major problem with reform experiments like Wilson’s is that they incorrectly interpret the core essence of policing. There is a broad misconception among most of the American public, including among police, that the reason police departments exist is to promote general well-being and public safety. If that were true, then reforming police would mean simply bringing them into better alignment with their fundamental purpose. The inconvenient truth of police history in the United States, however, is that police departments were not designed to keep a generic public safe. Rather, they were meant to serve the needs of capital and to uphold racial and ethnic hierarchies.14 To put it differently, police were designed with power and control in mind, not generalized public safety. Consider again the example of Chicago. Like most cities, it didn’t have a police department before the mid-1800s.15 When the city finally established one in 1853, it was because some Chicago business owners demanded it and agreed to help fund it.16 They didn’t do this because Chicago was a cesspool of criminal behavior, and they certainly weren’t pursuing an abstract interest in protecting the general population. Rather, the CPD was organized to control the supposedly undesirable behavior of immigrant groups (Irish and German affinities for drinking being among the gravest concerns of these early police boosters). Shortly thereafter, it was widely used to repress workers and break strikes as the local labor movement grew more assertive. The major point of policing, in other words, was to control immigrant groups and the working class.

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As a result, the people who were policed hated the CPD. Throughout the second half of the 1800s, one violent conflict after another erupted between the department and city residents, all of them precipitated or exacerbated by police violence against immigrants and the working class: the Lager Beer Riot of 1855; the Great Railroad Strike of 1877; the Haymarket Affair of 1886.17 Time after time, citizens (most of whom were European immigrants who today would simply be seen as “white”) faced police repression and rebelled against it.18 Perhaps ironically, it was in these moments of violence that people in positions of power— who had remained somewhat skeptical of the police in its formative years—came to appreciate the CPD and understand its utility. They saw people who needed to be controlled and a police force that was becoming fairly good at controlling them, largely through violence. By the early twentieth century, the department was firmly established as a central (albeit dysfunctional) presence in Chicago’s urban fabric. Chicago had its own particularities in terms of the early functions of the police, but it reflected the essential fact of what police were designed to do. As the historian Sally Hadden’s research on the antebellum South shows, the first proto-police were slave patrols, which were authorized to surveil African American populations and arrest those who committed the “crime” of trying to steal themselves to freedom.19 The overlap between slave patrols and the police was significant. Meanwhile, Kelly Lytle Hernández has noted in City of Inmates that in the early years of the Los Angeles Police Department, the police were heavily preoccupied with controlling that city’s large number of transient workers and thus disproportionately performed the function of arresting people for victimless offenses like homelessness.20 You don’t have to squint much to see the binding thread running through these assorted departmental genesis stories. Police

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were expected to protect the capital of wealthy elites, whether that meant arresting the human property of Southern slaveholders or rounding up radical labor organizers and crushing worker militancy. And they were supposed to surveil and control populations who were marginalized by virtue of their positions on the laddered hierarchies of class, race, and ethnicity. At the end of the day, a generic interest in promoting public safety did not rank high on their reasons for existing. This history poses a fundamental challenge for anyone advocating police reform, because it forces the question of what such advocates hope to reform police into. If the reformers’ vision is one of restoration—of bringing police back into alignment with a mission from which they’ve strayed—they misunderstand the foundational premise of U.S. policing. Indeed, if one of the primary problems with policing in 2020 is that those who bear its greatest burdens are Black, Latinx, Native, immigrant, and poor communities, a fair argument can be made that, in fact, the system operates more or less as designed. American police have always targeted specific groups for surveillance, control, and punishment, even as those targeted have varied and shifted over time. (The CPD’s early focus on European immigrants, for instance, gave way to a heavily discriminatory focus on African Americans when Black southerners began moving there en masse in the early and mid-twentieth century.) What would reform look like if the institution is the problem? The other core issue with pushing a reform vision is that police, simply put, do not want to be reformed and have always fought, rejected, or ignored reforms that threaten their power. Recent attempts at reform of officers’ behavior through bodycamera mandates illustrate this challenge.21 In practice, officers routinely turn cameras off, and departments and municipalities are often loath to divulge the cameras’ content.22 Another

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example unfolded in October  2020, when the CPD announced that it was accepting only 5 of 155 recommended reforms to the department’s use-of-force policies laid out by a working group empaneled by the city during the summer; members of the working group have since labeled the whole affair a “sham.”23 Orlando Wilson’s efforts in 1960s Chicago provide yet another illustration of why reform won’t solve the crisis. Wilson’s reform agenda was broad. In addition to pushing accountability mechanisms like the Internal Investigations Division, he also modernized communications technology and paperwork methods, hired more officers of color to battle accusations of racist hiring practices, implemented “Officers Friendly” programs to convince children that police were their friends, and established Community Relations Workshops to facilitate dialogue between police and citizens.24 At the same time, Wilson drove a tough-on-crime agenda that included marking certain neighborhoods (almost all of them poor and Black) as requiring special “aggressive preventive patrol.” He commanded his officers to engage in the widespread use of stop-and-frisk in those neighborhoods and implemented arrest quotas for officers who worked those streets.25 The cumulative positive impacts of all these reforms were meager, and their negative ones significant. Because the Internal Investigations Division never functioned properly, officers were not made more accountable. They were made more powerful, however, especially those officers who worked in Black and Brown communities. The reforms in Wilson’s suite generally gave the appearance of meaningful change without doing much to shift the lived reality of those people who were the most policed. In that last sense, what happened in 1960s Chicago largely echoes what scholars have found in police reform agendas elsewhere. As the historian Max Felker-Kantor writes of 1970s Los Angeles, reform “largely focused on changing the community’s perception

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of law enforcement, not the daily operation or actions of the police. As a result, these approaches did little to alter the fundamental issue of whom the police served and how the police served them.”26 The history of police reform, in other words, is generally one of expanded police power and greater perceived legitimacy of the police. It is not one of police conduct being effectively regulated and constrained, at either the individual or the collective level. Q Q Q

This is why calls to defund the police and envision alternative forms of harm prevention, reduction, and repair (in other words, actual public safety) are necessary. Part of the reason policing in the United States is so expensive is that policy makers have given police so many different functions in society, from responding to mental health crises to regulating homeless populations. In 2012, under former mayor Rahm Emanuel, the city of Chicago closed half of its mental health clinics (to say nothing of the shuttering of more than fifty public schools and other components of the public commons) while continuing to raise the CPD budget.27 With clinics closed, in many cases police took up the task of resolving mental health crises for people without access to treatment, though police lack training in helping people in such situations and, statistics show, disproportionately resort to violence when responding to situations of mental health crisis. Why not take a chunk of the CPD’s budget and reinvest it in not only reopening the shuttered clinics but opening many more? Or perhaps go further: in Sweden, mental health professionals are paid to work the streets and aid people in mental health crises so that police don’t have to.28 Why not take after Finland and reallocate part of the police budget and reinvest it in housing and

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other resources for homeless people, rather than paying for the police to routinely arrest them on minor charges?29 Indeed, why not rethink everything? What if the city of Chicago took a massive chunk of the CPD’s budget and instituted a universal basic income for all households that live below the poverty line? What if hundreds of thousands of people were, through this mechanism, able to access basic resources as well as more things to nourish their lives? Logic would suggest that the supposed need for police, as police and politicians articulate it, would decline significantly. Indeed, if you spend any time inside wealthy suburban neighborhoods, where people’s material needs are generally met, you’ll note that the police are not a particularly active presence besides at the periphery, where they work to keep outsiders from entering. Americans remain strangely attached to the idea that to meaningfully reduce police resources and reinvest them elsewhere, or even to get rid of police altogether, is unthinkable. Reform is the intellectual shoal on which seriously reimagining an equitable public safety for us all founders. What actually should be unthinkable is continuing to try to reform the police when we have nearly two centuries of history showing why they can’t be.

NOTES 1. “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020,” H.R. 7120, 116th Congress (2019–2020), https://www.congress.gov/ bill/116th-congress/house-bill /7120. 2. Lisa Mascaro and Mary Clare Jalonick, “Senate GOP Proposes Police Changes, Less Sweeping Than Dems’,” AP News, June 17, 2020, https:// apnews.com/article/206387fbb8c9aabec895b7fc032ede99. 3. Claudia Grisales, “House Approves Police Reform Bill, but Issue Stalled Amid Partisan Standoff,” NPR News, June 25, 2020, https://www.npr.org /2020 /06 /25 /883263263 / house - approves -police -reform - bill - but-issue -stalled-amid-partisan-standoff.

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4. “What Is the Chicago Police Department Budget?,” Civic Federation, June 23, 2020, https://www.civicfed.org/civic-federation/blog/what-chicago -police-department-budget. 5. Mark Konkol, “Chicago Police Don’t Arrest as Many Murderers as You Might Think,” Patch, February  10, 2020, https://patch.com/illinois /chicago/chicago-police-dont-arrest-many-murderers-you-might-think. 6. Sarah Schulte, “Chicago Police Arrest Record Only 10 to 20% for Sex Assault, Abuse Cases, Below National Average for Last Decade, Report Shows,” ABC 7 Chicago, October  8, 2020, https://abc7chicago.com /chicago-police-sex-assault-abuse-cpd/6873440/. 7. Matt Masterson, “Chicago Police Publish New Data on Civilian Complaints,” WTTW, November  4, 2019, https://news.wttw.com/2019/11/04 /chicago-police-publish-new-data-civilian-complaints. 8. “Accountability Dashboard, Bureau of Internal Affairs,” Chicago Police Department, https:// home.chicagopolice.org /statistics-data /data-dash boards/accountability-dashboard-2/. 9. Emma Gray, “American Policing Has Always Been About Enforcing White Supremacy,” HuffPost, June  4, 2020, https://www.huffpost.com /entr y / alex - s - vitale - american - policing - has - always - been - about -enforcing-white-supremacy_n_5ed934c2c5b69dee016ed79e. 10. “Orlando Wilson of Chicago Police,” New York Times, October 19, 1972, https:// www . nytimes . com / 1972 / 10 / 19 /archives /orlando -wilson - of -chicago-police-superintendent-19601967-who-led.html. 11. Simon Balto, “Chicago’s History with Stop-and-Frisk Laws Is a Warning,” Time, September 27, 2016, https://time.com/4510112/chicagos-history -stop-frisk-presidential-debate/. 12. Aimee Levitt, “The Brotherhood’s Last Stand,” Chicago Magazine, October 13, 2020, https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/November -2020/John-Catanzara-Fraternal-Order-of-Police/. 13. Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). 14. Gray, “American Policing.” 15. Olivia Waxman, “How the U.S. Got Its Police Force,” Time, May 18, 2017, https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/. 16. Balto, Occupied Territory. For a detailed study of the rise of the CPD, see Sam Mitrani, The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850–1894 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014). 17. Robin Einhorn, “Large Beer Riot,” Encyclopedia of Chicago, http://www .encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org /pages/703.html; Joseph Adamczyk, “Great Railroad Strike of 1877,” Britannica, https://www.britannica.com

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/topic/Great-Railroad-Strike-of-1877; editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, “Haymarket Affair,” Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event /Haymarket-Affair. Brent Staples, “How Italians Became ‘White,’ ” New York Times, October  12, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion /columbus-day-italian-american-racism.html. Sally  E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Candice Norwood, “Body Cameras Are Seen as Key to Police Reform, but Do They Increase Accountability?” PBS, June 25, 2020, https://www .pbs .org /newshour/politics / body- cameras -are - seen -as -key-to -police -reform-but-do-they-increase-accountability. Kelly Weill, “Baltimore Cops Caught Turning Off Body Cameras Before ‘Finding’ Drugs,” Daily Beast, August 1, 2017, https://www.thedailybeast .com / baltimore -cops -turned-off-body-cameras -before -finding-drugs; Josh Sanburn, “Why Police Departments Don’t Always Release Body Cam Footage,” Time, August 17, 2016, https://time.com/4453310/milwau kee-police-sylville-smith-body-cams/. Jacqui Garmain, “Chicago Police Rejected 150 out of 155 Reform Recommendations,” Mic, October  15, 2020, https://www.mic.com/p/chicago -police-rejected-150-out-of-155-reform-recommendations-39065940. Stacy Ann Lewis, “A History of Programs Implemented by the Chicago Police Department Within Chicago Public Schools,” Dissertations 50 (2011), https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/50; Balto, Occupied Territory. Balto, Occupied Territory. Max Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Jeff Coen, “Rahm Emanuel Closed Half of Chicago’s Mental Health Clinics. What Was the Impact—and Will Lightfoot Reopen Them?,” Chicago Tribune, June  6, 2019, https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-met -lori-lightfoot-chicago-mental-health-clinics-20190524-story.html; “Chicago Board of Ed Votes to Shut Down 50 Schools,” CBS News, May 22, 2013, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chicago-board-of-ed-votes-to-shut -down-50-schools/; Christopher Hacker, “CPD Budget to Swell to Over $1.7 Billion in 2020 Budget,” CBS Chicago, November  4, 2019, https:// chicago.cbslocal.com/2019/11/04/cpd-budget-to-swell-to-over-1–7-billion -in-2020-budget/.

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28. “Stockholm’s Mental Health Ambulance Could Help the US Rethink Policing,” The World, September  10, 2020, https://www.pri.org /stories /2020-09-10/stockholms-mental-health-ambulance-could-help-rethink -policing-us. 29. Karla Adam and Rick Noack, “Defund the Police? Other Countries Have Narrowed Their Role and Boosted Other Services,” Washington Post, June  14, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/police - protests - countries - reforms /2020 /06 / 13 /596eab16 - abf2–11ea - a43b -be9f6494a87d_story.html.

CAN I GET A WITNESS? JEFFREY AARON SNYDER

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opened my phone and I started recording because I knew if I didn’t, no one would believe me.” So said Darnella Frazier, the seventeen-year-old Minneapolis resident who took the footage of George Floyd’s killing that circulated around the world last summer.1 Frazier’s instinct to press record, something other witnesses to anti-Black violence have done in recent years, makes perfect sense in light of our country’s history of ignoring and suppressing Black testimony. Black people have testified about the terrors of racism for a long time now; most white people, and the political institutions that could end that violence, have refused to listen. The assumption that Black testimony doesn’t count as much as white testimony is a basic feature of American racism that was built into the laws of the slave system and continues to frame the idea of justice in the United States. Black people have always used whatever technology they could to put their testimony before the general public. Consider nineteenth-century slave narratives, books that launched the African American literary tradition and became pillars of the long Black freedom struggle. Prefaces written by prominent white abolitionists were essential features of the genre, serving to assure

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white readers that these Black authors really had written their own books—and that they really were telling the truth about the horrors of slavery.2 It is no coincidence that the most common subtitle for slave narratives was “Written by Himself” (or “Herself” in the case of Harriet Jacobs). That former slaves—from a supposedly “inferior race” and deprived of formal education—could successfully write their own life stories was perceived as a remarkable fact that demanded explanation. “It will naturally excite surprise that a woman reared in Slavery should be able to write so well,” Lydia Maria Child noted in her introduction to Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), citing a kind mistress who taught Jacobs to read and spell as well as frequent contact with cultured Northerners who gave her “opportunities for self-improvement.”3 Still, many white readers harbored doubts that former slaves could be reliable narrators, especially when recounting instances of slavery’s violence. “Skeptics,” William Lloyd Garrison wrote in the preface to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), “will try to discredit the shocking tales of slaveholding cruelty which are recorded in this truthful Narrative.”4 But Douglass’s testimony, Garrison assured them, was “sustained by a cloud of witnesses, whose veracity is unimpeachable.” These “Certificates of Character,” with respectable whites praising the “moral integrity” and “religious sincerity” of the Black authors, were crucial to the abolitionist cause. So were assurances that there was evidence backing authors’ claims. In the case of Henry Bibb, an official committee vetted the claims he made in Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb (1849) as follows: “Thorough investigation has sifted and analyzed every essential fact alleged and demonstrated clearly that this thrilling and eloquent narrative, though stranger than fiction, is undoubtedly true.”5

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In a slave society where bondage depended on the dehumanization of Black people, it’s hardly surprising that only white people could be counted on to certify the accuracy of a book written for a white audience. We should not forget that the most popular and influential antislavery text published during the antebellum era was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Note that Stowe’s depiction of slavery as a “system of hidden and endless violence” was deeply informed by the “living testimony” of liberated and fugitive slaves she had met.6 Beginning in the colonial era, African Americans were prohibited from speaking on their own behalf in court. In 1705, the state of Virginia passed its first slave code, which included a prohibition on Black people testifying against whites. “This legal disability,” according to historian Paul Finkelman, was “a hallmark of racial codes for the next 160  years.”7 It opened the door for whites to cheat, harass, and terrorize Black people, free and enslaved, with impunity. After Reconstruction, when Black men and women had the constitutional right to testify in court, it was frequently disregarded. At the trial for the lynching of Emmett Till in September 1955, two Black sharecroppers provided compelling eyewitness accounts identifying J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant as the individuals responsible for kidnapping and killing Till. The two white men were acquitted by an all-white Mississippi jury in deliberations that lasted just over an hour. Again, despite extensive reporting about violence against Black Americans by Black journalists, scholars and activists, white testimony became a chosen vehicle for changing white minds.8 In 1961, the white journalist John Howard Griffin published Black Like Me to rapturous reviews. Using a prescription drug and an ultraviolet lamp to darken his skin, the book documented Griffin’s journey to discover what it was “really like” to be

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“a Negro” in the Deep South.9 It was a “nightmare,” Griffin wrote, recounting daily indignities and threats, including frequent barrages of racial slurs. Griffin’s task was not to reveal what racism was but to convince white people that all the things Black people had been saying about racism were true.10 And how many people would have believed Rodney King’s account of his 1992 beating by Los Angeles police had an observer not recorded it with a video camera? In the past few years, the police killings of Black men and women have resonated with this long history of white disbelief, making the recording functions of inexpensive cell phones a powerful tool for collecting and disseminating evidence. When she decided to record the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Darnella Frazier understood that without the footage, no one in authority would believe what she was seeing. Alissa  V. Richardson, author of Bearing Witness While Black, places Frazier’s actions in a long tradition of “Black witnessing,” a distinctive gaze that musters “defiance, self-defense and selfpreservation” and declares: “I don’t want anybody to lie about this death.”11 Black witnessing encourages us to see instances of violence against Black bodies not as isolated incidents but as part of an “ongoing racialized saga.”12 Social media allows Black witnesses to broadcast police brutality and violence to a broader public without white gatekeepers or mediators. These videos have an extraordinary power, providing evidence that challenges ignorance, indifference, and injustice.13 “America can’t un-see” videos such as the George Floyd killing, former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nuttter said: people “can’t act like it didn’t happen.”14 Yet as these incidents accumulate, so does an endless loop of brutality and annihilation that can flatten the individual humanity of victims. “I would like to get to the point where Black people

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are just believed,” Richardson said in a recent interview with the Guardian. “We shouldn’t need this footage to prove that we didn’t deserve our own demise.”15 The phenomenon of “Black witnessing” now has a parallel in books that ask white people to bear witness about whiteness and white privilege. Robin DiAngelo’s best-selling White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (2018) is just one of the many recently published books about whiteness by white authors that features a foreword by a Black activist or scholar that attests to its authenticity. The African American reverend Brenda Salter McNeil’s foreword to Daniel Hill’s White Awake: An Honest Look at What It Means to Be White (2017) attests that she has “known and walked with Daniel for over ten years.” McNeil continues that she has “observed him in many situations and conversations about reconciliation and justice and I can attest that he is attuned to his own identity and privilege as a white man.”16 Here, we can hear an echo from 175 years ago of Wendell Phillips’s introduction to Frederick Douglass for white readers: “We have known you long and can put the most entire confidence in your truth, candor and sincerity.” Recalling the skepticism about how former slaves could write so well, contemporary antiracist white authors face doubts about their racial literacy and what they can contribute to a movement for Black liberation. Does this white author have the necessary qualifications to write about racism? The question, it seems, can only be answered by a Black witness, someone who has experienced racism firsthand. Because of this perhaps, the prominent white, antiracist educator Tim Wise summons more than a dozen well-known Black witnesses to vouch for him and his work on the “Testimonials” page on his website, Michelle Alexander, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Cornel West among them.17 “Wise,” West attests, “is a vanilla

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brother in the tradition of John Brown, a truth-teller and long distance freedom-fighter whose fight against White Supremacy is exemplary and inspiring.” Similarly, in his introduction to White Fragility, the Black sociologist Michael Eric Dyson praises Robin DiAngelo for forcing white people to recognize that “their whiteness has given them a big leg up in life while crushing others’ dreams.”18 He goes on to call her “the new racial sheriff in town,” who bravely “fetches to center stage a whiteness that would rather hide in visible invisibility.” In exchange, it is a prerequisite for white authors to offer selfreflexivity about their own complicity in maintaining white supremacy. (We find ourselves, then, in the curious situation where white supremacists go out of their way to claim they are not racist while white allies loudly proclaim that they are.)19 “I have a racist worldview, deep racial bias, racist patterns and investments in the racist system that has elevated me,” Diangelo confesses. On the never-ending work of recognizing her own “internalized superiority,” she writes: “I am eager—even excited— to identify my inevitable collusion so that I can figure out how to stop colluding!”20 If Black testimony is often subject to a heightened degree of scrutiny and skepticism among whites who would prefer to turn away from racism, it is also a valuable and more deliberate currency for white liberals and progressives. Surely this validation of Black perspectives must count as historical progress. At the same time, we should at least pause to note that, when mobilized by whites, Black voices replicate a familiar Black-white racial binary that Americans have been taught to see as natural and preordained. When Black witnesses render a verdict on the character of white authors, we are not necessarily seeing a new conversation about race but a reversal of the power dynamic in which one group authorizes another to speak.

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The idea that we are fundamentally different from each other and that this difference is fundamentally racial remains intact.

NOTES 1. Joanna Stern, “They Used Smartphone Cameras to Record Police Brutality—and Change History,” Wall Street Journal, June  13, 2020, https:// www .wsj . com /articles / they - used - smartphone - cameras - to -record-police-brutalityand-change-history-11592020827. 2. John Sekora, “Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative,” Callaloo (1987): 482. 3. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Boston, 1861). 4. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845). 5. Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb (New York, 1849). 6. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston: John P. Jewett and Co., 1853). 7. Graham Russell Hodges,  Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619–1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 8. Ida  B. Wells-Barnett, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892); Carter Godwin Woodson, The Negro in Our History (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1922); National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918 (New York: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, National Office, 1919). 9. John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me (1961). 10. Bruce Watson, “Black Like Me, 50 Years Later,” Smithsonian Magazine, October  2011, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/black-like -me-50-years-later-74543463/. 11. Allissa  V. Richardson, Bearing Witness While Black (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 12. Allissa V. Richardson, “Smartphone Witnessing Becomes Synonymous with Black Patriotism After George Floyd’s Death,” The Conversation, July 13, 2020, https://theconversation.com/smartphone-witnessing-becomes -synonymous-with-black-patriotism-after-george-floyds-death-142153. 13. Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui, and Jugal K. Patel. “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” New York Times, July 3,

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16. 17. 18. 19.

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2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd -protests-crowd-size.html. “It Really Is Different This Time,” Politico, June  4, 2020, https://www .politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/protest-different-299050. Zoë Corbyn, “Allissa Richardson: ‘It’s Telling That We’re OK with Showing Black People Dying,’ ” The Guardian, August 16, 2020, https://www .theguardian.com /world /2020/aug /16/allissa-richardson-its-telling-that -were-ok-with-showing-black-people-dying. Daniel Hill and Brenda Salter McNeil, White Awake (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2017). “Testimonials,” Tim Wise, http://www.timwise.org /testimonials/. Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility (Boston: Beacon, 2018). Nathan G. Alexander, “When Racists Called Themselves ‘Racists,’ ” ARC Digital, September  29, 2020, https://medium.com/arc-digital/when -racists-called-themselves-racists-94783812cef4. DiAngelo, White Fragility.

AS AMERICAN AS CHILD SEPARATION RACHEL NOLAN

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n June  2018, I attended a protest in front of the gold-domed Massachusetts State House in Boston. It was the height of furor over the Trump administration’s child-separation policy, words so flat-sounding that they cannot even approach the pain of what was happening. Since April 2018, the government had employed a “zero-tolerance” policy, forcibly separating children from their parents—supposedly, to deter migration at the U.S.-Mexico border. Most of the families were Central American—from Honduras, Guatemala, or El Salvador. They were fleeing such chaos and suffering at home that nothing would deter them. But this didn’t prevent the U.S. government from taking their children. Despite decades of dulled response to the mounting horrors at the border, child snatching touched a nerve. There were widespread protests across the United States, often expressed with signs, or speeches, to the effect of “This is not us,” or, “This is unAmerican.” Hillary Clinton tweeted, “There’s nothing American about tearing families apart.” At the Boston protest, a Black woman, with a commanding air, stepped to the microphone with a different view. “This is not a new story,” she said. “We have a long legacy of children of color being ripped from their parents. At the auction block, at Native

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American reservations, because of the war on drugs, and now because of what’s happening at our borders.” I had just moved back to Boston. I asked another protestor, “Who is she?” It was Ayanna Pressley, then at-large city councilor, now congresswoman in the U.S. House of Representatives. Pressley gave as succinct as possible a summary, two years in advance, of the argument of Laura Briggs’s new book, Taking Children: A History of American Terror. To call the book “timely” is an understatement. Briggs traces the history of a very American practice of separating children from their parents—mostly poor and of color—against the parents’ will. Briggs adds U.S. foreign policy, in the form of support for military regimes in Latin America that forcibly separated and “disappeared” children. But, otherwise, Pressley’s list hits the grim highlights. Is “taking children” too broad a category for understanding such different phenomena: Native American children kidnapped and sent to boarding school and Black children separated from their enslaved parents? Briggs does risk flattening out her argument by gathering many kinds of historical patterns under the category “child taking.” But the synthetic view has its merit. As the critic Fintan O’Toole recently wrote in a different context: “To see history—at least the history of war—in terms of people is to see it not as a linear process but as a series of terrible repetitions: what happens to human flesh in episodes of organized violence is always and everywhere the same.” For “war,” swap in “racist violence” or “genocide.”1 Once you are looking at the people, you see not just slaughter and rape but the children taken, over and over, in a horrifying loop. As Briggs notes, since the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, taking children has been recognized as a constitutive part of the crime. The best-known part of the 1948 definition of genocide is “killing members of the group.” But the last, lesser-known part of

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the five-point definition is “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Briggs describes the United States, along with other democracies in Europe, as toggling between a racial nationalist set of politics and an uneasy liberalism. It is this back and forth, push and pull, that creates different varieties and patterns of child taking— some meant to be hidden, secret, others intended as a sickening, punitive, public spectacle. All child taking is not the same but it is part of a recognizable historical pattern. What about that subtitle: “A History of American Terror”? Of course, this is not a uniquely American form of terror, even as Briggs uses that term advisedly to mean not just the United States but Latin America as well. A strong chapter, drawing on her own earlier work in Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption, shows how the U.S. government turned a blind eye to, if not actively encouraged, the theft of Latin American children by military dictatorships during dirty wars in the Southern Cone and Central America, from the 1970s through the 1990s. These children resurfaced in the tens of thousands, stripped of their histories—and, in the case of Guatemala, in many cases of their Indigenous identities—as adoptees either in-country or abroad. Briggs’s point is not that taking children is unique to America but that it is not unAmerican in any way. Q Q Q

Large-scale child snatching began its American story early. What set racialized slavery in the Americas apart from other forms of slavery (in ancient Greece or Rome, enslaved prisoners-of-war) or  unfree labor (indentured servitude, Asian workers labeled “coolies”) was that it was hereditary. By definition, if you were

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held as property, your children were property, too. They could be taken from you and sold away at any time, to anyone, anywhere. Taking children, like sexual violence, could be a form of both terror and profit. It was a threat as well as an actual practice. The threat was meant to deter rebellion or other “bad behavior.” Of course, enslaved families, especially mothers, fought for their children, as Central American families at the border do now. Sojourner Truth, after she was free, said at a women’s rights congress: “I have borne thirteen children and seen most all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard.” Truth spent years struggling to get her children back and was the first Black woman in New York to successfully sue a former owner. According to Briggs, she forced him to honor a promise to free her child, even after he had been sold away to Alabama. Briggs draws on studies of the family lives of enslaved people, slave autobiographies, and abolitionist literature to remind us that families mourning stolen children suffered one of slavery’s foundational traumas. As Briggs points out, an important recent book on slavery—what the author Saidiya Hartman calls “the process by which lives were destroyed and slaves were born”—is titled Lose Your Mother. Q Q Q

Briggs’s chapters “Taking Black Children” and “Criminalizing Families of Color” take us all the way up through the present. An important pause on this rapid tour of U.S. history allows us to take stock of the U.S. welfare programs that, as Briggs writes, “have been a political football since their inception as mothers’ pensions in 1909.”

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Such welfare programs are where we get the language of the “fit” mother: those deemed by the state to be deserving of keeping their children and given a modicum of stingy support. Up until the 1960s, there were transparently racist efforts to get Black mothers off welfare rolls—their children were supposedly illegitimate, welfare would disincentivize work. After the sixties, the racism was coded in different ways: supposed welfare queens, a now debunked moral panic over “crack babies” as the war on drugs heated up. This recoded racism upped the flow of Black children into foster care. Children were often “removed” over the strenuous objections of Black mothers and taken by social workers for no reason other than poverty. The logic is circular. The government wouldn’t (and won’t) help alleviate poverty through meaningful welfare. In consequence, mothers—especially, nonwhite mothers—were “unfit,” their children taken. And let’s not forget the largest separation scheme in contemporary U.S. life: mass incarceration. But that one is reversed. The parents are taken. Q Q Q

The  U.S. government began systematically separating Native American children from their families in the 1870s. Native children were sent to boarding schools where the mission was to “kill the Indian to save the man,” as the founder of one school infamously put it in 1892. School administrators cut the long hair of children, forbidding them to speak their languages or visit their parents, which might slow or impede assimilation. By the 1920s, over 80 percent of Native American children of school age were in boarding schools. In 1930, one witness on the Navajo (Diné) reservation wrote, “The children are caught, often

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roped like cattle, and taken away from their parents, many times never to return.” Scholars and activists are still uncovering the violence, including sexual abuse, that was rampant at these boarding schools, which saw large-scale shutdowns only in the 1970s. By that time, Native American children were frequently taken from families without consent. Again, it was that “fit” mother argument, as made by non-Native “authorities” who did not recognize childcare practices involving extended families. Native American children so frequently ended up in the foster or adoption system that Native activists successfully lobby for legislation preventing their communities’ children from being taken. The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), passed in 1978, limited the removal of Native American children from their communities for foster care and adoption and gave tribal governments a stronger voice in child-custody proceedings. The ICWA—and, by extension, tribal sovereignty—is still frequently challenged in U.S. courts. Meanwhile, the “plenary power doctrine” used to defend boarding schools—as Briggs explains, quoting the legal scholar Maggie Blackhawk—remain the direct legal precursors to today’s detention camps, which currently hold migrant and refugee mothers and children.2 Q Q Q

As in her previous book, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump, Briggs sometimes seems fatigued by the exercise of historical synthesis she has undertaken. How can you not already see it? In the introduction to Taking Children, she writes that the events she is about to narrate are “not exactly obscure.” It is only the narrative of American exceptionalism that has made it hard for some to

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connect the dots, to name the pattern as candidly as Ayanna Pressley did at the Boston protest. The book is not an unremitting dredging up of past and present misery. Briggs takes care to highlight organizing strategies and social movements that have been partially or fully successful in slapping back the various tentacles of child taking. These include organizing from abolitionist movements before the Civil War to midcentury Native American activism to keep and raise their children in the way they saw fit to the sanctuary movement protecting asylum-seeking families in churches in the 1980s. She ends with a sobering caution. Changing presidents won’t be enough to ensure a discontinuation of the practice that is so deeply engrained in American politics and life. The Trump policy of “child separation” for zero tolerance is officially discontinued, but it continues in another guise. Now, children are separated from their asylum-seeking parents for “neglect,” which, according to immigrants’ rights activists, can be as minor as failing to change a diaper promptly. Some argue that the act of migrating with children—with all the dangers it entails—means that asylum seekers are not “fit” parents. They do not stop to think or read about what has to be snapping at the heels of parents forced to make this choice. Parents around the world are the same: with tragic exceptions for abuse, they do not willfully endanger their children. Trump loves to lie about who started child separations at the border. Last year, during an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Trump said that he “inherited separation” from President Obama and that he (Trump) “was the one who ended it.” He has played variations on this lie, during interviews and campaign rallies. But it is not the same policy. The Obama administration separated children from parents due to “neglect” at the border, sometimes under dubious

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circumstances. But there was no systematic policy of taking children to deter migration. Without excusing either policy or forgetting Obama’s earned moniker as “Deporter-in-Chief,” it is important to remember the distinction between what happened under Obama and outright separation as policy, which only began under Trump. But Briggs’s book makes me wonder—when Trump is out of office, will people’s attention turn away from the border again? If so, how will separating children from their parents continue, under what legal guise? “We are haunted,” Briggs writes, “by our collective inability to think of those who lose their children to foster care or face criminal charges as having claims to their kids that deserve to be taken seriously.” I would add, after reading her book, that we are haunted by our collective inability, after child separations, to somehow avoid rearranging the facts of the case. Rearranging, that is, so as to more comfortably reflect the view that we would like to have of America: We don’t do that. So, it must somehow be the mother’s fault. If you belong to one of the communities most harmed by taking children, in the past or in the present, you already knew. If you didn’t know, once you see the pattern, read the stories, follow the footnotes, you can’t unsee it. Taking children is a crime of long standing in America. It is not a recent mutation, a freak orange accident on which we can easily turn the page.

NOTES 1. Fintan O’Toole, “A Moral Witness,” New York Review of Books, October 8, 2020, https://www.nybooks.com /articles/2020/10/08/martha-gellhorn -moral-witness/. 2. Maggie Blackhawk, “The Indian Law That Helps Build Walls,” New York Times, May 26, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/opinion /american-indian-law-trump.html.

PROTESTS AGAINST POLICE BRUTALITY GO GLOBAL DAVID SCHMIDT

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s soon as COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, the rumors started: it had been prophesied all along! The psychic Sylvia Browne had predicted it in her 2008 book  End of Days,  writing: “In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe.” The Brazilian author Melissa Tobias described it in her novel A realidade de Madhu: a “global pandemic that would kill more than three billion earthdwellers.” Some even attributed prophetic powers to the end credits scene of the 2001 film  Planet of the Apes,  depicting how a new disease could quickly spread across the globe through air travel. It didn’t take psychic powers to foresee how quickly a pandemic would spread, though. And in this age of unprecedented interconnectivity, infectious diseases aren’t the only thing that goes viral. Social tendencies seem to crop up simultaneously in distant corners of the globe. The recent rise of the far right—in such disparate countries as Hungary, the Philippines, Brazil, and the United States—is just one example. Most recently, police violence—and the mass protests in response to it—are making news across the globe. While protests erupt across the United States in response to the murder of

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George Floyd, Mexico’s people have protested their nation’s own wave of public police brutality cases. Q Q Q

Thirty-year-old Giovanni López, a low-income construction worker, was sitting on the stoop of his aunt’s house on May 4. He was just finishing dinner along with his aunt and brother. They lived in a poor, dusty neighborhood on the outskirts of the lakeside town of Ixtlahuacán de los Membrillos, in the state of Jalisco. Despite Ixtlahuacán’s tourism economy and large U.S. expat community, the surrounding towns languish in neglect. Police officers approached Giovanni, detained him, and threw him into a truck, along with seven other neighborhood locals. According to eyewitness accounts and early media reports, Giovanni was detained for not wearing a facemask. (The State of Jalisco made masks mandatory in public as of April.) The authorities countered that he was detained on suspicion of substance abuse and for assaulting the officers. Giovanni spent that night in jail. While in police custody, officers beat him severely and sent him to the hospital. He died the following morning. Nearly a month went by before the case was made public. (In the State of Jalisco, the odds of a crime being solved are 0.6 percent, many languishing in a bureaucratic bottleneck of stacked files.) It wasn’t until early June, when reporters began to pressure the state authorities, that the police finally announced they “would look into the case.” By that time the news had become public. A month after Giovanni’s death, his brother posted a video of his detention online, which quickly went viral. At the peak of coronavirus infections in Mexico, outraged crowds flooded the city of Guadalajara and marched to the state capital. Clashes soon erupted

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between protesters and police. Police cars were burned and government buildings graffitied. The police used tear gas to disperse the crowds. Similar protests rocked Mexico City and other large cities across the country. As in the case of George Floyd, of course, this one public case represented the tip of the iceberg, a face and name to put on years of abuse and impunity. As in so many countries, tensions were high after months of quarantine, fear, job loss, and uncertainty. Outrage at police violence, long festering like a sore, had now exploded, to paraphrase Langston Hughes. Other cases have emerged in the wake of Giovanni’s death. A video surfaced in early June, from the northern border city of Tijuana, which shows police officers stepping on a detained man’s neck. The man later died. On June 11, the teenager Alexander Martinez went to a local store with his friends to buy soft drinks. Alexander lived in the town of Acatlán de Pérez Figueroa, in the southern state of Oaxaca. He was a well-liked, athletic boy, on the fast track to a career as a professional soccer player. When he and his friends left the store on their motorcycles, municipal police officers ordered them to stop. When they didn’t, an officer shot to kill. As the newspaper El País reported, “There are corners of Mexico where they shoot first and ask questions later. Violence sets the rules for this macabre game.”1 The authorities responded that they had mistaken him for a criminal—an all-too-common claim. Q Q Q

Many in the United States are used to hearing of state violence in other countries. “Well, of course that happens in Mexico,” some friends have told me regarding these recent events. Even more

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than police impunity, the violent repression of free speech is often described as “a foreign phenomenon.” For many Americans who have never set foot in a demonstration, repression is something those other countries do. The government fires on unarmed protesters in Russia, in China, in Iran. Millions watched the lone protester stand against tanks in Tiananmen Square and said, “Good for that brave man. And how terrible that they treat their own people like that.” Needless to say, this perspective requires a considerably myopic and selective memory. How quickly we forget Kent State, the repression of the Civil Rights Movement, the dogs, the fire hoses, the clubs. The paramilitary terrorism of the mass lynchings. The beginning of this century, as well, saw violent government responses to antiglobalization and antiwar protests. Perhaps because of this mindset, many of my friends and family were shocked when I told them about the brutal police response to our own peaceful demonstration here in San Diego, CA. A large crowd of over 1,000 unarmed civilians marched through downtown San Diego on the afternoon of Sunday, May 31. Signs and placards called for peace and reconciliation, justice for George Floyd. “Say his name!” was a frequent cry during the march. “No more police brutality!” The full force of the state came out to meet us. Armored vehicles and police with militarized equipment; National Guard troops; snipers posted in visible positions on the roofs of buildings lining Broadway, training their weapons on us. Still, the march remained calm. We gathered in front of the Hall of Justice. Things looked hopeful. Then shots were fired. The first sound was that of a “flash bang” to disperse the crowd. “Something hit me,” a young man next to me shouted. Soon after,

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we heard the familiar  pop pop pop  of small-arms fire—rubber bullets fired at the crowd indiscriminately. As young women and children screamed and protesters ran eastward down Broadway, a large second flank of officers drove up from the south to trap the crowd in a closed area of the street. (This technique, known as “kettling” or “corralling,” is a military strategy used to surround large groups of unarmed protesters, causing maximum bodily injury and detentions.) “We were doing so good,” a female college student next to me cried out to the crowd of officers in riot gear. “Why did you have to take it there?” How fragile, that peace. How quickly the facade of free speech dissipates. Similar scenes played out in cities across the nation, including the capital. Shortly before the first shots were fired, SDPD announced on their official Twitter account: “Unlawful assembly order being given in the area of Broadway. We are asking everyone to disperse immediately due to the escalation of violence by the protestors.” None of the people I spoke with at the event heard any warning at the time. (If it was announced, it must have been made by the “low-talker” from a certain Seinfeld episode.) Over one hundred San Diegans were soon arrested for being present at the protest. “I thought that only happened in places like Russia,” one local friend said as I described the scene. “Some of my Russian friends have said the opposite,” I replied. “That this kind of repression was a uniquely American thing. They grew up watching heartbreaking footage of our protesters being shot at during the Vietnam War and Civil Rights marches. They pitied us.” History comes full circle as many Russian voices have recently called on the United States to adhere to international law and human rights norms. On June  4, Maria Zakharova—Russia’s

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director of the Information and Press Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—condemned the violent suppression of Black Lives Matters marches in the United States. “In [the authorities’] actions taken against peaceful protesters, tear gas and other special means were used, in fact, while making arrests and detentions . . . the authorities must not violate Americans’ right to engage in peaceful protest.”2 Interestingly enough, Mexico is experiencing a very similar series of events at the same time. Q Q Q

It is always unwise to make simplified equivalencies between countries, especially in the case of the unique history of the Black Lives Matter movement. Mexico does not have the same history of racial dynamics as the United States. Indeed, some of Mexico’s intellectuals and privileged citizens insist that inequality and prejudice do not exist there, under the frequent cry, “We never had a Ku Klux Klan here.” This is true. Moreover, Mexico never had Jim Crow laws or lynchings based on skin color. Slavery was outlawed in Mexico in 1810, fifty-three years before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Some of Mexico’s very first presidents were of Indigenous and African descent (Benito Juarez and Vicente Guerrero, respectively). Yet, as in many countries, the privileged get lawyers, trials, justice; the poor get the shaft. The marginalized citizens live in those “corners of Mexico where they shoot first and ask questions later.” Meanwhile, some elites in Mexico—descendants of the old Spanish ruling class, “whitexicans” in the current popular lexicon—deny the reality of prejudice and inequality.

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One of them has made a name for himself as a YouTuber and comedian. Chumel Torres has been widely criticized for his frequent racist and classist comments. Controversy erupted recently, when the National Commission for the Prevention of Discrimination (CONAPRED) announced a forum on racism and class prejudice and invited Torres to participate in the forum. The head of CONAPRED resigned in the wake of the controversy, and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador called for the dissolution of the institution. “This is like holding a forum on human rights,” he stated, “and inviting a torturer to it.”3 The dynamics of prejudice and inequality are complex and unique in Mexico, blending racial issues with social class. The author Federico Navarrete develops the concept at length in his book on racial prejudice in Mexico,  Alfabeto del racismo mexicano. At its heart, though, the principle is the same one behind the protests in the United States: violent, unequal, and systematically unfair treatment by law enforcement. A long history of state violence against the poor—especially those who speak up against the status quo—and impunity for those who exert it. Of course, protests against police violence, corruption, and impunity are nothing new to Mexico. In 2014, the country was rocked by the disappearance of forty-three students from Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, following a coordinated attack by municipal police and criminal elements.4 What is interesting now, though, is how these events have coincided with those in the United States. I recently spoke with Arturo Ramos, retired professor of sociology of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), about the globalized tendency in these protests: “It is a corollary result of economic and cultural globalization. Social movements are currently transcending national borders—both in the case of the rise of the far right, as well as with expressions

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of resistance and struggle against various forms of the oppression of social classes, of the masses, exercised by monopolistic, transnational capital.” The collective outrage against police brutality and unequal treatment has exploded across many countries. On June 6, thousands marched in Australia against police violence against the aboriginal population. Protesters gathered in Paris on the same date, many remembering Adama Traoré, a man of African descent who died in 2016 while in police custody. Other protests took place in England, New Zealand, and elsewhere. These circumstances have existed for years. As technology and social networks make it increasingly easier for everyday citizens to expose them, though, they are emerging simultaneously, in a global movement of outrage. “In this day and age,” Professor Ramos continued, “when people react to the discrimination and abuse in a particular country or region, that reaction will rarely stay confined to geographical or political boundaries. This is because the diverse global channels of communication, thanks to new forms of technology, allow for the integration of identities and struggles for true justice and inclusion, as a projection of the essential human nature which makes us a global community, capable of overcoming the secondary differences that so often divide us.” Shortly after Alexander Martinez died in that Oaxaca hospital, his mother cried out in front of the clinic. “My son had a dream, and those sons of bitches cut his dreams short. They killed my boy, I know that now. But I want everyone to rise up, to refuse to put up with this. Fight back. Because they could do the same thing to any one of you, too.”5 This is the lament of countless mothers, a collective pietà. As we know all too well, George Floyd echoed the cry back, calling out for his mother with his last breath. These cries are universal,

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the wailing of every mother, every son and daughter. Todos somos Giovanni, todos somos Alexander, todos somos George Floyd. We are all Giovanni, Alexander, and George Floyd. May their deaths not be in vain.

NOTES 1. “Un último gol contra la impunidad policial en México,” El Pais, June 12, 2020, author’s translation. 2. “Захарова: власти США должны соблюдать право своих граждан на мирные протесты,” TASS, June 4, 2020, author’s translation. 3. “AMLO critica invitación a Chumel Torres a foro sobre racismo y clasismo,” El Universal, June 17, 2020, author’s translation. 4. “AYOTZINAPA Reasons of State—and Economy,” Brooklyn Rail, February 2015, https:// brooklynrail.org /2015/02/field-notes/ayotzinapa-reasons-of -stateand-economy. 5. “Un último gol.”

PART IV Viral Biopolitics

TO HEAL THE BODY, HEAL THE BODY POLITIC JULIE LIVINGSTON

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n 2020, the coronavirus pandemic has laid bare a fundamental truth often ignored in American society: the human body is a relationship.1 We humans can pass a virus among us aboard our pleasure cruises and on our business travels. We can pass a virus among us when standing cheek by jowl on the deboning line in the Perdue chicken plant, trying to make rent. We can call a virus toward us by buying and selling wild animals whose commodity value grows as their habitats and their future shrink. The body is an act of exchange and a site of vulnerability in a complex and more-than-human world. This body truth is not limited to our current reality with the novel coronavirus. The water filtered through your body may someday rain on a field of potatoes in Kamchatka; it’s already in the salmon in Puget Sound, along with the Prozac, Lipitor, Flonase, Tylenol, and Cipro you consumed.2 Americans are encouraged to inhabit our bodies as the most primary form of private property, as a fortress, a temple, a machine whose health is individually secured through consumption in a marketplace of technology and goods. Yet this very fantasy—wherein health is an atomized, even competitive pursuit underwritten by technological consumption—is at the core of our existential predicament. Remedies

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are framed as false dichotomies. Health or economy? Justice or safety? My body or yours? The relationship that is my body, your body, is so extensive, so tentacular, that it hides in plain sight. Here in New York City, where I live, the private car and the highway by which wealthy Manhattanites escape to fill their lungs with the clean air of their second homes also produce “Asthma Alley” in the largely Hispanic, working-poor Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx. Though the driver may not realize it, each trip to the Hamptons results in the dusting of particulate on a small child sitting in her living room, clutching her inhaler. Before 2020, the relationship that is the body was already ailing. People around the world were awash in an array of comorbidities—the underlying and overlapping chronic diseases that make them especially vulnerable to serious illness from COVID-19. Even if we humans could bring the novel coronavirus under control technologically (no easy feat), we would still be left with the diabetes, the cancers, the hypertension, the kidney disease, the asthma, and other comorbidities. They would still kill, debilitate, and impoverish many of the same people most vulnerable to the virus, albeit more slowly and without much fanfare. Even if COVID-19 disappeared tomorrow, the prospect of the next pandemic would remain amid the factory farming, the accelerating loss of wild habitat, and the global flesh trade that facilitate zoonosis.3 Wildfire season would still have arrived on the West Coast, and 2020 would still have seen more of Dhaka, Jakarta, Lagos, and Miami ceded to the ocean. Before Americans began sacrificing our elders’ future to “reopening the economy,” we had already honed the sacrifice zone—the place just offstage, obscured from view, where the well-being of some is seized as an offering toward some higher purpose called “the economy.” Young people have rightly chafed at the expectation they will forfeit

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their future to the climatic side effects of current economic activity. Now the elderly have been called upon to do the same. I call the phenomenon from which the pandemic, the wildfire, the flood, and the comorbidities stem “self-devouring growth,”4 or the collateral damage wrought when we organize our politics, our economies, and our cultural dispositions around endless, industrially configured, consumption-driven growth. This collateral damage includes the growing gap between rich and poor and the corrosive effects on democratic decision-making, as well as the deadly ecological and bodily fallout manifest in rising cancer rates and ocean temperatures, species loss, and air and water pollution. The idea that singular technological solutions—like the effective coronavirus vaccine I hope for—will solve these complex political and economic challenges is part of the problem. Keep your inhaler close; it is a vital tool. But know that it is no cure for tainted air. Know that the mountains of discarded inhalers are hazardous waste. The disaster is now our steady state, not our singular event. Self-devouring growth asks us to see this as the expected, predictable outcome of our economic system and its disposition toward growth without end. Self-devouring growth operates in part through the sacrifice zones where billions of people, disproportionately Black and Brown, live and work, obscuring and displacing the side effects of growth out of view. It proliferates through solutions that are narrow and, in the end, part of the same growth machine—palliating the symptom, even as the larger ailment festers, while profiting from both. Consider type 2 diabetes. This is one of the comorbidities that make a person particularly vulnerable to manmade disaster, from war to hurricanes to COVID-19 to deadly urban heatwaves to the unthinkable explosion in Beirut.5 Diabetics must maintain control over their diet and exercise regimens, their hydration, and

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their access to the necessary supplies and services to manage their disease, including glucose monitors and test strips, insulin, pumps, and needles. If they are among those whose condition has resulted in end-stage kidney disease, they will also need access to dialysis. This is a massive endeavor in the best of circumstances, especially for those who are food and housing insecure. But it proves near impossible amid catastrophe, with its sudden displacements, interruptions in supply chains, and power cuts. We don’t pass diabetes along like a virus, but we humans have grown it like a market—passing it among ourselves via our political, economic, infrastructural, agricultural, and pharmaceutical practices. Nabisco makes the Oreos that foster hyperglycemia, and it sells the Honey Maid Cinnamon Roll Thin Crisps that have earned the Diabetic Living magazine seal of approval.6 Meanwhile, its parent company, Mondelez, cuts deeper into the Indonesian and West African rain forests, shrinking remaining wild habitats and raising carbon levels through deforestation. Bayer makes glucose meters and (as the owner of Monsanto) also the pesticides, herbicides, and genetically modified seeds necessary for the industrial production of cheap sugar. We grow diabetes through our landscapes of sedentarization and neglect, our cars and our couches. We grow it through maldistributed and racist maternal health care. Type 2 diabetes is its own pandemic. As the seventh-leading cause of death globally, diabetes is also a leading cause of lower-limb amputations and blindness. It wasn’t always this way. Over the past four decades, the global incidence of type 2 diabetes has increased fourfold and shows no signs of slowing down, with an especially sharp rise in low- and middle-income countries. Here in the United States, one in ten Americans is diabetic, a burden disproportionately borne by BIPOC communities. As a result of their diabetes, 230 Americans

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will undergo surgical amputation each day, forced to surrender a dying part of their body to scalpel and saw.7 A sacrifice zone of legs and feet. The CDC estimates that in 2017, the total cost of diagnosed diabetes in the United States was $327 billion. This money doesn’t just disappear from the U.S. economy—it is the U.S. economy. Our approach to diabetes tends to focus on the individual body and the individual disease in an industrial formation that grows diabetes, even as it grows the marketplace of personal diabetes management. We are creating the disaster and then selling the goods to survive it to a captive audience—some far more captive, indeed sacrificial, than others. Soon we will be able to sketch a similar matrix of relationships for COVID-19. That sketch will encompass the mountains of discarded plastic gear necessary to protect ourselves from one another, the bleach and the wipes and the heaps of discarded takeout containers.8 It will encompass the bacon you maybe ate to comfort yourself while in lockdown, produced by workers rendered essential, from pigs farmed in systems that threaten to yield the next pandemic.9 It will encompass the relationships that make up diabetes, cancer, and all the other comorbidities. Because COVID-19 acts as an accelerant on these diseases. The pandemic reveals that the bodily burdens, like the asthma in Mott Haven or the cancer in Louisiana’s chemical corridor, are sacrifice zones for a supposed good life that we must call into question. That good life, with its Oreos and SUVs, its pallets of bottled water and its “personal” devices, is proving suicidal; the sacrifice zones are growing like everything else.10 The pandemic is part of a general consequence of this growth modality that is producing such a range of health issues. Yet the responses to these health crises always reproduce the same system of growth. We

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cannot seem to step outside its accepted paradigm, the individual body and consumption-driven health, to inhabit the body as the relationship it is. Healing the body requires healing the body politic—the collection of people who together form a larger whole. That will mean tending to the relationships that constitute that body politic in their greatest and most intimate iterations. What might that look like? I don’t quite know, but surely it should start with acknowledging rather than obscuring the welter of relationships that constitute that good life we prize. Does it cost $3.49 for this roll of plastic wrap, or does it cost $3.49, plus some crumb of the Louisiana coast that has been given over to the Gulf of Mexico? Does it cost $3.49, plus a sunken shard of Louisiana, plus the slow death of the Gulf from the factory’s chemical runoff and the waste this plastic wrap will become? Does it cost $3.49, plus the costs of the cardiovascular disease fostered by the mercury-laden runoff from the petrochemical plants, which in turn accumulates in the seafood we eat from the Gulf? Does it cost $3.49, plus the cost of the obstructive pulmonary disease and the cancers that people in Louisiana’s chemical corridor bear through their proximity to those plants—plus the costs of COVID-19, which now thrives there? If that’s a roll of plastic wrap, imagine the cost of a depleted uranium bomb. Recognizing such costs pushes public health far upstream, locating it at the farm and the factory as much as at the bathroom scale or the medicine cabinet. Around the world, there are new economic thinkers and activists, some of them degrowth proponents, who caution us that we can either move away from an unquestioned, rapacious celebration of growth toward a definition of the good life that serves us, or the planet will level us and the sacrifice zones will grow ever wider.11 In Latin America, theorists of Buen Vivir offer a way to

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understand the good life as a relationship that encompasses humans and the natural world—where equilibrium, allowing for intergenerational stability, rather than growth, is the goal. Here the subject of well-being is not the individual consumer with their private-property body—but instead the relationships of mutuality that constitute the world, which is understood to be finite. In New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has refused to organize the national budget around growth, instead opting for new priorities that prize collective well-being, like effectively lowering carbon emissions and reducing child poverty. As the dust settles on 2020, we’d do well to heed those warnings.

NOTES 1. The theorist Ed Cohen urges us to build that relationship as one of community. “A Cure for COVID-19 Will Take More Than Personal Immunity,” Scientific American, August 7, 2020, https://www.scientificamerican . com /article /a - cure - for - covid -19 - will - take - more - than - personal -immunity/. 2. Lynda  V. Mapes, “Drugs Found in Puget Sound Salmon from Tainted Wastewater,” Seattle Times, February 23, 2016, https://www.seattletimes .com /seattle -news/environment /drugs -flooding-into -puget-sound-and -its-salmon/. 3. Rob Wallace, Alex Liebman, Luis Fernando Chaves, and Rodrick Wallace, “COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital,” Monthly Review 72, no.  1 (May 2020); Robert G. Wallace, “Breeding Influenza: The Political Virology of Offshore Farming,” Antipode 41, no. 5 (2009): 916–51; Celia Lowe, “Viral Sovereignty: Security and Mistrust as Measures of Future Health in the Indonesian H5N1 Influenza Outbreak,” Medicine Anthropology Theory 6, no. 3 (2019). 4. Julie Livingston, Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 5. Pamela Allweiss and Ann Albright, “Diabetes, Disasters and Decisions,” Diabetes Manage 1, no. 4 (2011): 369–77; Richard M. Mizelle Jr., “Hurricane Katrina, Diabetes, and the Meaning of Resiliency,” ISIS 111, no. 1 (2020): 120–28; U.S. Global Change Research Program, “Temperature-Related

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Death and Illness,” in The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: A Scientific Assessment, April  2016, https://health2016 .globalchange.gov/temperature-related-death-and-illness. Marsha McCulloch and Laura Marzen, “Top Packaged Snacks for Diabetes,” EatingWell, September 28, 2018, https://www.eatingwell.com/article /291099/top-packaged-snacks-for-diabetes/. Foluso  A. Fakorede, “Increasing Awareness This National Diabetes Month Can Save Limbs and Lives,” American Journal of Managed Care, November  29, 2018, https://www.ajmc.com/view/increasing-awareness -this-national-diabetes-month-can-save-limbs-and-lives. “Covid-19 Has Led to a Pandemic of Plastic Pollution,” The Economist, June  22, 2020, https://www.economist.com/international/2020/06/22 /covid-19-has-led-to-a-pandemic-of-plastic-pollution. United Nations Environmental Programme, “Preventing the Next Pandemic: Zoonotic Diseases and How to Break the Chain of Transmission,” July  6, 2020, https://www.unep.org /resources/report/preventing-future -zoonotic-disease-outbreaks-protecting-environment-animals-and. Tegan Wendland, “Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor Is Expanding. So Are Efforts to Stop  It,” KPBS, March  20, 2020, https://www.kpbs.org /news /2020/mar/20/louisianas-chemical-corridor-is-expanding-so-are/. Eduardo Gudynas, “Buen Vivir: Today’s Tomorrow,” Development 54, no. 4 (2011): 441–47; Catherine Walsh, “Development as Buen Vivir: Institutional Arrangements and (De)colonial Entanglements,” Development 53, no.  1 (2010): 15–21; Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (New York: Random House, 2020); Giorgos Kallis, Degrowth (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda, 2018).

AMERICAN ELDERCIDE MARGARET MORGANROTH GULLETTE

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ontrary to what many believe, the tens of thousands of deaths of those living in long-term care (LTC) were no inevitable biological catastrophe. Their grieving, angry family members know better: they know the conditions that prematurely deprived their loved ones of the remainder of their lives. By December, just as vaccine distribution started, nearly 110,000 residents and staffers had died. The extra deaths among our elders constitute an appalling percentage of the 1.4 million Americans who were living in nursing homes before the pandemic. These older adults were of all races, genders, ethnicities, religions, and political persuasions. Before COVID-19, 12  percent were African American, and 6  percent were Hispanic. Many people have also died in assisted-living facilities, middle-class residences not currently inspected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The deaths in nursing facilities alone account for almost 40 percent of all the U.S. dead. If we can’t explain, correctly, why the nursing homes failed, we cannot prevent the next pandemic. We may need to be reminded that people who choose congregate living—nursing and veterans’ homes, assisted-living, and continuing-care retirement communities—are often quite healthy or staying in rehab only temporarily. Of course, whether other

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residents are chronically ill, disabled, frail, or living with some cognitive impairment, all should be able to look forward to living nicely, perhaps with some assistance—receiving help with activities of daily life such as showering and taking medications—as well as good meals, exercise classes, access to the outdoors, pleasant and helpful aides, conversation at mealtimes, and visits from loved ones. Many would have lived long lives in their new homes. All this was denied to those who sickened and died. We don’t know the stories of the survivors from their own mouths—their fear, anguish at being neglected, anxiety as they listened to the news of mounting deaths among people like them, compassion for friends who were taken to hospitals and did not return. While journalists have interviewed family members and administrators, few have spoken to residents to find out how they felt and what they wanted. Aides were overworked, unprepared, and lacked protective equipment. Nurses were overextended. In one harrowing case at the Holyoke Soldier’s Home in Massachusetts, where union officials had long warned about conditions, staff were instructed by the home’s leadership to merge two dementia units, cramming residents with COVID-19 into wards with residents who were uninfected. At least seventy-six residents died. All across the country, if an aide held an old hand and spoke words of love from the family members whom residents could not see, that was the best death available. The fact of the matter is this: no resident, however poor, feeble, or impaired, needed to die of COVID-19. Nor did those who work taking care of them. We don’t need to look far for proof. In a small, nonprofit, Baptist-run nursing home in Baltimore, Maryland, whose low-income residents were people of color, many with chronic conditions, not one person had even become infected as late as June  18, 2020. Everyone was protected by best practices, instituted early and with the greatest good will. The Rev.

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Dr. Derrick DeWitt Sr. brought in PPE and more TVs for entertainment and social distancing, hired an extra activities coordinator, and provided food for employees so that they wouldn’t have to leave to buy lunch. As soon as possible, they instituted porch visits. A study of New York State LTC facilities showed that where they were unionized, 30 percent fewer residents died. There were fewer infections. There were better masks and eye shields. Unionization often means better pay and infection-control policies. That means fewer aides need to hold two jobs and there is less turnover. Nonprofits run by religious and social-service agencies have had much lower death rates than those run by for-profits. Many among the extra dead were betrayed by government-run or supervised institutions that should have driven resources to them long before. Pre-coronavirus, Medicaid rates dropped too low to cover costs, and facilities kept wages too low and aides’ hours too short for them to provide sufficient care. Many facilities failed state tests for adequate infection preventions—failures ignored by the agencies responsible for monitoring them. In 2017, the Trump administration reduced the fines against nursing homes for harming patients, even when this harm resulted in a resident’s death, reversing guidelines put in place under President Obama.

A Tragedy Foretold Ageism, combined with ableism, “dementism” (the fear of Alzheimer’s), sexism, racism, and classism, made the apathy leading to eldercide possible—and almost inevitable. To recognize the ongoing neglect and oblivion means acknowledging its deep-seated causes,

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including indifference at growing inequality and the health hazards of poverty. CDC data shows that 70 percent of Americans between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-four (before old age, before Medicare) have at least one chronic illness, and 37  percent have two. Social Security is inadequate for many who worked hard. People in the middle class often become poorer as they grow older, particularly given the midlife job losses that have characterized our economy for forty years. Long-term care was removed from Obamacare. In the assisted-living communities, where fewer died, people had their own rooms. In the nursing and veterans’ facilities, poverty crowded them into single rooms or wards. The poor become even more powerless in later life. Indifference is inexcusable—and historical. It goes back to the stingy nineteenth-century “poorhouses” for “the old and indigent.” In the twentieth century, nursing homes picked up the ugly connotations that persist, making them still seem frightening and to be avoided at all costs. They were stereotyped as warehouses for sick old women whose wits were gone, living in places that “wouldn’t pass the smell test.” To America’s shame, LTC facilities were all too often cruel institutions that mistreated their residents. Some had no nurses. Training in geriatrics was lacking. Administrative oversight was careless. People who needed help with showering were not always helped in a timely fashion—thus the smell that some observers blamed on the victims rather than those who should have been responsible for helping them. Food could be bad. People were restrained and overmedicated in ways that would drive anybody crazy. In the early 1970s, my dear grandfather, an immigrant born in 1880, hale in his nineties but suffering from arteriosclerosis and suddenly separated from his wife, was oversedated into incoherence. In some facilities older adults were actually restrained, sometimes in ways that prevented them from scratching an itch.

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People were left alone in wheelchairs in empty corridors to be more easily monitored. May Sarton’s novel As We Are Now, published in 1973, represented some of the feelings that eventually drove reform. Her protagonist, a retired schoolteacher, sets her nursing home on fire in frustration and rage at neglect, condescension, and meanness. It took until 1987 for Congress to pass the Nursing Home Reform Act, which set improvement standards. The obvious changes—minimal staffing requirements, training for aides, mandated resident assessments, and annual reviews—had an impact that I was able to witness in one facility. In the 2000s, a charming older friend of mine in her nineties lived in a nursing facility for several years. The building was well lit and neatly arranged. No condition was abusive or lethal. It lacked the amenities of expensive assisted-living communities: there were two people to a single room, few activities, and the food was mediocre. It was not always as clean as my friend had kept her own home. But when I called to hear her marvelous laugh, she never complained. Yet the catastrophe in the LTC facilities since February 2020 shows that the system failed abysmally all across the United States. Oversight regulations were patchy, differing from state to reluctant state. Some states refused Medicaid reimbursement and underfunded their share. Enforcement was dismal. And despite the vast variety of characters and experiences of older adults, the image of old people as waiting to die in institutions lingered. Even before the pandemic, merely living into the “Fourth Age”— becoming very old or frail—was seen by some as abjectly near to death. In Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People, I concluded that so-called euthanasia was deemed legally understandable when it referred to dependent old women shot by their husbands. A study in Florida, published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, showed that such killings were happening

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twice a month. Prosecutors rarely indicted the husbands for what they considered “mercy killings,” nor would juries convict. Lacking stories, the lives of the individual people in LTC who died of COVID-19 have been squeezed down into naked statistics. Astonishingly, state-issued data mostly fail to distinguish among them: we can’t learn how many were women or men, people of color or white, or their income levels. To the general public, they remain a faceless, voiceless, genderless mass. And they are still dying disproportionately. This eldercide has yet to be acknowledged as such—the abandonment of old people to exposure and death on a mass scale. People may know that so many lives of older adults were lost without realizing that the outcome could have been otherwise, and without comprehending the deathly injustice. We know the survivors suffer from isolation and boredom. In addition, trauma may arise in those identified as supremely at risk. Analyzing previous outbreaks such as SARS, researchers found that being singled out heightens anxiety or creates survivors’ guilt. Residents of LTC facilities, spatially excluded from society, have been treated over and over as if they were not quite human.

“The Ugly Stepchild” When pundits describe what a Biden administration would need to do to restore our health-care system, even now in the COVID-19 era, some forget the grave necessity of improving care in nursing and veterans’ facilities and assisted-living retirement communities. As a UMass Boston gerontologist, Elizabeth Dugan, told the Boston Globe in October, “We don’t [even] think of nursing homes as part of the health care system. We could have done

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better. We should have done better.” Writing in the  Journals of Gerontology, Edward Alan Miller et  al. bluntly observe, “Longterm care is the ugly stepchild of health policy. It is widely understood that . . . the sector is inadequately financed and ineffectively regulated.” When the Trump-formed Coronavirus Commission on Safety and Quality in Nursing Homes released its report in September, the report merely “urged” these facilities to do right. Enforcement mechanisms—the teeth in any reform—were not added, according to a dissent from one member of the commission, Eric Carlson, a lawyer for Justice in Aging, an organization centered on alleviating poverty among seniors and suing for better conditions. The industry’s lobby (which has long attempted to degrade quality-of-care standards and is now trying to prevent federal and state liability suits) won this round. According to a December AARP report, immunity from liability has been granted in at least twenty states. This, briefly, is the long lethal background of the historic American eldercide of 2020. None of this—not the grief of family members nor the tragedy of long neglect and underfunding—has provoked national outrage. What good outcomes can the next phase bring as long as there is no proper understanding of age bias and thus no proper mourning, or even regret? First, we must realize that many deaths were unnatural and unnecessary, caused by ageist neglect or violent prejudice. Labels lumping older adults together distract the general public from the benefits of longevity and hide the resilience, common sense, and values older adults possess. Will having a vaccine suddenly teach our society any of this? The decision made by public-health leaders and the states to prioritize LTC residents by giving them vaccinations right after frontline medical personnel begins to provide implicit redress.

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Still, there may be pushback from those in the spring and summer who said that “only old people die” of the disease, and that therefore it doesn’t matter. Giving residents of LTC facilities vaccine priority is ethical and just, treating the survivors not only as vulnerable but as precious. Being considered human is a status conferred or withheld by society. Our culture has to restore the image of people in later life who need a little help—as fully human beings who have life ahead of us and an equal right to enjoy it. With consciousness and conscience could come other reckonings, including criminal charges, class-action suits, guilt acknowledged, remorse, apologies, perhaps even a special monument to these dead—and concrete federal plans for rescuing those who will need long-term care in the future. It is up to society to pressure Congress to adequately fund and tightly regulate the places where many of us—and most often women with the least income— will pass years of our lives. And reform of oversight should include assisted-living facilities. The tens of thousands of lost selves were the country’s matriarchs and patriarchs, the result of America’s once-proud ability to achieve longevity. For those closer to their hearts, they were dear spouses, parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, mentors, coaches, people who comforted us and guided us by their presence in our lives. Let us grieve the magnitude of that loss and find ways to prove that in our country the lives of elders do matter. Some good must come out of terrible national ignorance and disgrace.

THE WORLD IS A FACTORY FARM XIAOWEI WANG

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n late 2018, I traveled to Guangzhou, a city of more than 13 million people in southern China, as an emerging pathogen was sweeping across the country. African swine fever (ASF), a disease with a nearly 100 percent fatality rate in pigs, had set China on guard. The disease threatened a hallmark of contemporary urban Chinese life: the reliable availability of cheap pork. While ASF had been detected in countries like Russia and Belgium, 2018 was the first time it had appeared in China, the world’s top pork producer. The disease spread quickly throughout the country. Pigs were preemptively slaughtered. Factory farms and international borders stepped up biosecurity levels, a response that reflected a decades-long project of optimizing ecology in the pursuit of modernity. It’s a project I had become very familiar with as I researched how artificial intelligence had been used to scale up pork farming, creating China’s “pork miracle”: the ability to meet the domestic demand of 54 million tons of pork per year.1 This growth in output has gone hand in hand with the emerging globalized economy, brokered by the World Trade Organization. The WTO’s promises of economic development via free trade hinged upon industrialized agriculture, especially in areas of the

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world where smallholder farming was still the default. The result was new alliances of cross-border agricultural trade and economic development—and an influx of species and pathogens newly carried across the globe. The concept of biosecurity—a set of standardized practices to prevent the spread of disease between animals and humans—was manufactured in the 1990s to address this sudden surge. Even before African swine fever took hold, I was asked to adhere to strict protocols in order to visit factory farms in China. One farm outside Guangzhou had agreed to a visit if I quarantined myself for four days in a nearby hotel beforehand; took a series of steps to disinfect myself; and then did another four days of self-quarantine afterward. Such human quarantine procedures in the name of hog biosecurity are commonplace in factory farming. In industrial hog operations, where a single breed is used and animals are in close, indoor quarters, a virus can quickly tear through a farm. In the face of ASF, my invitation was rescinded entirely as the farm reconsidered allowing a traveling American researcher, a carrier of unknown multitudes of diseases, to casually visit. The experience was an eerie foreshadowing of the much larger crisis that would soon unfold. The more I learned about the dizzying web of international trade agreements, foreign policy decisions based on agricultural trade, investments, technological change, and ecological devastation wrought by multinational agribusiness over the past two decades, the more surprised I was that a global pandemic hadn’t happened sooner. Global free trade of agricultural commodities is set up to encourage industrialization of farming. The ecological and human health consequences of factory farming are dire, especially the incubation of emerging pathogens, as the epidemiologist Rob Wallace documents in his book Big Farms Make Big

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Flu. Such entanglements are intentionally obfuscated, barely glimpsed through the tiny variations in meat prices at the supermarket. Opacity is enforced for reasons of biosecurity, or in the United States, “ag-gag” laws.2 This restricts political action, relegating regulation to a tightly controlled corner where politics and corporate interests intersect, while jeopardizing the transparency needed to guide actual security in the first place. In December 2019, a year after my trip to Guangzhou, I started to hear about the appearance of a novel, pneumonialike virus coming out of a Wuhan wet market. I was not surprised. But my experience researching industrial agriculture has led me to be very concerned about the global response to the crisis. As COVID-19 continues to unfold, it is rendered as a bounded problem, understood at the level of the city or the nation-state. Yet the need to think beyond boundaries and across scales is more urgent than ever—beyond the dichotomies of human versus nature, urban versus rural, individual versus collective. Biosecurity thrives on boundaries. It needs the delineations of the nationstate to exist: the nation-state as a regulator of trade, standards, and disease barriers and quarantine procedures against alien viruses and pests. In a biosecure context, security is maintained through standardization, surveillance, and efficiency, all toward the goal of allowing capital to continue to flow. It is a kind of security that disregards actual life. Even as I write this text, factory farming is heralded as the necessary and only way to ensure global food security in a postpandemic world, exemplifying the kind of reactive security that fails to sustain life. Thinking beyond boundaries allows us to trouble and denaturalize biosecurity, a relatively new concept that is becoming increasingly central to all species, shifting and brokering new relationships among finance, technology, and

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governments. It allows us to imagine new forms of security, beyond those in the service of global capitalism, that emphasize working at the scale of the neighborhood rather than the nation-state. Q Q Q

The origins of COVID-19 are decidedly rural, intertwined with a landscape of multinational agribusiness, industrial agriculture, and a pursuit of modernization beyond China alone. The aftermath of the Green Revolution brought “modern” agriculture to many parts of the world, replacing long-standing methods of smallholder farming with techniques pioneered by a “good aggressive bunch of American agronomists and plant breeders.”3 Parallel to the Green Revolution, China also sought to modernize its agricultural systems, shifting from a patchwork of peasants who farmed small plots of land to a nation with an agricultural output to match those of its Western rivals. The advent of neoliberal economic reform led by Deng Xiaoping paved the way for China’s eventual accession to the WTO in 2001. The organization’s free-trade agreements required China to make big changes in agricultural practice and policy. The agreements encouraged the widespread use of pesticides and machinery, along with the consolidation of land and labor. They also radically shifted the scale of agriculture; millions of tons of soybeans shipped from Brazil could bypass China’s cities and urban centers, instead feeding the country’s pigs directly. While these changes had deep sociopolitical and ecological consequences, the moves toward modernization allowed China to attain a level of agricultural efficiency that could address its growing agricultural trade deficit in a world of free trade. But when the 2005 WTO summit convened in Hong Kong, thousands gathered, forming a

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transnational coalition to protest how free-trade agreements devastated small farmers.4 The practices of factory farming are especially conducive to proliferating zoonotic pathogens. Zoonotic diseases like COVID-19 are the result of pathogens moving from one species to another— from birds into humans, pigs into humans. Emergent pathogens have long existed, but our contemporary global economy allows zoonotic diseases to quickly transform from isolated cases in remote regions to full-blown pandemics. The epidemiologist Rob Wallace has long been sounding the alarm not only on how industrialized agriculture plays a central role in increasing zoonotic disease transfer into humans but also on how “it pays to produce a pathogen that could kill a billion people.” Wallace points to the way that spatial conditions allowed the H5N1 avian flu to diffuse rapidly: he describes an early WHO bulletin from 1982 that outlines the proximity of human habitation to mass duck production, which uses numerous ponds that facilitate oral-fecal disease transmission. In a liberalized economy, Wallace insists, these conditions only intensified in southern China. One 2014 paper on zoonotic disease states that 60 percent of all emerging illnesses are now zoonotic, and 80 percent of new pathogens come from the world’s top pork-producing countries— places like China.5 It’s not just the internal industry practices of animal farming that accelerate zoonotic disease transfer but also the land-use changes that accompany “modern” agriculture. Mechanization requires less manual labor and larger swaths of consolidated land, prompting rural-to-urban migration of former farmers as they seek new jobs in the city. Farming a few pigs is a rustic affair, but at factory scale, the environmental consequences are overwhelming. Factory farming and the industries that support it, such as mining and logging, cause enormous habitat and biodiversity

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loss and increase the likelihood of zoonotic diseases crossing over to humans by putting novel disease carriers like bats in closer contact with humans and domesticated animals.6 In a country like China that has experienced enormous economic growth by becoming “the world’s factory,” the neoliberal urbanization project has allowed once-remote areas to be absorbed into city sprawl, reminding us that the question of urban life after COVID-19 is a question of rural life as well.7 Q Q Q

Visiting the headquarters of Alibaba Cloud was much easier than trying to visit an industrial hog farm. Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant with a market valuation of approximately $420 billion, is enormously similar to Amazon. Like Amazon, it has a cloud computing business that not only rents out spare server time, powering the internet, but additionally rents out technological innovations it has created in-house for its shopping and logistics empire.8 At the Alibaba Museum in Hangzhou, the small exhibition hall boasts about the measures Alibaba Cloud is taking to make modern life better and more comfortable. Alibaba’s ET City Brain project promises security and safety from not just “crime” but also traffic accidents and vehicle collisions with pedestrians. Its ET Agriculture Brain project promises food security for the world through precision farming and the increased use of biosecurity on industrial animal farms. Along the walls of the museum, security is the ideology that is guaranteed and promised, enabled by artificial intelligence and a network of sensors. Alibaba is unabashed about its ambitions, for the Smart City and the Smart Farm mean a world of surveillance. All forms of security rely on ideas of containment and the creation of territory, whether through surveillance, patrol, or

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state-inflicted terror. Biosecurity is no exception, ever present in the containment of a farm, lab, hospital, or hotel room. The urge toward total security is accompanied by technological innovation: facial recognition, closed-circuit television cameras, machine learning, and other technologies designed to recognize “anomalies.” This is evident in modern pig farming, which has more in common with silicon chip manufacturing than with the agriculture of yore. Even before ASF, factory farms enforced biosecurity protocols such as having workers wear masks and change shoes when entering and exiting hog confinement areas, designed to minimize disease exchange among pigs as well as between pigs and humans. They deployed closed-circuit television to monitor pigs for signs of disease. Alibaba’s AI pig-farming project took advantage of camera infrastructure that was already present in China’s factory farms. AI is just helping optimize what human workers have long been doing: watching pigs, conducting temperature and health checks. The level of efficiency AI offers will purportedly allow pork production not only to scale up but also to become more secure, ensuring tighter regimes of biosecurity. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, biosecurity measures have moved from rural farms to our everyday urban lives. Like those used on China’s industrialized pig farms, these security measures are fueled by tech capital. Essential workers returning to their jobs may be given frequent COVID tests provided by the private company Everlywell, in partnership with the cloud computing company Appian. Alphabet (formerly Google), through one of its companies, is providing free testing throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere that encourages patients to register with their Google accounts. Palantir is working with the U.S. government to implement COVID case tracking with data sent directly to the company, bypassing the Department of Health and Human Services.

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On the other side of the Pacific, Ant Financial, Alibaba’s sister company, has a product called Alipay that issues QR codes to individual users to be scanned at various health checks such as subway entrances and markets throughout Chinese cities. On the hardware end, temperature-check cameras manufactured in China are placed in Amazon warehouses to monitor employees.9 Facial-recognition temperature scanners have also been sold to building-management firms throughout New York City. Under a regime of biosecurity, living beings are flattened into momentary vectors of capital or disease. Containment of all kinds becomes the goal. These new frontiers in biosecurity are accompanied by a cultural pendulum that swings from normalcy to alarm alongside the constant search for an elusive sense of security in our ever uncertain world. But if biosecurity is an ideology, a practice, and an economy that makes the nation-state secondary to the forces of tech capital and technology, its recent appearance is testament to its own fragility. The fact that biosecurity needs to exist is a reminder that the project to contain and control the unpredictability of living beings is ultimately futile. There are numerous ways to intervene in these hulking systems of capital that would like us to believe there is no outside. Q Q Q

A few hours outside of Guangzhou, I finally did get to see some farm animals. A small rice-farming village that I visited was in the process of undoing a “bold, new” experiment it had previously embarked on. For years, the local agricultural bureau (part of the government) had worked with the area’s farmers to implement pesticides, fertilizers, and farm machinery. Under these

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modern protocols, one of the older farmers in the village started to notice a decline in the quality of soil. The villagers decided to restructure their approach to farming, remixing and combining old techniques with new ways. Rice paddies are traditionally mountain terraced, using a form of natural irrigation that allows water to flow from top to bottom. The village changed its governance structure so that stewardship of each rice paddy would change every so often, via a lottery system. This meant that each farmer would have noncontiguous paddies. If one person decided to spray pesticides or dam water, they would affect a lower paddy that could belong to them or their neighbor. Alongside this form of community governance was the implementation of natural forms of pest control, organic farming practices, and an ecosystems-based approach to agriculture that emphasized biodiversity. The villages sold their surplus rice online, leveraging new technologies like China’s robust mobile payment system and speedy courier infrastructure. It is exactly this kind of approach—without boundaries, without ambitions to scale—that reminds us that life outside is possible. It is possible, for instance, that a small village in contemporary authoritarian China might define a governance structure for itself. Life outside may not always be grandiose, visible, or permanent, but as the constant failed attempts at biosecurity show, nothing is steady or stable. As COVID-19 continues, from afar I get glimpses of the village on social media—while my life in the city has been suspended, they continue to plant rice, raise chickens, and make rice wine. Life outside requires a focus on mutual care; a vocabulary of tending to the future that we increasingly hear calls for; a kind of thoughtfulness that asks us to attend to the present moment and the communities we are accountable to. Life outside requires us, as urban dwellers, to also think outside,

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too—outside ourselves and our cities. To think of life outside, beyond containment, is an experiment in imagining new forms of security beyond the kind shaped by market forces.

NOTES 1. Shefali Sharma and Mindi Schneider, “China’s Pork Miracle? Agribusiness and Development in China’s Pork Industry,” Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policies (IATP), February  17, 2014, https://www.iatp.org /documents /chinas - pork - miracle - agribusiness - and - development -chinas-pork-industry. 2. “Ag-Gag Laws,” Animal Legal Defense Fund, https://aldf.org /issue/ag -gag /. 3. Carl Ortwin Sauer, “Memo Regarding Wallace’s Ideas for a Program in Mexico,” 100  Years: The Rockefeller Foundation, https://rockfound .rockarch .org /digital-library-listing /-/asset_publisher/yYxpQfeI4W8N /content/memo-regarding-wallace-s-ideas-for-a-program-in-mexico. 4. “Thousands Gather in Hong Kong for First WTO Protest,” New York Times, December  11, 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/world /asia /thousands-gather-in-hong-kong-for-first-wto-protest.html. 5. D. Thapaliya et al., “Zoonotic Diseases of Swine: Food-borne and Occupational Aspects of Infection,” in Zoonoses—Infections Affecting Humans and Animals, ed. A. Sing (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), https://doi.org /10 .1007/978-94-017-9457-2_2. 6. R. S. Ostfeld, “Biodiversity Loss and the Rise of Zoonotic Pathogens,” Clinical Microbiology and Infection 15, supplement 1 (January  2009): 40–43, https://www.sciencedirect.com /science/article/pii /S1198743X1 46 04122#. 7. “China Is the World’s Factory, More Than Ever,” The Economist, June 23, 2020, https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/06/23 /china-is-the-worlds-factory-more-than-ever. 8. Russell Brandom, “Using the Internet Without the Amazon Cloud,” The Verge, July 28, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/28/17622792/plugin -use-the-internet-without-the-amazon-cloud. 9. Krystal Hu and Jeffrey Dastin, “Exclusive: Amazon Turns to Chinese Firm on U.S. Blacklist to Meet Thermal Camera Needs,” Reuters, April  29, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus -amazon-com-cameras/exclusive -amazon-turns -to -chinese -firm-on-u -s-blacklist-to-meet-thermal-camera-needs-idUSKBN22B1AL.

LISTEN TO THE BIRDS PRISCILLA WALD

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ird omens once warned the ancients of the future. In Greece and Rome, for example, avian augury involved seers trained in the art of reading the flight of birds, who sought to make sense of a chaotic world through decoding messages from the gods. Since bird omens—or “auspices,” Latin for this kind of divination—often warned of disaster, ignoring or misreading them could be catastrophic.1 Ancient audiences watched tragedy unfold when hubristic rulers disregarded their augurs’ reading of these omens. (The two eagles that violently destroy a pregnant hare at the beginning of Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon, for example, forecast a Greek victory but prompt Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia, leading, in turn, to his murder at the hands of his wife, Clytemnestra.) The legacy of bird divination is etymologically evident in such words as augury, inauguration, and auspicious (from the Latin augur and auspex). Birds, it seems, continue to point to the future.2 Bird omens of a sort are the subject of two recent anthropological studies of avian-flu preparedness in Asia. Both Natalie Porter, in Viral Economies, and Frédéric Keck, in Avian Reservoirs, convey the ominousness suffusing poultry farming, using birds as predictors. As both demonstrate, studying how birds

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interact with human agriculture can provide early warnings of a grim future. Indeed, Keck in Avian Reservoirs explicitly compares public-health surveillance (which he studies in the book) to augury, tracing “the idea that birds carry signs of the future that humans should learn to read . . . back to Roman divination.” The focus of both books might specifically be avian bird flu, but its implications reach far beyond. An unusual die-off of poultry or wild birds in an area, for example, can signal disaster on multiple levels: economic, social, and medical. The portent of pandemic that concerns both authors, however, is less the avian sentinels than the social disorder evident in the measures designed to predict and prepare for it. Through fieldwork, both authors observed and participated in exercises in avian flu preparedness: Keck while working with microbiologists on a European Commission–funded project designed to investigate the conditions enabling pathogens to cross species barriers; Porter while living and working on a Vietnamese poultry farm. They were both troubled as they observed the social, economic, and political relationships emerging in what Porter calls “a new era in global health,” initiated when a novel strain of the virulent H5N1 avian influenza infected human beings in December 2003, a half year after the containment of SARS. While the mortality rate of avian flu among birds—or fowl plague—has long threatened poultry farmers with financial disaster, the new era emerged when it was recognized that the disease could transmit to humans, raising the possibility of a bird flu pandemic. This recognition turned birds into something new: not just harbingers of the end times but potential agents of apocalypse. For both Porter and Keck, however, the agents posing the greatest threat to human health are not avian but human. A microbe might cause an infection in one or more individuals, but humans create the conditions that transform infections into

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outbreaks and outbreaks into pandemics. Environmental devastation, an increasingly shrinking and interconnected world, and a growing population all produce the ideal medium for rapid microbial circulation. Q Q Q

“Daybreak reaches your ears before your eyes on poultry farms in northern Vietnam,” begins Viral Economies; the morning cries of chickens, Porter explains, unfold sonically into a cacophonous “call to action, an auditory assault that rouses you from bed and signals the start of a new day.” But in 2003, an “entirely different alarm sounded from Vietnamese poultry farms.” SARS “announced the dawn, not of a new day, but of [the] new era.” The threat had turned the birds’ pastoral cacophony into a dire warning of global pandemic. Porter’s opening scene recalls the beginning of Silent Spring, where Rachel Carson uses a change in bird song to forecast doom. “On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.”3 Neither “witchcraft” nor “enemy action” has caused this devastation in Carson’s opening fable; rather, “the people had done it themselves.”4 Birds bear the warnings, Carson or Porter might note, but humans are responsible for the global threat. This dawn anecdote aptly launches Porter’s analysis of twentyfirst-century “global public health.” Such an analysis could not be more timely, since COVID-19—like avian bird flu—is a uniquely dangerous zoonotic disease, which means it can transmit from animals to humans. The danger to the population from such diseases is largely the result of humans’ lack of immunity.

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Efforts to address the apparent acceleration of zoonoses in the early years of the twenty-first century found expression in the One Health Initiative, designed to foster collaborations among a wide variety of experts in human and animal health. But Porter, noting the inefficacy of the initiative, attributes its failure to “interventions [that] are overly technoscientific and targeted” and a form of governance that does not “properly account for the conditions under which farmers and fowl actually live.” Seeking to correct the limitations of One Health, Porter offers a different lens for her analysis: a multispecies ethnography. This, she explains, is “a mode of investigation that focuses attention on culturally and historically specific relationships between species, and explores how those relationships shape social worlds.” In practice, this means that Viral Economies broadens One Health’s focus on humans and animals to include, surprisingly, pathogens. According to Porter, viruses—as “fundamentally relational entities”—reveal the many ways individuals and species come into contact, as well as the fluidity of roles and relationships. Poultry, for example, connect to people as living organisms, livestock, and disease reservoirs. Consequently, explains Porter, a “multispecies analysis takes poultry and pathogens as part of the social fabric, and it traces the everyday exchanges in which these life forms become productive forces for markets while simultaneously engaging in a variety of consequential relations with humans.” By treating the virus as a vector for study rather than a villain to denigrate, Porter’s analysis opens up new ways of seeing how different organisms circulate together, for good and for ill. Q Q Q

The relationships that come into focus in a multispecies ethnography for both Keck and Porter reveal the cultural assumptions

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and beliefs that inform social organization. The eponymous “avian reservoir” (the bird “hosting” the disease), explains Keck, is “a space where human and nonhuman animals are connected by invisible entities called ‘microbes’ that can be captured, classified, and mapped.” Classifying, capturing, and mapping microbes all involve technologies—instruments, language, images—that collectively register the double helix of biology and culture, which constitutes lived experience. Similarly, as Keck notes, “contact zones” can be spaces—such as museums, as in James Clifford’s formulation5—in which people and cultures productively commingle or, as in the language of biosecurity, spaces of dangerous contagion. But the productive and dangerous commingling converge in the multiple uses of the word contagion: in the circulation of ideas and unconscious influence, for example, as well as germs. The concept of “contagion” materializes the experience of being human: we are constantly exposed to others’ beliefs and affects, as well as to the microbes they carry. If the natural disruption marked by bird die-offs signals social chaos—like the bird omens in classical literature—then efforts to address the cause of the die-offs expose the logic governing the social order, as well as the techniques needed to maintain that order. Q Q Q

Both works identify a ritualistic aspect in global public health measures. They do so by demonstrating how the multiple perspectives offered in a multispecies analysis make visible the social hierarchies and differential valuing of life forms undergirding such rituals. Keck distinguishes between prevention and preparedness, observing, “If prevention excludes the perspectives of animals on

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public health management under a sacrificial rationality underlying culling and vaccinating, preparedness includes them by extending participation through techniques of monitoring.” Preparedness rituals in turn manifest the ways living organisms are transformed through their varied relationships, “biological, cultural, and economic”; birds become sentinels, fowl become poultry, and poultry in turn become “livestock . . . living beings as well as market labor and commodities.” These metamorphoses make apparent how, as Porter emphasizes, “life itself is . . . at stake in global health experiments.” They show the calculations involved in what, following Michelle Murphy, she calls the economization of life: which lives are “worth living and sustaining, which lives [are] worthy of investment, and which lives [are] not worth being born.”6 And they bring into view the underlying concepts that structure all of the relationships, the “tools,” as Keck calls them, that “capture relations between humans and their environment.” Q Q Q

Both works advocate a radical change in the relationships between human and nonhuman animals. But the most urgent need for change may well be in our conceptual relationship to microbes, which is evident in our vocabulary. Anyone following the COVID-19 coverage has surely heard that we are “at war” with SARS-CoV-2; indeed, microbial warfare is a long-standing epidemiological metaphor. A possible explanation for its appeal is evident in the epigraph to the 1995 film Outbreak, where the molecular biologist Joshua Lederberg calls the virus “the single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance on the planet.” After all, he muses elsewhere, “many people find it

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difficult to accommodate to the reality that Nature is far from benign; at least it has no special sentiment for the welfare of the human versus other species.”7 Metaphors, like host reservoirs and contact spaces, transform as they recombine elements. And the metaphor of war turns the indifference of the natural world embodied in the elusive and mysterious virus—which it is difficult to know how to accommodate—into a willful enemy engaged in an activity for which humankind has centuries of precedent, including a welldeveloped vocabulary of heroism and sacrifice. We can see in this metaphor the possibility of a roadmap for addressing the threat and an effort to preserve human dignity. It is, after all, humbling for humans to imagine annihilation by a life form that isn’t even sentient—or, for that matter, unambiguously alive. Q Q Q

But the war metaphor is misleading and even dangerous. As Keck notes, Lederberg was among a growing group of biologists troubled by it. “Perhaps one of the most important changes we can make,” Lederberg advised in a 2000 Science article, “is to supercede the 20th-century metaphor of war for describing the relationship between people and infectious agents.”8 In its place he proposed an ecological perspective offered by “the germs’-eye view of infection.”9 Following the emergence of a series of catastrophic communicable diseases—HIV, Ebola, Marburg, and other deadly hemorrhagic fevers—in the 1970s and 1980s, Lederberg helped organize a conference to study the phenomenon of “disease emergence.” The participants concluded it was the result of globalization and development practices. While an expanding population was moving into previously uninhabited

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(or sparsely inhabited) places—and hence encountering new microbes—people and goods were moving rapidly around an increasingly interconnected world. From a “germs’-eye” view, the participants concluded, it was human behavior that created these new outbreaks and turned them into pandemics. Not, critically, microbial ingenuity. Consequently, the threat of emerging diseases could not be addressed exclusively by medical science and epidemiology. Instead, it required a radical transformation of both large-scale and everyday practices. The war metaphor obscured the human responsibility for the problem. Q Q Q

While the message of the conference concerned the importance of learning to live more responsibly with our microbes to avoid catastrophic pandemics—a lesson the twenty-first century attests to our not having learned—for Porter and Keck the lesson is that global health initiatives are themselves diagnostic. The natural disruption of a pandemic, like a classical bird omen, reveals social dis-ease on a planetary scale. SARS-CoV-2 is speaking to us in, for example, the higher infection and mortality rates in Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities, which are among the many inequities it highlights. But, as Porter and Keck show, disparities manifest in preparedness as well as in pandemics. A multispecies analysis, Porter writes, shows that “at every level and in every relation, some lives matter more than others.” And she advocates “opening One Health up to new experimental designs, which can better reflect multiple ways of classifying, controlling, and valuing life, and can better accommodate multiple ways of living with others in a pandemic age.” For Keck, that accommodation

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relies on humans’ coming to understand that we are not “at the center of the ecosystem” but “are only one of its actors”; it is time to acknowledge our “dependence on other species.” The message of these two works is both timely and timehonored. The birds and their microbes, like the omens of classical literature, bear witness to a realm of higher truths. We would do well to heed our augurs.

NOTES 1. On classical bird omens, see Jeremy Mynott, Birds in the Ancient World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 2. Today, it is also evident in the visual imagery of outbreak films: “We don’t have to weaponize the bird flu,” intones the CDC’s Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) in the 2011 film Contagion (dir. Stephen Soderbergh), “the birds are doing it for us.” And in the 2006 ABC film Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America, flying geese metamorphose into missiles. In such instances, the flight of birds again ominously hints at where there is (or soon will be) an outbreak. As in Greek tragedy, today audiences’ bird’s-eye view portends imminent disaster. 3. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 2. 4. Carson, Silent Spring, 3. 5. Frédéric Keck, Avian Reservoirs: Virus Hunters and Bird Watchers in Chinese Sentinel Posts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 63, citing James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth- Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 6. Porter, Viral Economies: Bird Flu Experiments in Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 6, citing Michelle Murphy, The Economization of Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 7. Joshua Lederberg, “Viruses and Humankind: Intracellular Symbiosis and Evolutionary Competition,” in Emerging Viruses, ed. Stephen S. Morse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3–4. 8. Joshua Lederberg, “Infectious History,” Science 288, no. 5464 (April 14, 2000): 293. 9. Lederberg, “Infectious History,” 293.

RISK FOR “US” OR FOR “THEM”? The Comparative Politics of Diversity and Responses to AIDS and COVID-19 EVAN LIEBERMAN

States, Societies, and COVID-19 in Comparative Perspective In the modern era, citizens around the world have come to expect governments to take action to curb the spread and to mitigate the consequences of disease outbreaks. Yet the quality of those responses varies widely, generating puzzles ripe for comparative analysis: Why are some states more aggressive than others in allocating resources, transmitting information, and seeking to regulate and to transform citizen behaviors? And why do some citizens and not others demand and willingly obey such government efforts? The early decades of the global AIDS pandemic motivated such general questions, and key features of the present COVID-19 pandemic hold many similarities: a highly infectious virus spread rapidly via humans traveling on airplanes to various corners of the world and then to new networks within those countries. And with respect to both viruses, individuals can be infectious without being symptomatic or realizing their status—a particularly pernicious challenge for control because a seemingly healthy carrier is more likely to go about their regular routine, exposing others to infection. Moreover, while there is no cure or vaccine for HIV or COVID-19,1  respected health authorities quickly determined how to avoid transmission, and that knowledge was shared

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widely across governments, scientists, and through international organizations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO). Despite this shared body of scientific knowledge, the imperative of governments and other authorities to enact and implement policies designed to prevent the spread of a potentially deadly virus has come up against a host of social, political, and economic constraints: it is frequently costly or unpleasant to change the behaviors that contribute to transmission—both from the perspective of the state and society. Willingness to bear those costs must be balanced against risk perceptions, which are themselves a function of many factors, including but definitely not limited to objective dangers that might be conveyed from an epidemiological perspective. Specifically, I focus on the influence of ethnic, racial, and national boundaries as factors that shape how risks are understood within and across societies. When data about disease burdens are collected and disseminated in ways that reinforce such boundaries, including with notions of differentiated vulnerability, this may generate political dynamics that ultimately impede effective policy responses, as was the case with respect to the AIDS epidemic.2 The implications could be profound: in the context of the COVID-19 epidemic, in which the ability to participate fully in social and economic life could eventually be restricted to those thought to be at lower risk, the use of national, race, and ethnic categories to describe disease vulnerability could very well serve to harm those for whom such data collection was intended to help.

Theorizing About Boundaries and Contagious Disease In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, a wide range of interested observers and government officials around the world attempted

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to convince citizens of a common threat and consistently repeated the incantation that HIV “knows no boundaries.” Yet when it came to forming social and political attitudes about AIDS, it was plain to see at almost every level that leaders and ordinary citizens interpreted deaths and illnesses in terms of various socially meaningful categories—initially with respect to gay men but eventually specific ethnic, regional, and national groups. In India, AIDS was referred to as “Mumbai” disease and as a problem for particular castes. In South Africa, for a time, blacks referred to it as a “white” disease, and whites as a “black” disease. In Nigeria, northern Muslims said it was a problem for southern Christians. And in the United States, AIDS has often been described in terms of Haitians, Africans, and African Americans. While such claims contained hints of truth, in the sense that at particular moments, higher rates of infection could be detected among certain subpopulations, these stereotyping dynamics falsely conveyed a sense of qualitative difference in risk: this is “their” problem, not “ours.” Such dynamics appeared consistent with the tenets of social identity theory,3  which emphasizes human tendencies toward intergroup comparisons and the desire to gain in-group esteem. Along these lines, in the context of an epidemic, socially and politically meaningful categories can shape discourses of risk and, in turn, political calculations about how to respond. To be clear, ethnic or racial diversity,  per se, were not detrimental to government AIDS policies. In fact, in some diverse countries such as Brazil at that time, the forging of a strong sense of solidarity across that diversity helped contribute to a politics of shared threat and development of a more effective response.4 On the other hand, when internal boundaries were already strong— for example, race divisions in the United States, caste divisions in India, etc.—there was a tendency to describe the epidemic not as something that affects all of us equally but as a problem

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for  some  more than for  others. Particularly because ethnic and racial animus often involves implicit and explicit reference to ideas of moral worth and hygiene, the politics of the stigmatized condition of being infected or at risk of infection with HIV was routinely characterized by a blaming and shame-avoidance dynamic, incentivizing some leaders to minimize or to deny risk of infection for coethnics or conationals. And this tended to stall political action, including on budgetary outlays, prevention programs, and treatment access.

Boundaries and COVID-19: Preliminary Observations Does such a theory have any predictive or explanatory value for the politics of responding to COVID-19? The first few months of the pandemic suggest a few reasons to tentatively respond “yes.” Once again, we have heard repeatedly that “COVID-19 knows no boundaries,” a rallying cry that has been quickly contradicted by government leaders and citizens around the world, who have predictably tried to make sense of the threat of the virus in terms of social boundaries that are familiar—and with some potentially analogous consequences.5 First, we have seen a huge emphasis on national boundaries— even in the presumably supranational European context—and many national leaders, especially the U.S. president, have focused on the idea that this infectious disease is “foreign.” Of course, it is true that the very movement of people anywhere in the context of COVID-19 increases the risk of infection and the fortification of national boundaries is one measure in a public health strategy designed to contain and to control contagion, but metaphors of “foreignness” contribute to false notions of the biological

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susceptibility to disease in terms of “them” and “us.” Indeed, President Trump has referred to COVID-19 as “Wuhan disease” and a “Chinese virus” and has sought to curb immigration in the wake of the epidemic, exacerbating such notions. And within national boundaries, certainly in the United States, various commentators have begun to highlight the uneven burden of COVID-19 across  racial  groups. Initially, rumors spread that “Black people were being spared,” but more recently, with the availability of testing data and further investigation, news reports have highlighted the high prevalence of COVID-19 cases and deaths among African Americans.6 And on April  18, CNN aired a broadcast entitled, “The Color of COVID,” which further explored this troubling pattern.7 Understandably, many African Americans and progressive public health officials believe it is important to identify and bring to the public’s attention this unfair health disparity in order to target the problem effectively. But the case of AIDS and related histories of the racialization of public health epidemics suggest the need for some caution here. Even well-intentioned efforts could have the unintended effects of harming the overall public health response and exacerbating the very disparities of concern. There is no scientific evidence suggesting that African Americans are, as a group, biologically more susceptible to COVID-19. Rather, as most public health experts point out, higher prevalence and death rates are almost surely due to other correlates of racial identity—including poor underlying health conditions, disproportionate vulnerability in employment circumstances, and mistrust of public health campaigns—rooted in our country’s racist past.8 Yet emphasizing the link between race and vulnerability to COVID-19 may serve to reinforce harmful and inaccurate biological notions of racial difference. Oddly, some state-level testing protocols—including in my home state of Massachusetts—use

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anachronistic race categories that are assigned by health practitioners with little guidance.9 (Individuals can be classified as “Black/African American,” but not “mixed race”; one can be “Hispanic,” or a series of “Non-Hispanic” categories, but it’s not clear how the very large Brazilian- or Colombian-born populations ought to be classified.) Moreover, it is not difficult to imagine that if COVID-19 comes to be understood as a “Black” epidemic, this will create false impressions for many white Americans—in the United States’ racially polarized and effectively segregated society—that the virus is “not our problem,” leading to decreased demand for and compliance with public health directives. And such notions may breed resentment among African Americans, who, in turn, may perceive they are being unfairly blamed for the extent of the pandemic. These are the types of unproductive political dynamics that characterized the AIDS epidemic and I fear we could see a repeat if patterns persist. Comparative analysis offers opportunities to consider alternative pathways. Notably, in Canada, where race and ethnicity are also correlated with COVID prevalence, public health authorities have opted against reporting and collecting COVID-related data in terms of socially constructed ethnic and racial categories, arguing that all should be treated the same.10 Detractors argue for a U.S.-style approach as described here, highlighting the need to shine a light on health disparities. Such cross-national differences invite important questions for policy-oriented and political research: Which approach leads to more aggressive outcomes in terms of prosocial attitudes and behaviors? Does highlighting the higher prevalence of some ethnic or racially defined groups induce empathy and reorientation of resources to advance equity? Or does it generate resentment on the part of the high-prevalence group for being “blamed” and

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further induce those who identify with groups at lower risk (e.g., whites) to discount the severity of the problem because it will not affect “us”? There may not be a simple answer—for example, preexisting levels of intergroup trust may condition the effects of reporting on ethnic- or race-based disease prevalence. Most of those who recommend collecting and disseminating ethnic- and race-based data in the current context do so out of a genuine and laudable concern for routinely disadvantaged minority groups. But well-intentioned tactics can backfire. My point is not that public health officials should abandon the enterprise of collecting racial- and ethnic-based data but simply that it ought to be done deliberately, cautiously, and with an eye toward the potentially undesirable effects of such collection.

Directions for COVID-Related Research Empirical research is necessary to assess the validity of competing claims concerning the effects of different approaches to social boundaries on policies and responses. Of course, many other variables affect politics and policy making within and across countries. In the particularly extreme case of the response to COVID-19 in the United States, profound partisanship and the sitting president’s wild unpredictability and distrust of scientific expertise have clearly been influential. But even these dynamics are at least partially explainable in terms of group boundaries: Donald Trump’s words and policies on COVID-19 are consistent with his nativist orientation and racist identity politics.11  And partisanship is strongly predicted by a number of factors that go deep into this country’s own highly racist past.12

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There will be no shortage of social science research on COVID-19, a pandemic that is reshaping economies and political order the world over. I have suggested the prospect of extending theories about the politics of diversity and social boundaries to this context and offered a few observations that suggest the relevance of this approach. Future work should consider how such factors affect risk perceptions, citizen behaviors and government responses—through analyses of surveys, online discourse, policy making, observed behaviors, testing and other epidemiological and administrative data. In so doing, we must be wary of how existing data-collection efforts will structure the answers we get, including, as described above, the highly limited set of race categories used on government reporting forms that do not reflect the more flexible set of identities in use today. Social scientists have an opportunity and a responsibility to inform policy and practice during this unique and challenging period of world history. Can we use theory and evidence to help guide workable solutions to curb the current pandemic and to mitigate its damaging effects? For example, what sorts of policies and messages might build solidarity?13 While we must invest in understanding the biomedical properties of the virus and the various tools and technologies being recommended by public health experts, social, political, and economic factors will inevitably mediate any attempts at implementation. Of course, we have no magic bullets, but we can and should continue to generate propositions and research about how to motivate action toward collective well-being.

NOTES 1. More recently, antiretroviral drug therapies for HIV have become sufficiently effective to reduce viral loads to the point of no longer being

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detectable, so arguably almost forty years into the epidemic, the scientific community is on the brink of a cure. The discussion of the politics of government responses to AIDS draws on research published Evan S. Lieberman, “The Perils of Polycentric Governance of Infectious Disease in South Africa,”  Social Science & Medicine  73, no.  5 (2011): 676–84, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science /article/abs/pii/S0277953611003583; Yarrow Dunham, Evan. S. Lieberman, and Steven A. Snell, “Does Stigmatized Social Risk Lead to Denialism? Results from a Survey Experiment on Race, Risk Perception, and Health Policy in the United States,”  PLoS One  11, no.  3 (2016), https:// journals . plos . org /plosone /article ? id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147219; Evan S. Lieberman, Boundaries of Contagion: How Ethnic Politics Have Shaped Government Responses to AIDS (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Varun Gauri and Evan  S. Lieberman, “Boundary Institutions and HIV/AIDS Policy in Brazil and South Africa,” Studies in Comparative International Development 41, no. 3 (2006): 47–73, https:// link .springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02686236. For a review, see Leonie Huddy, “From Social to Political Identity: A Critical Examination of Social Identity Theory,” Political Psychology 22, no.  1 (2001): 127–56, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0162 –895X .00230. João Biehl, “The Activist State: Global Pharmaceuticals, AIDS, and Citizenship in Brazil,”  Social Text  22, no.  3 (2004): 105–32, https://read .dukeupress.edu/social-text /article-abstract/22/3%20(80)/105/32678/TheActivist-StateGLOBAL-PHARMACEUTICALS-AIDS-AND; Gauri and Lieberman, “Boundary Institutions and HIV/AIDS Policy”; Richard Parker, “Building the Foundations for the Response to HIV/AIDS in Brazil: The Development of HIV/AIDS Policy, 1982–1996,”  Divulgação Em Saúde Para Debate, no. 27 (2003): 143–83. Jillian Kestler-D’Amours, “Diseases Know no Borders: Cooperation Key in COVID-19 Response,” Aljazeera, March  10, 2020, https://www .aljazeera .com /news/2020/3 /10/diseases -know-no -borders -cooperation -key-in-covid-19-response. Dahleen Glanton, “Let’s Stop the Spread—of the Myth Black People are Immune to the Coronavirus,” Chicago Tribune, March 18, 2020, https:// w w w . chicagotribune . com /columns /dahleen - glanton /ct - dahleen - glanton - coronavirus - black - immunity - myth - idris - elba - 20200319 -5auoqjzrmbcsphitbhpocth3qa-story.html; Jason Breslow, “Why Misinformation and Distrust Are Making COVID-19 More Dangerous For Black America,” NPR, April 10, 2020, https://www.npr.org /sections

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/coronavirus -live -updates /2020/04 /10/832039813 /why-misinformation -and-distrust-is-making-covid-19-more-dangerous-for-black-amer. Helen Regan, Jenni Marsh, Laura Smith-Spark, Fernando Alfonso III, and Amir Vera, “April  19 Coronavirus News,” CNN, April  19, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/world / live-news/coronavirus-pandemic-04-19-20 -intl. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Health Equity Considerations and Racial and Ethnic Minority Groups,” https://www.cdc.gov /coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/health-equity/race-ethnicity.html. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, “COVID-19 Response Reporting,” https:// w w w . mass . gov / info - details /covid -19 - response - reporting #guidance-for-laboratories-. Beverly Bain, OmiSoore Dryden, and Rinaldo Walcott, “Coronavirus Discriminates Against Black Lives Through Surveillance, Policing, and the Absence of Health Data,” The Conversation, April 20, 2020, https:// theconversation .com /coronavirus - discriminates - against- black-lives -through-surveillance-policing-and-the-absence-of-health-data-135906?; CBC Staff, “Toronto Will Start Tracking Race-Based COVID-19 Data, even if Province Won’t,” CBC, April 22, 2020, https://www.cbc.ca /news /canada /toronto/toronto-covid-19-race-based-data-1.5540937. John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen, Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). Questions we raise in Melani Cammett and Evan Lieberman, “Building Solidarity: Challenges, Options, and Implications for Covid-19 Responses,” COVID Rapid Response White Paper Series (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, 2020).

THINK LIKE A VIRUS WARWICK ANDERSON

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t seems there’s nothing like a pandemic to get people reading— and writing—medical history. Even before the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, historians and a few historically minded anthropologists were looking into the meaning and significance of epidemics. They studied particularly the rise, during the past forty years, of ecological explanations of disease patterns, theories of “emergency” and “crisis,” and practices of biosecurity, surveillance, and preparedness. Through transforming knowledge of our relations with the microbial world, these historians and anthropologists are helping to equip us for our current predicament— equipping us, as it were, not with physical personal protective equipment (PPE) like masks, but with equally effective cognitive PPE. In 2020, as COVID-19 spread insidiously around the world, the major outcomes of this long-term research conveniently materialized in a flurry of books: most notably, in Mark Honigsbaum’s The Pandemic Century, Lyle Fearnley’s Virulent Zones, and Andrew Lakoff’s Unprepared. These books appear just when we need them, at the right time to help us to understand and withstand the pandemic. So what can we learn from this new cognitive PPE?

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Mulling over these three books after the advent of COVID-19 leaves me with a worrisome impression. In recent decades, significant energy and funding have been devoted to preparing for a future epidemic—to managing the unknown. Yet these studies make clear that much of that effort and money might have been better expended in research on disease ecology and the social determinants of health—on making the unknown known. Certainly, preparedness planning appears to have done little or nothing actually to prepare us for the current pandemic. A decade of technocratic exercises designed to achieve global health security now looks like a colossal and tragic waste of time and resources. Rather than simply accepting that a virus will come, instead, we might follow a new path: learning how these viruses live and thrive—and working to suppress or deflect them before they take off. Q Q Q

Making the unknown known begins with abandoning deficient and inadequate ways of understanding viruses. For a start, infectious disease prevention and control are never simply about “microbe hunting.” Ever since so many diseases were attributed to particular germs late in the nineteenth century, the sport of chasing the causative organism has become a common theme in the development of epidemiology, the statistical study of disease outbreaks. As a medical student in the 1970s, I was inspired by Paul de Kruif’s tales of gallant disease detectives, published originally in 1926 and long a staple in the education of budding health professionals.1 It seemed pretty straightforward: all you had to do was track down and isolate the germ, using the tools of a microbiology laboratory, then do a bit of contact tracing and isolation or

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quarantine of spreaders and carriers—and that would both explain and contain the epidemic. If only it were that easy. Working out disease patterns, as de Kruif occasionally hinted, often proved far more complicated and scrambled in practice. The emergence and worldwide spread of influenza in 1918, for example, provoked consternation and bewilderment among epidemiologists, who struggled to explain how it happened and what it meant. In the interwar years, many infectious disease specialists turned to broader evolutionary principles to make sense of interactions of microbes or parasites with their hosts—that is, with us. These biomedical experts aimed to integrate the new microbiology with an older macrobiology, hoping thereby to comprehend how equilibria between germs and their hosts might become disturbed, causing diseases to emerge. One of the leading figures in this effort to make the mapping of disease patterns more complex and realistic was F. Macfarlane Burnet, a taciturn Australian virologist with uncanny biological intuition, who coined the term “disease ecology” in the late 1930s. Burnet described vividly the struggle for existence between humans and their parasites, an eternal tussle in which the microbes for a time might gain the upper hand, causing what we know as an epidemic. Ever sensitive to pathologies of progress, Burnet warned that wars, migrations, advances in mobility, human overcrowding, financial depression, and environmental degradation were likely to aid and abet such disease emergence. So-called civilization, he lamented, was letting loose new calamities.2 Yet these were only calamities from the human’s point of view; from the microbe’s perspective, after all, pandemics must look more like flourishing. Burnet’s jeremiads from down under attracted little attention from other epidemiologists during a period when infectious disease seemed to be declining, at least in wealthy countries. With

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the advent of AIDS in the 1980s, however, this blithe disregard turned occasionally to intense scrutiny. Suddenly, at least some epidemiologists came to see the utility of Burnet’s “ecological” thought in figuring out why new diseases, such as AIDS (and later, influenza variants, Ebola, SARS, MERS, Zika, and so on), might emerge as if out of nowhere and afflict us. Soon, new ecologically informed research enterprises, such as One Health, EcoHealth, and now the planetary health movement, were proliferating in global public health.3 Even so, the rising ecological clamor remained virtually inaudible to most policy makers and to the public. Q Q Q

When we seek to understand patterns of infectious disease, we have a choice to make. One option is to default to facile assumptions of contamination, the sense that mere contact or proximity leads inevitably to danger and defilement. Of course, it’s true that contagion is not an uncommon means of spreading germs, but person-to-person contact is never without context, whether ecological or social. While it may be possible to perform adequate microbe hunting using a simplistic contamination model, such reductive accounts won’t help us to understand why a particular disease appeared in the first place. Contamination thinking can’t show how an epidemic emerged, where it’s going, and what we should do to arrest it. The other option, as the historian Charles E. Rosenberg noted in relation to AIDS, is to try to grasp the configuration of an epidemic.4 Understanding the configuration of a disease is necessary if we want to learn about its origin, structure, and future course. We need to be able to situate disease and contextualize it.

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Since the 1980s, then, ecology has offered a powerful method of engaging with the biological configurations and complexities of emerging diseases. Ecology—as a mode of configuring—is a more intricate means of collecting epidemic intelligence, so much so that ecological explanations have tended to displace older sociological insight into economic and political factors, which also influence the distribution and abundance of germs and, hence, patterns of infectious disease. For some, social medicine, as propounded first by the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow in the 1840s, continues to furnish an alternative integrative framework for making sense of disease emergence. Like ecology, social medicine suggests a source for complexity in epidemiology, but one affording a contrasting socioeconomic configuration.5 Still, social medicine seems to be struggling to gain attention these days. Both ecology and sociology provide distinctive and, so far, divergent modes of rendering our understanding of epidemics more elaborate and multifaceted. And, in so doing, both potentially make our framing of disease and our epidemic intelligence more constructive and serviceable. Yet disease ecologists and aficionados of social medicine seem more often to be in competition than accord, usually talking over one another. Q Q Q

This is where history becomes useful in unraveling our current assumptions and misapprehensions. At first, the appearance of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, incited various ecological speculations about why the epidemic might emerge there at that particular time. Admittedly, those arguing for interspecies transmission (often including bat and pangolin consumption) invoked

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stigmatizing accusations of “primitive” customs and habits more often than they considered modern ecological hazards, such as urbanization, industrial agriculture, and efficient transport networks. But it was a start. Since then, occasional flickers of social medicine have shown up in observations of the influence of racial and socioeconomic disparities on disease prevalence. Before long, however, much more simplistic contamination models, shorn of any ecological and sociological complexity, came to dominate most accounts of the worldwide spread of the novel coronavirus. Contact implied danger, defilement brought disease. Therefore, it has fallen to historians and anthropologists to show us how we might yet have structural complexity, or at least a sense of configuration, in our apprehensions of the pandemic. In The Pandemic Century, a masterful tour of the receding horizon of past plagues, Mark Honigsbaum repeatedly scrutinizes the obsession of modern medicine and public health with developing new diagnostics and technical preventive measures— such as vaccines—in order to contain disease outbreaks. Often, this narrow a focus on technological “solutions” has led to the neglect of the complex ecological and immunological reasons behind the emergence and spread of such human afflictions. With marked brio and impressive detail, Honigsbaum surveys the histories of outbreaks of influenza in 1918–19, bubonic plague in Los Angeles in 1924, psittacosis (an ailment of parrots that can cross over to humans) in 1929 and 1930, Legionnaires’ disease in Philadelphia in 1976, AIDS since 1981, SARS in East Asia in 2003, Ebola in West Africa in 2014, and Zika in the Americas in 2015. The lesson of history is clear, according to Honigsbaum: we desperately need “a more nuanced view of our complex interactions with microbes.” Each of the examples he highlights indicates “the dangers of overreliance on particular technologies at the expense

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of wider ecological insights into disease causation.” The story of SARS, another coronavirus, is especially pertinent, as it links the crowding together of horseshoe bats, palm civets, and humans to the evolution and transmission of the virus in the markets of Shenzhen—conjuring a sort of ecological déjà vu in the era of COVID-19. Published only in 2019, the first edition of The Pandemic Century stopped at Zika. The revised 2020 version concludes, inevitably, with COVID-19, the much anticipated “Disease X.” Written in March and April 2020, Honigsbaum’s account of the new pandemic is already dated, so much so that it seems premature, even opportunistic. But he deftly draws out parallels with previous infectious calamities. Each epidemic, he writes, “is part of an ecological web that is itself influenced by a constellation of shifting economic, social, and environmental factors.” Like Frank Snowden in his excellent Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present,6 Honigsbaum eloquently makes the case for better understanding the ecological configurations of disease outbreaks. All the same, we continue to discount or marginalize the ecology of disease emergence and transmission while happily investing in reductionist technical interventions based on simplistic contamination models. Q Q Q

In Virulent Zones, we can now follow the anthropologist Lyle Fearnley into the farms and fields of southern China. These are the source of multiple influenza pandemics and coronavirus outbreaks, so we need to listen carefully to the conversations he has there with virologists, veterinarians, birders, and ordinary laborers. More an ecology sleuth than a microbe hunter, Fearnley wants to find out what disease ecology looks like at ground zero around

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Poyang Lake. He shows us “how China’s landscapes of intensive livestock farming and state biopolitics created ecologies of influenza that exceeded global health models and assumptions.” According to Fearnley, Hong Kong since the 1980s has also been especially fertile in generating ecological thought about the emergence of new viruses, in tracking cross-species transmissions, and in assaying the impact of changing farming practices, urban overcrowding, and population mobility on the distribution and abundance of germs in the region. The emergence of H5N1 influenza in 1997 stimulated further ecological inquiries, prompting virologists and epidemiologists to leave their city laboratories and offices to venture into the fields to work out how domesticated poultry, wild birds, pigs, and humans were interacting to cause viral epidemics. It turns out influenza viruses tend to incubate and mutate in wild geese and flocks of ducks and chickens before infecting proximate humans in cramped conditions. Fearnley probably overstates the novelty of such fieldwork in disease ecology. But he does make a compelling argument for the move away from older micro-evolutionary theories of pathogenesis, based on competition of hosts and parasites, toward a more systemic and rigorous reckoning—a dynamic configuration—of how environments and animal populations (human and nonhuman) connect up to promote viral innovation. Meanwhile, he points out that the WHO and other global health organizations still focus conventionally on viral surveillance, vaccine development, and preparedness planning. This is another way of saying that such crucial organizations have mostly ignored developments in disease ecology. In other words, we may have a lot to learn from interspecies ecological research in Hong Kong and southern China concerning disease outbreaks. As Fearnley concludes, in relation to COVID-19: “If there is any hope in predicting and preventing the next emerging viral pathogen,

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it will rely on inventing new instruments of ecological and social research that are capable of tracing the links between viruses and their environments.” Perhaps, then, less talk of the China virus and more attention to the insights of Chinese disease ecology? Q Q Q

Both Honigsbaum and Fearnley show us there can be no reliable biosecurity or epidemic preparedness without insight from disease ecology and social medicine. Similarly, the anthropologist Frédéric Keck, who traverses some of Fearnley’s territory in Avian Reservoirs: Virus Hunters and Birdwatchers in Chinese Sentinel Posts, calls for a “shift in the reflection on preparedness from the short temporality of emergencies to the long temporality of ecologies.”7 The dire ecological and sociological impoverishment of preCOVID-19 imaginings of biosecurity and preparedness is vividly revealed in Andrew Lakoff’s Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency. Lakoff exhaustively documents global efforts to classify, regulate, and technically circumscribe outbreaks of novel diseases, describing how the global health industry in the early twenty-first century has redefined and reclassified events like “crises” and “emergencies” and reframed “biosecurity” and “preparedness.” Another anthropologist venturing into recent historical analysis, Lakoff adroitly shows how management theories, civil defense practices, and risk analysis came to inform and limit responses to disease emergence. Focusing on the United States after the September  11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he explains how “national preparedness provides authorities with tools for grasping uncertain future events and bringing them into a space of present intervention.”

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In effect, preparedness becomes our last resort when risk assessment fails. Often this involves the modeling or imaginative reenactment of potentially catastrophic events whose likelihood escapes calculation—such as the emergence of a novel coronavirus. Thus, Lakoff tracks the swarm of global bodies and their confusing acronyms (ProMED, GPHIN, GOARN, GISN, and so on), all dedicated to assessing the risk of disease emergence or, when that fails, managing the unknown by performing imaginative enactments of worst-case scenarios, often focused on rapid pharmaceutical and vaccine development. Disease ecology and social medicine, which might help make known the lurking unknown, have become utterly marginal to this furor of modeling and simulation. Q Q Q

We can read Honigsbaum’s and Fearnley’s books with profit to learn more about our current predicament, to see how historical perceptions and responses are repeated or modified as we come to terms with the pandemic that confronts us today. Reading Lakoff’s book performs a different function, exposing the remoteness or inapplicability of some recent global health endeavors, illustrating what went wrong or what turned out to be futile. Sadly, such distressing historical failures, as much as any ecological glimmers of hope, condition the way we live now.

NOTES 1. Paul de Kruif, Microbe Hunters (1926; reprint, Boston,  MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002). 2. See Warwick Anderson, “Natural Histories of Infectious Disease: Ecological Vision in Twentieth-Century Biomedical Science,” Osiris 19 (2004): 39–61.

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3. James Dunk and Warwick Anderson, “Assembling Planetary Health: Histories of the Future,” in Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves, ed. Samuel S. Myers and Howard Frumkin (Washington, DC: Island, 2020), 17–35. 4. Charles E. Rosenberg, “Explaining Epidemics,” in Explaining Epidemics, and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 293–304. 5. For example, Paul Farmer, Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 6. Frank M. Snowden, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). 7. Frédéric Keck, Avian Reservoirs: Virus Hunters and Birdwatchers in Chinese Sentinel Posts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 177.

PART V Pandemic Lives

FOR THE LOVE OF STRANGERS JULIA FOULKES

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teach courses about New York and often begin the semester’s conversation by asking students to share a personal anecdote that best describes their city. Invariably, the anecdotes are about encounters with strangers, often on the subway. It’s about help offered, anonymity made comforting, aloneness yet connection amid others. My own favorite anecdote is in the same mode. A friend was wearing beloved red, clown-like shoes on the subway one day and she soon realized that someone sitting across from her was eyeing them. The person then looked up at her and said: “I could be friends with you.” Strangers that could be friends—all because of a shared style in quirky shoes. That’s my vision of New York. The nearness and ubiquity of strangers is one of the qualities I love most about New York—but it is the one that makes it so vulnerable to the coronavirus pandemic. Physical distancing is hard to do here. We live crammed sideby-side in apartment buildings, subway cars, on sidewalks during rush hour, in Times Square. Our playgrounds and dog runs are shut and even our parks now face the possibility of closure given that we can’t stay out of the only open green spaces we have and

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stray too close to other people while in them. Central Park has been called the lungs of the city, a poignant metaphor for how fragile and belabored breathing has now become. As our green lungs shut down, so too does our everyday existence among strangers. The very density of many unfamiliar folks nearby was part of the remedy in other moments of crisis.1 The eerily quiet subway rides across the Manhattan Bridge in the days after 9/11, smoke still pluming across the sky from the World Trade Center, always felt like a communal ritual of despair as well as an enveloping embrace. That car of unknown people were suddenly the only people who could possibly understand the aching wound. Similarly, Hurricane Sandy required crowds of volunteers to feed and shelter people pushed out of drowning homes and neighborhoods. But in our crisis of the moment, we are right to be careful of offering strangers such shelter much less an embrace. Strangers have become vectors of virus contagion. I cross the street to avoid the elderly man on his daily walk around the block. I know this is a kind of caring but it goes against every New York instinct I have. In his classic essay “Here is New York,” E. B. White estimates that eighteen inches between people is “the connection and the separation that New York provides for its inhabitants.”2 (Eighteen inches now sounds like marital intimacy.) This nearness affords both the “gift of privacy” and the “excitement of possibility.” As he sits writing the essay alone in a hotel room, White details all that is happening in the city nearby that he is oblivious to. Strangers could become friends but they more likely remain unknown to one another. The city invites participation but doesn’t require it. What’s odd—and foreboding—about the current

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moment is that, in many cases, nothing is going on around the corner at all. The eeriness now is knowing exactly what everyone is doing: going from couch to chair to bed, panicking in their apartments. The constant cry of sirens is a bell tolling the heroism of nurses, doctors, ambulance drivers, and paramedics—but also a dire warning of what could happen because we spend time with others. Medical workers, grocery clerks, and postal workers sorting the packages we depend on are forced to spend time with others, but they are (hopefully) behind masks, wearing protective gear, near people but with layers in between. There is no comfort from these crowds, only more strain. The anxieties of nearing another become palpable even in the most benign situations such as grocery shopping. But it is in the subway, the city’s circulatory system, where the fear and inequities are most acute:  essential workers packed  into sparsely running subway cars, risking their own health to save that of others.3 It’s no surprise, then, that our fear of strangers may be on the rise. One consequence of the tragedy of 9/11 is how many Muslims experienced a new fear and anger directed at them. Certain strangers became terrorists. The rise of anti-Asian hate crimes and discrimination now replicates that ugly and insidious strain of choosing to target whole swaths of people for a tragedy that is far beyond them.4 I fear for how months of this experience will impact my city. How being with those who are familiar, known, safe from contagion will impact my view of those unknown, near me, wearing odd shoes. Will I look upon them as a possible friend? What used to be a routine habit I’m now practicing with concerted purpose. When I go for my solo walks nowadays, I seek out the eyes of those six-feet-away, wanting to connect to them in the only way

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possible. I see you, stranger who could be my friend. How I long to be close to you again, eighteen inches apart, enough for both separation and connection.

NOTES 1. Emily Badger, “Density Is Normally Good for Us. That Will Be True After Coronavirus, Too,” New York Times, March 24, 2020, https://www . nytimes . com /2020 /03 /24 /upshot /coronavirus -urban - density -risks .html. 2. E.  B. White, “Here Is New York,” (1949), reprint, in Empire City: New York Through the Centuries, ed. Kenneth Jackson and David Dunbar (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), https:// langurbansociology .files.wordpress.com/2013/01/white-on-nyc.pdf. 3. Chris Jewers, “Shocking Picture Shows New York Train Packed with Mask-Wearing Passengers Despite Strict Social Distancing Instructions—as Essential Workers Continue to Commute Amid Rising Coronavirus Death Toll in NYC,” Daily Mail, April  3, 2020, https://www .dailymail .co .uk /news /article -8183545 /Shocking -picture - shows -New -York-train-packed-mask-wearing-passengers-despite-lockdown.html. 4. “Asian Americans Report Rise in Racist Attacks Amid Pandemic,” PBS Newshour, April 1, 2020, https://www.pbs.org /newshour/show/what-anti -asian-attacks-say-about-american-culture-during-crisis.

WHERE IS SHE? SOLEDAD ÁLVAREZ VELASCO

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e met at the end of August 2019, sitting side by side in row 18 of the Aero Mexico flight that departs every morning from Quito to Mexico City.1 Mine was seat C, on the aisle. Although she had been assigned the middle seat, she did not take her eyes off the window seat, where her five-year-old son, Juan, was sitting. Her white blouse went well with her two-piece suit: a skirt and blazer, both grey. Her black hair was nicely braided. She was wearing a pair of long gold brocade earrings. She wore black high heels and carried a large leather purse of the same color. Juan had her elegance: at his young age he was travelling in a suit and a tie. A few minutes before the plane took off, she looked at me, sighed, and—filled with nervousness—said, “This is the second time I am on a plane, but not the first time I am travelling to Mexico.” Luz de América was thirty-eight years old when I met her. She was born and raised in San Antonio de Quinsapincha, one of the rural parishes of Ambato canton, province of Tungurahua, Ecuador. Because this is one of the poorest cantons in the country,2 everyday life has turned increasingly precarious, certainly for peasants who, like this woman’s parents, make their living by farming. “La tierrita [the land] gives very little money, so I learned to work with leather,” Luz de América told me. Like many other

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artisans in Quinsapincha, she learned how to mould, to sew, and to paint leather to make shoes. Her rough and scarred hands revealed her daily effort in cultivating the land and working with leather, an effort that did not result, however, in a decent income. Working every day, she earned $170 a month, which barely covered her living expenses. It takes four and a half hours by plane to cover the nearly 2,000 miles that separate Quito from Mexico City. During those hours in the air, in the most unexpected way, Luz de América remembered and shared with me her first migratory experience while simultaneously experiencing, at that very moment, how the second one begun to unfold: “Two years ago my husband left. He lives in Queens. He paid off a coyote who crossed him. In Quinsapincha, people know how to get there. That’s how I left the first time. . . . On that occasion, we were supposed to meet in New York, and then we were going to bring Juan.” In January, 2018, Luz de América entrusted the care of her son to her mother and left “por la chacra.” It took her more than six weeks to reach Mexico by land. She left undocumented and guided by the same coyote that had guided her husband. That is how she crossed a part of the same route that we were to fly over: Colombia, Central America, and southern Mexico. By land she also crossed the border between Mexico and the United States, and even advanced into U.S. territory until she was stopped. Confined in a detention center, she suffered the same as so many other millions of undocumented migrants: “They punished us by taking us to cold rooms, ‘iceboxes’ which were colder than the moorland,” recalled Luz de América. Held incommunicado and “punished,” she was detained for more than six months, until she was deported to Ecuador. Chained hands and feet, she returned on a deportation flight. That was her first plane ride. Luz de América was certain that she

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would emigrate again, but she was not sure when. She did not want to suffer the “punishment of the icebox” nor to leave Juan again. So she hesitated while her husband in Queens insisted that she had to try again. He said that this is how the clandestine journey works, that it does not always work the first time, and that the coyote would give her two more attempts to cross until she finally reached the United States. Between her own doubts and the external insistence, something unexpected happened. In November, 2018, Mexico eliminated the visa requirement for Ecuadorians. This meant that Luz de América could travel not as an undocumented passenger but with her passport in hand, not clandestinely by land but by plane, so that she would reach Mexico in four and a half hours and not in six weeks. The change in the visa policy coincided with something else: the increased numbers of unaccompanied and accompanied Central American migrant children arriving in the United States. The United States has a legal limit of twenty days for the custody of minors in detention centers. In the face of the massive arrival of children, something exceptional happened. In order not to violate the time limit established by law, detained undocumented mothers and their children were released before the legal limit was reached, with the requirement that they appear before an immigration court. Their undocumented status did not change, but certain undocumented mothers and their children were in this way allowed to enter the United States.3 In fact, a month and a half before Luz de América begun her journey, her sister-in-law and her two minor nephews flew to Mexico and managed to reach New York. Because the migratory context was exceptional and promised a more accelerated and apparently less risky transit, Luz de América decided to leave for a second time. The same coyote who guided her on her first attempt organized her second trip. He gave her a

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series of written instructions in addition to the advice that her sister-in-law gave her. That is how she knew beforehand that one of the biggest challenges she would face was crossing with her son through immigration control at the airport in Mexico City posing as tourists. Luz de América had to face an immigration system that a priori discriminates against certain bodies on the basis of racialized constructions. She had to fool that system by appearing to fit into the category of tourist and not into that of potential migrant—although this is what she was—in order to consummate her migratory project, which was no less than her life project. If she made it through immigration control, the rest seemed comparatively simple. She and Juan would be guided to the northern border, and they would turn themselves in to the U.S. immigration authority. If all went well after they were released, they would arrive in New York in a few weeks. The path seemed clear. Yet while still in Quito, she had a warning. The Ecuadorian immigration agent who was stamping her passport for departure, after asking her where she was going, warned her: “You won’t be able to enter Mexico.” Ignoring this, Luz de América took her passport. She knew that there was a reason for the warning: “My passport is stained, because I was deported. That’s why the policeman told me that. But I’m sure I’ll get to cross,” Luz de América insisted, in a tone of voice that could not hide her nervousness and fear. In her purse she carried everything she and her son needed: her smartphone, a Mexican cell phone sim card, enough cash to cover expenses along the road, some candies, and Juan’s toys. Luz de América was not easily deterred from her search for a new life. Neither poverty nor migratory restrictions nor warnings of state controls had stopped her. Her strength came from her life experience, a strength that allowed her to reveal her weaknesses. As she recounted her life, she paused. She was silent, her body contracted, because she found it hard to remember the sorrow she

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carried. Her eyes filled with tears as she remembered what she had suffered while in detention, far away from her son. She held her hands very tightly, almost as if she was praying, when she imagined herself crossing the desert and carrying her son in her arms. She told me she was afraid, afraid to cross borders. But acknowledging fear does not mean lacking courage or bravery, and that was exactly what gave her substance. Forty-five minutes from landing, Luz de América asked me a favor. The flight attendant had given us the Mexican immigration form we were supposed to fill out on entering the country. It was only then when she confessed to me that she had only finished second grade and consequently barely knew how to read and write. Together we completed the form, and in less than no time we landed. When the plane stopped, Luz de América smiled at me again and said, “I’m a bit scared. But, with the help of the Virgin, we will cross.” With her steady strength, she took Juan by one hand and grabbed her purse with the other. They got off the plane. I was close to them, close enough for Luz de América to know that I was there in case I could help her. I was deluded to think that with my presence I would give strength to a woman who hardly needed it, who had never stopped fighting for her life and who was walking in front of me on the verge of another battle. The line to reach immigration control did not take long. She and Juan went first. Luz de América approached the checkpoint and handed her passport and her son’s to the Mexican immigration officer. There was an ebb and flow of questions and replies. They exchanged a silent dialogue of gazes. Juan, without any real idea of what was happening, waited at the side. Grabbing his mother’s hand, at the age of five, he was the greatest source of strength that woman needed at that moment. I witnessed from afar what perhaps no one else realized: how the vital power of that indigenous woman from Quinsapincha— a peasant and artisan,

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who could barely read and write—was in fact the real passport that allowed her to cope with border control. Without further ado, the Mexican immigration stamp was inked on her “stained passport,” and with that the ill omen of the Ecuadorean immigration agent came to nothing. She and Juan entered Mexico. I imagine her smiling. I hear in the distance perhaps her sigh of deep calm because the first challenge has been overcome. Luz de América took her son, and they just kept on walking without stopping.

II. I have no doubt that the vital power that enabled Luz de América to enter Mexico also allowed her and Juan to cross Mexico, to traverse the border, and even to surrender to the U.S. immigration authorities. Her strength will have surely allowed her to care for her son in detention. At the moment when she left Ecuador, as mentioned, it was very unlikely that she and Juan would have been deported. Therefore, after several weeks they may have been conditionally released, allowing them finally to begin their journey to New York. Between the end of 2019 and the first two months of 2020, Luz de América and Juan will have begun to decode everyday life in Queens. Certainly she will be working at some of the many jobs that the informal market of New York City holds for undocumented migrants like her: highly precarious jobs, without any social protection. Together with her husband, the three of them will probably be dwelling in some small place in Queens. Maybe it is a crowded place, where they have to share their lives with

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several other Ecuadorians or other Latin Americans, who like them most probably are undocumented migrants too. Just as an unexpected migratory context accelerated her decision to leave Ecuador for the second time, an unexpected pandemic today is certainly transforming Luz de América’s life project in a radical way. Since mid-March  2020, a health cataclysm has come to unveil the savage contemporary social inequality in which we, inhabitants of a global village, live. Despite the fact that borders have been sealed around the world, the pandemic unleashed by Sars-CoV-2 has not slowed down on its journey of contagion and devastation. The United States is today the most affected country in the world, and New York the city that has been hit the hardest, with a total of cases exceeding that of entire countries. That is why Luz de América’s voice has come back to me. Her story, an individual one, is the story of thousands of other Ecuadorians who, like her, stripped of rights, pushed by the violence of poverty in Ecuador, filled with courage and bravery, have undertaken inhospitable journeys to reach the United States and in particular New York. Where is Luz de América? How is she? How is Juan? How are all those other Ecuadorians who undertook clandestine journeys “por la chacra” and whose mobility was blocked by border closures amid the pandemic? How are the Ecuadorians detainees? Those who have been punished in the “iceboxes”? Those who are about to be deported? How are the hundreds of thousands of undocumented Ecuadorians who are sick? How many of them have died because of COVID-19? Have they been buried? Who mourns those bodies? From Quinsapincha, Dotaxi, Cochapamba, Jima, Gualaceo, Girón, and from so many other places, Ecuadorians like Luz de América have emigrated to the United States. Ecuador has a

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fragile monoproductive economy, highly dependent on the international market. There poverty and systemic inequality have not ceased to reproduce. In fact, poverty has found a niche in indigenous peasant and rural life for reproduction. It is no coincidence then that indigenous peasant women and men, like Luz de América, have since at least the end of the 1960s emigrated mainly to the United States. Because of this the historical, social, cultural, and economic formation of this Andean country cannot be understood without paying attention to the incessant departure of Ecuadorians abroad. Por la chacra, por la pampa, por el camino, as the clandestine path from Ecuador to the United States is locally known, with false documents, with a visa or without it, by air, by sea, or by land, so many Ecuadoreans have emigrated that 738,000 today live in the United States, the tenth largest group of Latin origin.4 The vast majority live in New York (39  percent), New Jersey (18  percent), and Florida (11 percent).5 The epicenter of COVID-19 in the United States is thus home to a large number of Ecuadoreans migrants. Among them, many are undocumented and therefore their rights are limited—among others, their right to health. In the United States, 45 percent of undocumented immigrants lack health insurance, which in the context of the pandemic is a major problem.6 Although in most states community clinics attend to patients regardless of their immigration status, thousands of undocumented immigrants do not have access to health care because they fear control and deportation. On February 24, 2020, on the eve of the expansion of COVID-19, the Trump administration implemented the “public charge rule” that blocks green card eligibility for immigrants who have used or whom the government believes are likely to use a public benefit. Health care does not qualify as a public benefit. However, in the current context of criminalization and xenophobia towards undocumented

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migrants, the misinterpretation of this rule goes along with a lot of fear to stop undocumented migrants from seeking medical care. In addition, raids and detentions have not stopped in the regions most affected by COVID-19, including California and New York.7 Both facts perversely exacerbate the risk of death among the undocumented population, including Ecuadoreans. These facts to some extent explain the racial and ethnic disparity among COVID-19 victims in the United States. On April 8, 2020, health data confirmed that in New York the highest percentage of deaths from COVID-19 fell among Hispanics (34  percent), followed by African Americans (28  percent).8 That 34  percent is likely to include Ecuadorians. Along with these revealing figures, press reports show the pitiless experiences that Ecuadorians are currently facing in New York, precisely in Queens. As an effect of the national quarantine, many have become unemployed. Some are living in overcrowded, unsanitary places; others are homeless, sick, uninsured, unable to attend health centers because they are afraid of being detained and deported.9 Those who have fallen ill may die at home, turn into unrecognized corpses, become NN (no-name) bodies, and end up in the mass grave now being built for pandemic victims on Hart Island off New York.10 For all these reasons, I cannot help but wonder where Luz de América, Juan, and all the other thousands of Ecuadorian migrants are. I want to know not so much a geographical location as a historical and therefore political location, the place that they occupy in the past and present of Ecuador. Where are they? is a question that arises from an incomprehensible invisibility of those thousands of men and women. The Ecuadorian political agenda has removed them from its priorities because for the past decades it has adopted an extreme nationalism focused on combating irregularized immigration within the national territory

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and strengthening border security. In lockstep, a violent xenophobic discourse has normalized within Ecuadorean society, while the media for the most part exacerbate the construction of the “illegal migrant” as a national threat, deliberately leaving out the history of Ecuador as a country of migrants. In the midst of the pandemic, undocumented migrants have been erased from official discourse. In the United States, the bill passed by the Senate to inject two trillion dollars into the U.S. economy and help workers openly excluded the more than 12 million undocumented workers, including Ecuadorian migrants. In Ecuador, the bill proposed by the government of Lenin Moreno to deal with the ravages of COVID-19 also excluded migrants— indeed, it did not even mention them, despite the essential role that undocumented migrants play in social and economic life in both countries. The perverse national denial is obscene and intolerable, given that migrant remittances have been key to sustaining the Ecuadorian economy. Over the past twenty years, Ecuador has received more than $49 billion in remittances, which, along with exports and foreign investment, represent a main source of liquidity maintaining the dollarization on which the country’s economy is based. Moreover, during the last two decades remittances represented 3.6 times foreign direct investment, which only reached approximately $13.5 billion.11 We cannot simply overlook the fact that, besides commodities from Ecuador’s extractive economy and foreign investment, it is the migrant labor force, exported abroad over the past five decades, that has sustained the economy of this Andean country. To ask about Luz de América, is to ask about the history of a country of migrants that has been stripping rights from its citizens and expelling them in silence for decades. To ask about them is to acknowledge our forgetfulness and the deliberate ways in which we have disappeared them from public life, denying them

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the decisive role they play in the social, political, cultural, and economic fabric of a transnational country. To ask about them is to point to a failed state, to reveal its absolute inability to protect the thousands of Ecuadorians who have been sustaining the country and who are fighting for their lives. As the severity of the pandemic ravages the lives of the most disposable, our forgetfulness ravages us as a collective. It is the stories and images of their lives that demand that we make present what we have wanted to make absent. I have told Luz de América’s story to share images of her journey, of her courage and bravery. Susan Sontag wondered about the political role of images in fostering a critical awareness of the brutality of our present times. Her reflection arose from wartime contexts. War tears, breaks, disembowels, ruins, Sontag said; that is why “being an observer means having the luck to have avoided the death that has struck others.”12 Although we are not currently facing a war in the Americas, the atrocity of this pandemic has turned the lives of thousands of people into a battlefield against death. This is the reality especially for those who have been confined to live in a state of state of complete unprotection, like undocumented migrants. We cannot simply be passive, memory-less observers of the barbarity that this pandemic is unleashing. If we are able to be observers, it is because thousands of others are being killed. Encountering the stories of Luz de América can help to locate us in the present, to take on the responsibility that we as observers, not yet touched by death, have to politicize our memories and thus interrupt the reproduction of a present that wants to discard life.

NOTES 1. This article was originally published in English in the cultural and political journal Brooklyn Rail in June 2020. 2. La Hora (2019). “Ambato ocupa el tercer lugar a nivel nacional en índice de pobreza,” January  30, 2019, https://www.lahora.com.ec/tungurahua

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/noticia /1102218754 /ambato - ocupa- el-tercer-lugar-a-nivel-nacional- en -indice-de-pobreza This policy allowed many Central American and Ecuadorian mothers and children to enter the United States. John Davis, “Border Crisis: CBP’s Response,” (2019), https://www.cbp.gov/frontline/ border-crisis -cbp-s-response. Luis Noe-Bustamante, Antonio Flores, and Sono Shah, “Facts on Hispanics of Ecuadorian Origin in the United States, 2017,” Pew Research Center, Hispanic Trends, https://www.pewresearch.org /hispanic/fact -sheet/u-s-hispanics-facts-on-ecuadorian-origin-latinos/ Noe-bustamante, Flores, and Shah, “Facts on Hispanics of Ecuadorian Origin.” KFF, “Health Coverage of Immigrants,” March 18, 2020, https://www.kff .org /disparities-policy/fact-sheet/health-coverage-of-immigrants. Catherin Kim, “Low-Income Immigrants Are Afraid to Seek Health Care Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Vox, March 13, 2020, https://www .vox .com /identities /2020/3 /13 /21173897/coronavirus -low-income -immi grants; Miriam Jordan, “ ‘We’re Petrified’: Immigrants Afraid to Seek Medical Care for Coronavirus,” New York Times, March 18, 2020, https:// www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/us/coronavirus-immigrants.html. David Robinson, “In New York State, the Black and Hispanic Populations Are at Higher Risk of Dying from Coronavirus, Preliminary Data Show,” USA Today, April 8, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news / health /2020/04/08/ny-plans-release-covid-19-racial-demographic-data -amid-concerns/2969478001/. Annie Correal and Andrew Jacobs, “A Tragedy Is Unfolding Inside New York’s Virus Epicenter,” New York Times, April  9, 2020, https://www .nytimes.com/2020/04/09/nyregion/coronavirus-queens-corona-jackson -heights-elmhurst.html. “Nueva York abre una gran fosa común en la isla de Hart que recibe 25 cadáveres al día,” El País, March  10, 2020. https://elpais.com/sociedad /2020–04–10/nueva-york-abre-una-gran-fosa-comun-en-la-isla-de-hart -que-recibe-25-cadaveres-al-dia.html. El Comercio (2020). “ Ecuador recibió USD 49 125 millones por remesas desde 1999,” El Comercio, January 20, 2020, https://www.elcomercio.com /actualidad/ecuador-remesas-emigrantes-dinero-economia.html. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003; Madrid: Alfaguara, 2011).

GRIEF CIRCLING SOPHIE LEWIS

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he coronavirus pandemic of my experience has been a slow eruption of omnipresent neighborhood and planetary grieving, in a year that was already characterized for me by grief above all else: my mother died of cancer in London in November  2019. Before the virus’s death toll began accruing, I’d been doing research, belatedly, on collective death doulas, good deaths, death cafés, and the death positivity movement. As luck would have it, I was recruited into a neighborhood “grief circle,” directly after Mum’s death, by a flyer posted outside my house. I have been attending ever since. It is convened by the cofounder of Philly Death Doula Collective, Kai Wonder MacDonald. It’s in that space that I have grieved the fact that Mum didn’t have a particularly good death nor even, for complex reasons, a real funeral. Grief circles are confidential, loosely anonymous gatherings that are free or priced on a sliding scale. They exist for the sole purpose of bearing witness to the grief of others and being witnessed in one’s own. The core premise is that witnessing grief reciprocally is an ancient form of mutual aid. There is no toxic positivity and no advice giving. Ours currently takes place weekly and draws between six and fifteen attendees, about three of whom have remained constant throughout.1

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Our grief circle stepped into overdrive this spring, for obvious reasons. Kai now schedules specific circles for so-called essential workers. COVID-19 deaths, especially for the racialized populations that are bearing the brunt of the virus, are rarely good deaths. Kai’s “trauma-informed” practice holds that lonely, fearful, disenfranchised deaths, in turn, breed trauma among the living. At every single grief circle, I’ve heard two or three or four or five new stories from people who have lost someone to an opioid overdose—the epidemic before the pandemic. It shouldn’t perhaps have taken so much to drive the reality of this crisis in my city home to me, but it did. It took my breath away. Now, drug users in Philly (including the sex workers who run their own community center, Project SAFE) face a perfect storm of lethal risk. Overdose rates, we think, are already rising as a result of lockdown measures—more people using on their own in social isolation—not to mention COVID-19-related economic contraction, disruptions to the drug and sex markets, and suspensions of some outreach and harm-reduction services. Operators on the national “Never Use Alone” hotline stay on the phone with people while they use. But, as Sophie Pinkham noted in the Nation, “people are wary about disclosing their drug use and address to a stranger, and many of Project SAFE’s participants don’t have stable access to a phone.” On account of the isolation that causes deaths from overdose in the first place, I fear there will be a great quantity of grief, borne of more overdose deaths, to contend with imminently. There have been myriad other species of death aired at grief circle: unexpected ones and planned ones, good deaths and bad, experiences of dying well, experiences of dying stubbornly and in denial. Shootings, car accidents, suicides, complications from diabetes, cancers. Multiple deaths. One’s own imminent death

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through terminal illness. Break-ups. Dead hopes and dreams. At grief circle, we witness it all. Before the time of coronavirus, our gatherings were hosted in Kai’s living room. Nowadays, the circle, like every other goddamn thing in life, takes place on Zoom. But it works. Our grief is geographically dispersed now; it feels like consciousness raising. Recently, the alternative intimacy of the muted virtual listening, and the sensitivity we’ve begun to develop to each other’s facial cues on gallery view, unleashed a wave of collective crying I had never experienced before in that forum. All eight of us were crying along with a health-care provider in Oregon who was unbearably exhausted, overwhelmed by the fear and death that COVID-19 has unleashed in her workplace. After that, we cried for someone who felt utterly bereft: a life partner of fifty years is dead, and the pandemic lockdown measures are only compounding her hopeless loneliness. Grief whirls like wind. It often does not go away even after the same twenty conversations have been had with patient friends. It tires, maddens, frustrates. Or it reorients desires, sometimes fruiting in the form of lush antiproductivity. Grief can bring both anhedonia and joy, fug and lucidity, desire and depression, to an alienated life. When our grief has structural causes, it can be the ground of struggle and a utopian political force. As adrienne maree brown puts it, “Grief shows us what we love, what we most want to protect.” Like death, it can be bad for the economy. The laws of value accumulation would have us rush it. The clocks of capital tick out austere rations of “compassionate leave” for the bereaved. In a better society, we would have great numbers of places “for public weeping,” like those Anne Boyer planned to build before she got sick with cancer: “a temple where anyone who needed it could get together to cry in good company and with the proper equipment.”

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At the end of February, having listened plenty during grief circles to my vertigo about society’s unwillingness to speak ill of the dead and my anguish about my mother’s lack of a funeral, Kai offered to help me conceptualize a memorial. “That’s a great idea,” I immediately said. One with cigarettes and vodka, in her honor, at the nature reserve. We had a planning discussion. The date I picked was April 25. I don’t need to tell you that it turned out to be yet another appointment transferred from meatspace to Zoom. Thirty people ended up participating—including my two friends who helped with Mum’s transfer from hospital to the hospice and a substantial number of unconnected friends who’d been bereaved of their own parents and were simply hungry for ritual or else willing to bear witness. Kai looked on. My heart felt full and serene. Poems were read, and songs sung, according to the program I’d drawn up. I had spent the best part of a week on a slideshow studded with several gigabytes worth of photos and music, ample quotations from her writing, video of her in the hospital, and even an audio clip from her 1970s radio-documentary work on German Jewish refugees living in the UK. I sucked in rancid cigarette smoke indoors and day-drank and felt truly that I was in her presence. I exhaled. I admired the incomplete tapestry of her painful, beautiful life I had constructed out of PowerPoint. I returned, insofar as that’s possible, the virtual gaze of my laughing and weeping friends. I got some respite. I felt proud. I still do.

NOTE 1. Phillydeathdoulas, descriptive poster of grief circle, Instagram, April 17, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/B_Fj_4UgOnS/.

IN CHINA, PANDEMIC DIARIES UNITE AND DIVIDE A NATION GUOBIN YANG

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lthough Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary is now available in English translation, the extraordinary story of pandemic diary production in China remains little known outside of the Chinese-reading world.1 On March  30, 2020, the  New York Times  carried a story called “The Quarantine Diaries,” which offers fascinating glimpses into pandemic diary writing “around the world.”2 It covers diarists in Paris, Manila, St.  Petersburg, Spain, and several cities in the United States but fails to even acknowledge the existence of the mother of all COVID-19 diaries—the lockdown diaries of Wuhan.

Documenting the Pandemic Experience I began to see diary postings on Chinese social media after Wuhan was locked down on January  23, 2020. Initially, there were not many of them, but the few I saw became viral. These must have inspired others to write. Very soon, there was an explosion of pandemic diaries. Most of them were written by  residents of Wuhan. Teachers, medical workers, COVID-19

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patients, government officials, IT professionals, students, poets, novelists, and community volunteers all posted diaries. They documented personal troubles and collective struggles. Many diaries came with photographs. Some were video blogs, or vlogs. The abrupt shutdown of a city of 11 million had stunned China and the world. Lockdown diaries brought the visceral realities of this city and the pandemic close to home. The contents of the diaries reflect the changing circumstances of the war on COVID-19 and their impact on personal lives. Diaries in the first week of the lockdown depict the initial reactions—panic shopping and personal helplessness. A diary entry, dated January 27, by feminist activist Guo Jing contains the following: “Today, the weather was a bit clearer, but still cloudy. After walking for only a few steps outside, I saw two cats on a pile of debris. We stared at each other. This scene has such a strong sense of the apocalypse. When we stared at each other, it seemed as if there were only me and the two cats left in this world.” February was the cruelest month in Wuhan. It saw the peak number of daily confirmed cases of coronavirus and daily deaths. No diarist who wrote on February  7 would fail to mention the death of Dr.  Li Wenliang, widely reported as an early whistleblower who later contracted the disease on his job and died on February  7. February was also the month when the war on COVID-19 was at its most austere stage, and many diaries record the impact of a rigid regimen of community isolation and quarantine. A graduate student who volunteered to work as a guard at the entrance of a residential community wrote the following on February 20: She started work at around noon. At 12:30 p.m., two lunch boxes were delivered to the volunteers at the gate. At 1:08 p.m., a man in his thirties passed by and asked for a pair of gloves.

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The man told her he was going to visit his wife in the hospital, and he had to wear gloves to be let in. She gave him the gloves. At 2:35 p.m., a white-haired elderly woman in her eighties appeared and said she was going out to buy some lunch. Instead of letting the elderly lady out, she gave her a free lunch meal and persuaded her to return to her apartment. Patients in temporary shelter hospitals posted video diaries on video platforms such as Douyin, the Chinese version of Tiktok, offering intimate glances into lives in these gigantic facilities. One of these videos showed medical workers and patients cheerfully performing public-square dances inside a temporary hospital. Square dancing was ubiquitous in China’s pre-COVID-19 urban landscape. Seeing it again was a boost of morale for many while critics saw it as inappropriate for a time of national suffering. By March, COVID-19 had been contained in China, but it got worse in other countries. Many diarists took note of these changes. Mr.  Zhang started posting pandemic diaries on January 27. By March 18, he had posted forty-nine entries. He wrote on March 18 that he would now turn his attention more to the outside world. After all, his son was studying in the United Kingdom, and incidents of racism against Chinese students there worried him. For several days, he posted diaries in the form of letters to his son, offering advice about how to manage his stay-at-home life in a foreign country. These diaries attracted other parents with children studying abroad. Ms. Ma noted in her diary on March 1, 2020, that fifty-eight countries in the world had reported cases of COVID-19. She commented that in northern Italy, although multiple towns were locked down, residents in one town rallied in a plaza to demand freedom. After enumerating a long list of such COVID-19-related

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activities in foreign countries, she summed up her thoughts with these words from Yuval Harari: “Never underestimate human stupidity.”3

Pandemic Diary Communities Shared on social media, pandemic diaries form online diary communities. Some of these communities are small, comprising mainly friends, family, and acquaintances. Popular diaries like those by Fang Fang, however, attracted millions of readers. In these diary communities, readers and viewers comment on the diaries, argue among themselves, and share personal experiences. There is a sense of communal belonging. Some people organized communal diary-writing projects. In early February, a member in a closed, fee-based WeChat group on psychological counseling called on her online community to start a diary-writing project. Participants were invited to write at least one hundred words a day for one hundred days. Many joined the project, eventually producing over 3,000 diary entries. Like a sustained, hundred-day-long conversation, these diaries created a sense of community for people living in isolation. Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary was the most influential of all lockdown diaries. Fang Fang is a Wuhan native and a well-known novelist. From late January to late March, she posted sixty diary entries on social media. She wrote mostly of her observations and reflections about the pandemic and the havoc it wrought on her native city. For her sharpness, empathy, and insights, she endeared herself to the hearts of millions of readers in China and beyond. Each diary entry was a social media sensation. Her readers would wait long hours at night to read new entries, because

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she posted at night—usually before midnight, but sometimes at two or three a.m. Posting a diary on social media in China entails navigating technical and political barriers. Politically sensitive words are automatically filtered or blocked. If a diary entry contains one single sensitive keyword, it would not go through. Some diarists complained of having to spend an hour or more to make a successful post. Even after a diary is posted, it may still be removed by the web editors and managers. Savvy readers save the diary first and then read it. What was it about Fang Fang’s diary that made readers wait for it late into the night? Fang Fang was writing during the worst period of the pandemic right from its epicenter. She felt the pains of her fellow Wuhan residents. She called on the public to hold government officials accountable for their actions or inaction. She mourned the dead in moving words. For many readers, her diaries had a cathartic effect in a time of darkness. They admired Fang Fang’s courage in telling the truth. Others liked Fang Fang’s diaries simply because she put into words what they themselves wanted to say. Mourning Dr.  Li Wenliang, Fang Fang wrote: “People who are not in Wuhan could not understand the trauma we suffer in our hearts. It is far more than a matter of being quarantined at home. Wuhan people badly need consolation and emotional release. Is that why Li Wenliang’s death broke everyone’s heart and made them all want to scream and wail?” In a time of crisis and uncertainty, Fang Fang’s diary created a sense of certainty. Through her diary, readers felt connected to a larger community. In this sense, pandemic diaries like Fang Fang’s were a unifying social force in China’s war on COVID-19. One reader wrote about Fang Fang’s diary in her own diary: “In the past two months, reading Teacher Fang Fang’s diary[4] every night became a habit before going to sleep. One reader left a

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comment [on Fang Fang’s diary] that only after reading Fang Fang’s diary was a day considered complete. I want to add that every day, only after reading Teacher Fang Fang’s diary could my inner self calm down. . . . Without the guidance of Fang Fang’s diary, I would probably become more and more depressed in my stay-at-home life.” Fang Fang’s diary was so popular that after she had written sixty entries and decided to stop writing in late March, her fans started a relay to carry on her cause. Reading Fang Fang’s diary had become such a daily ritual in these diary communities that many found the absence of the ritual unbearable. So, they decided to write and post their own diaries as “relay diaries.” From March 27 to May 29, 2020, sixty people wrote sixty “relay diaries” to match the number of Fang Fang’s diary entries and continued their communal discussions in the comment sections of the diaries. But Fang Fang’s diary also attracted scrutiny and personal attacks. Initially, her detractors blasted her diaries for being too critical and “negative.” They complained that Fang Fang’s diary lacked “positive energy.” In late March, when news came that an English version of Fang Fang’s diary would soon be published in the United States, Fang Fang was called a traitor. By making her diaries available to U.S. readers, the accusation goes, she “handed over ammunition” to U.S. politicians who were blaming their own pandemic failures on China. Fang Fang had criticized government leaders for mishandling the pandemic. Now her critics challenged her by pointing out that China did so much better than the United States. Fang Fang’s diary drew the ire of Chinese nationalists. Some of her earlier supporters changed sides. But the word “nationalist” is inadequate for describing ordinary people. One diarist—I’ll call him Mr. X—recounted a personal story. In X’s WeChat circles, several of his well-educated

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friends, who had been polite and courteous in their online interactions, suddenly turned belligerent after they heard that Fang Fang’s diary would be published in the United States. They attacked Fang Fang viciously. What puzzled him most was the change in an elderly woman in her seventies who was like a mother figure to him. The lady was Mr.  X’s mother-in-law’s friend. He called her “Aunt.” About ten years ago, Mr.  X had a serious illness. A surgery left him in great pain for months. It was Aunt who nursed him in the hospital. Aunt had often told him that she had a miserable life when she was young. Her family was poor, but she was fortunate to have received help from many kind people. That was why later in her life, when her own circumstances improved, she wanted to help those in trouble. To Mr. X, Aunt has a Buddha-like heart. After the lockdown started, Mr. X recommended Fang Fang’s diaries to Aunt. Initially, Aunt did not express any opinions but did read them. Mr. X felt that if Aunt did not say anything, that would mean she did not dislike the diaries. Several times, she even “liked” the diaries he had posted on WeChat. However, when she learned that Fang Fang’s diary would be published abroad, her attitude changed. She began to forward postings and videos which were critical of Fang Fang. She called Fang Fang a traitor in her WeChat comments. Mr.  X was stunned. He had known Aunt’s patriotic feelings but was still greatly puzzled by her drastic change of attitude. By sharing personal stories of daily struggle during the lockdown, pandemic diaries had brought the nation closer together in a common crusade against the coronavirus. But just as the pandemic was tamed, pandemic diaries were lifted out of their original context and turned into something else—a testing kit to check people’s ideological temperatures. And the world of Chinese social media was divided into two opposing camps. Although

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this divide reflects enduring ideological tensions between liberals and conservatives, the story of Aunt’s reaction to Fang Fang’s diary reveals how a global crisis, mediated through online diarywriting and reading, can awaken latent passions about self, family, and the nation among the most ordinary people of a society.

NOTES 1. Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City (New York: HarperVia, 2020). 2. Amelia Nierenberg, “The Quarantine Diaries,” New York Times, March 30, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/style/coronavirus -diaries-social-history.html. 3. Harari’s best-seller  Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind  has a bestselling Chinese translation. 4. “Teacher” is a generic honorific in China. You may address your neighbor as “Teacher” without knowing what her profession is.

PART VI Private Crises in Public Spaces

THE VIOLENCE OF URBAN VACANCY SOPHIE GONICK

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udson Yards—Manhattan’s most extravagant luxury development—is the product of investors’ spoils. Looming over the western edge of Manhattan, its anachronistic skyline was built by the looting of Harlem through a case of economicdevelopment gerrymandering.1 Public funds meant to aid urban communities harmed by disinvestment went into creating an urban experience too expensive for most New Yorkers. This legalized plunder and pillage, however, have created luxe spaces devoid of activity. Hudson Yards has failed to attract and keep tenants in both its residential and its commercial spaces. As in other parts of the city, spiraling rents and landlords’ greed have meant many establishments cannot afford to stay put. Rather than reimagine the hollowed city, developers can just sit on their loot, waiting out the crisis—the current tax code not only permits but encourages emptiness through rebates and write-offs. The massive urban development embodies a new urban status quo, that of vacancy. Vacancy reveals how the city privileges property over personhood, the real estate mogul over the overall well-being of the city or the neighborhood. It is the product of an urban growth model reliant on property and sales taxes instead of comprehensive employment. Often incentivized through tax

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breaks, vacancy has become a symbol of misplaced municipal priorities. The wealthy have long wielded property rights as a bulwark against change—by imposing height restrictions against densification to protect home values, for instance, or using tax bills to fight school-integration efforts. Such rights, always extended on differential terms to nonwhite populations, are sacrosanct to the elite. But increasingly, vacancy draws our attention to those exclusionary terms and opens a window for radical transformation. COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter made the violence of vacancy undeniable. In New York, scores of tenants face substandard conditions and overcrowding, the homeless population continues to grow, street homelessness has skyrocketed since the advent of the pandemic, and thousands face eviction when local and national rent moratoria expire. Despite deepening housing precarity, much of the city’s housing stock continues to lie vacant, from the new Hudson Yards development to profit-seeking real estate investments to pied-à-terre apartments. The pandemic has brought into sharp relief the reality of the vast quantities of empty units, on the one hand, and the overcrowding in the outer boroughs, on the other. During April and May, as COVID raged in dense immigrant neighborhoods such as Elmhurst, Queens, parts of Manhattan appeared to be dormant stage sets, devoid of much human life. The new urban vacancy is produced through dispossession—or city-sanctioned looting. Spindly towers line Park Avenue, while luxurious new malls entice shoppers at the World Trade Center and Battery Park, in addition to Hudson Yards. These developments, geared toward high-end property ownership instead of comprehensive growth, dispossess urban dwellers of alternative, more secure economic futures—providing retail

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jobs where we might have industry, luxury housing where we might have mixed-use neighborhoods. They gobble up land that previously had other uses—offering up trendy hotels and prêt-àporter where once there was meatpacking, skyrise housing on the site of an old recycling plant. Planners and the state justify such development because it might ensure tax dollars in perpetuity. Whether from homeowners or high-ticket goods, tax profits might finance a city starved for federal aid and stave off any future fiscal disaster. Yet rather than produce abundant prosperity, the prevalent system of growth has created luxe emptiness while lining the pockets of real estate moguls. As international cities such as Berlin and Barcelona toy with expropriation—to dispossess megalandlords and banks of vacant buildings and fill them with low-income residents—in the United States we hear the constant drumbeat for property rights and, by extension, the rights of the wealthy to hoard, pillage, and exclude. Tax rebates and reinvestment efforts shunted toward luxury development instead of local improvements, public schools financed through property taxes, the defensive securitization of surveillance cameras, antihomeless urban design, and spiked fences and walls all privilege the interests of the elite over the well-being of any kind of collective polity. Instances where property is prioritized over life are certainly not new. Recent incidents include the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. Before the emergence and consolidation of BLM, Zimmerman was largely absolved, his shooting of Martin seen as one man’s action to protect his home. Several years later, as we sank into the despair and rage of the Trump era, a woman was killed by a white supremacist who plowed his car into counterprotesters confronting the Unite the Right gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia. Despite the violence of her death, many

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commentators and politicians praised law enforcement because the college town had sustained limited property damage. Still, the hallowed rights to property remain fragile for BIPOC communities. A viral video in August 2020 showed a white officer violently arresting a Black woman on her own porch. Her crime: talking too loudly. A generation of Black and Brown households has never recovered from the financial crisis of 2008. Back then, predatory lending practices wrested years of equity from communities of color across the country. In turn, many people faced the threat of forced eviction, even while banks were bailed out. Steven Mnuchin, then the head of a foreclosure mill, became treasury secretary. Dispossession here was not merely the taking of property; it was the foreclosure of intergenerational transfers of wealth, the ending of upward mobility through homeownership, and the extinction of once lively, stable neighborhoods.2 The refuse of 2008—the empty homes, the ruined personal credit scores, the legacy of debt—reveals the hypocrisies of the propertied order. The prevalence of nuisance laws and broken-windows policing, in which subjective notions of disorder and disturbance justify punitive state intervention, further enshrines property ownership and its attendant rights for a white minority. Rage at this system has produced a variety of radical responses. On the first day of June 2020, exactly one week after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, people took to the streets of SoHo, New York, to break windows, spray graffiti, and grab luxury goods. Expensive handbags, vertiginous stilettoes, pavéd watches, and gold-plated sunglasses had sat for months on their pedestals behind thick glass and steel bars, as the city all around was gripped by a pandemic. Such visual totems of excess and consumption were stark reminders of the entrenched inequality of the urban environment; as the rich fled to their summer estates, a

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low-income community largely of color continued to work as essential laborers. The news media seized upon the story of SoHo’s plunder, as it came to symbolize criminality that went against the logics of the orderly consumer city and violated property rights, albeit for large corporations such as LVMH. According to many reports and the chatter of social and popular media, hooded thugs and greedy looters, enjoying their spoils, would thrust the city back into the dark, dirty days of the 1970s (in addition to reversing the strides made by nonviolent Black Lives Matter protesters). The glittering post-2001 urbanism of Bloomberg and then de Blasio— who failed to fulfill promises of police reform and housing affordability—would soon crumble into new ruins. The rich were fleeing, and the ethnic rabble were disgruntled, no longer in their “proper” place. But those so-called looters were in many ways mimicking similar processes of destruction and capture that have already hollowed out much of the city. Indeed, what was subprime lending but looting on a much more expansive and audacious scale, a form of what the urban geographer David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession.” Downtown destruction was a reaction to this historical geography of pillage. While robbing stores temporarily disrupts the urban order, other practices seek more long-lasting change. Within this urban vacancy, many Black and Brown communities—unduly punished by the propertied order—see a strategic political battleground on which normative property systems may be disrupted. During the fall of 2018, Moms 4 Housing, an emergent collective of mostly Black homeless women, occupied several houses in West Oakland, the epicenter of homelessness amid skyrocketing housing prices in the Bay Area. The historically Black neighborhood has experienced increasing gentrification following displacement brought about in part by the foreclosure crisis. Identifying the

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disconnect between houses without people and people without homes, the moms flip the rights-based framework, this time advocating for housing as a human right, which is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Grassroots urban movements and collectives such as Moms 4 Housing are concerned with not only finding housing but forcing us to see the reality of the city, where urban development as usual is antithetical to basic needs such as shelter, and to contend with the differential impacts of the propertied order. Propertied systems drive urban inequality, increasing the insecurity of historically marginalized communities through speculation and extraction. Recent debates over rent strikes, moratoria, and urban budgets reliant on property taxes demand a reckoning with dependency on private ownership as a means of financing and reproducing the city. Therefore, in order to reimagine the city in the age of vacancy, collectives such as Moms 4 Housing might provide blueprints for an alternative urbanism of cooperation against the violence of the market. As we contemplate urban emptiness, many prognosticators fret we will soon fall into a crisis similar to that of the 1970s. Already, NYC’s street homeless population has shot up, and crime numbers have increased. The city’s previous fiscal crisis, however, was caused by massive disinvestment and white flight. In our contemporary moment, urban success predicated on real estate activity alone has paradoxically paved the way for urban crisis—a flourishing property market did not protect against crisis, but instead produced new ruins. Boomtime urbanism privileged spectacle over holistic growth—giving us the city’s first Neiman Marcus at Hudson Yards (now gone) instead of job training or small-business grants in Harlem—creating a landscape marked by deepening inequalities. As we teeter on the brink of uncertainty, new initiatives—mural art on boarded-up storefronts, the

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squatting of empty homes, emergent mutual-aid networks—help us imagine more inclusive forms of urban life.

NOTES 1. Zachary Small, “The Financing of Hudson Yards Is Worse Than Its Architecture,” Hyperallergic, April  15, 2019, https://hyperallergic.com /494907/the-financing-of-hudson-yards-is-worse-than-its-architecture/. 2. The lion’s share of foreclosures related to subprime lending were on refinanced mortgages. In many cases, homeowners refinanced in order to pay for health-care bills and the rising cost of education.

THE LIMITS OF TELECOMMUTING MARGARET O’MARA

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orty years before COVID-19, Alvin Toffler saw the future of working from home, and it looked very good. In his 1980 bestseller, The Third Wave, the futurist author declared that modern economies would soon shift away from the office and toward “the electronic cottage”—a retro-utopian update of the preindustrial days of home work and piece work, now wired to the modern world via desktop computers, faxes, and dial-up modems. “The electronic cottage raises once more on a mass scale the possibility of husbands and wives, and perhaps even children, working together as a unit,” he explained. This arrangement would propel “greater community stability” and “a renaissance among voluntary organizations.”1 Fast-forward to the great pandemic and shutdown of 2020, an extraordinary social experiment unfurling at global scale and astounding speed. By June, 42 percent of the American workforce was working from home.2 The benefits of the new normal became readily apparent—no commutes! comfy sweatpants!—and many relished the slowdown in the relentless pace of twenty-first-century life. As Toffler predicted, America’s remote-working classes became simultaneously placeless and newly rooted in place, their mental maps shrinking to a few neighborhood blocks, the local grocery, the nearby park.

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Yet Toffler’s optimistic, communitarian forecast failed to perceive how this new electronic reality would exact a toll on mental and financial health; split open new fault lines of class, gender, and race; and accelerate a long-brewing social reckoning. Schools and child-care facilities shuttered, leaving working parents, especially mothers, struggling to balance professional and domestic duties. Some had to cut back work hours; others quit their jobs altogether.3 Seven months into the pandemic, the U.S. employment statistics reflected the sharp inequalities of COVID’s economic toll, with job losses falling disproportionately on women and people of color.4 Many such losses were among those who could not stay home in the first place, on whose labor in grocery stores and Amazon warehouses and meatpacking plants all the comforts of the electronic cottage were dependent. There already has been a great deal of speculation about the lasting effects of this information-overloaded digital year on work, schooling, and the public realm.5 As retailers shutter and major corporations announce they will keep workers home for good, it is clear the pandemic has already changed some things permanently. But looking backward to the roots of remote work is equally important. It turns out that these systems were never really designed to benefit the groups that could gain the most from them: working mothers, caretakers, and their children, especially those without easy access to new technology. Perhaps the lesson to take from this year of living online is not just about making better, more humane, work-and-learn-fromanywhere technology. It is about recognizing technology’s limits. Q Q Q

Like many of Alvin Toffler’s ideas, the “electronic cottage” combined ahistorical grandiosity with canny insight into emerging

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technological and demographic trends. By the early 1980s, a growing number of mothers of young children had entered America’s waged workforce and, thanks to woefully inadequate child-care infrastructure, were struggling to balance work and family life. One job they could do from home? Code. As the personal-computer market boomed, some employers hungry for talented programmers used telecommuting as way to recruit women back into the waged workforce. “I want to spend as much time as possible with my child and not having to commute gives me extra time,” one mother and part-time programmer told the New York Times in 1985.6 Work-from-home life offered flexibility and job fulfillment even for those without children. “I have the kind of personality that likes to make my own schedule,” one unmarried female programmer told the Times. She arranged to spend three days a week in the office and two at home. But both the women and the men who became telecommuting’s early adopters quickly saw the tradeoffs. By moving out of the office, workers lost many of the rituals and regulations that protected them from overwork and exploitation. “Whenever I’m awake,” one telecommuting engineer admitted to a Washington Post reporter in 1980, “I’m working.”7 Labor unions were so concerned about remote workers’ susceptibility to employer surveillance and isolation that the AFL-CIO issued a resolution opposing “computer homework” in 1983.8 The commercialization of the internet in the 1990s set off another wave of ebullient predictions about the work-from-home future, with little attention paid to addressing those early concerns about its impact on workers’ well-being. Thus, even as work-from-anywhere information-technology jobs increased, the actual percentage of telecommuters remained vanishingly low. One 1994 survey of companies that allowed remote work found that less than 1  percent of employees took advantage of it. The

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chief obstacle was managerial resistance. “Managers won’t give up control,” one researcher noted. “They still can’t trust that employees are working when they aren’t present.” Stubborn insistence on face time helped explain why, even at the apex of the dot-com boom in 1999, a mere 7  percent of the American workforce worked remotely.9 What’s more, 1990s telecommuters often were not working from home. Instead, they flocked to satellite offices built to shorten commutes in trafficchoked regions like Los Angeles and Washington, DC. Grand predictions that the average knowledge worker would soon retreat to an internet-enabled cabin in the woods never came to pass. The case of the tech industry is particularly revealing. Even as dot-com-era leaders steadfastly preached the gospel that computer hardware and software would upend the way the world worked, played, and communicated, they too remained firmly committed to the office. Skyrocketing real estate prices in 1990s Silicon Valley and Seattle reflected that even the builders of this miraculous new online infrastructure believed it was far better to work face-to-face. This intensified after 2000. Instead of dispatching workers to self-directed lives in their electronic cottages, internet-age Silicon Valley traded in drab office spaces for far grander facilities designed to make workplaces compelling playgrounds that met employees’ every need. Google, founded by two Stanford graduate students, built an elaborate Silicon Valley headquarters that was a fantasy version of a richly endowed college campus, drenched with amenities like climbing walls, massage rooms, and free food in the cafeteria. As CEO of Apple and Pixar, Steve Jobs helped popularize the gospel of innovation-by-serendipitous-encounter, facilitated by offices with open layouts and spots for impromptu connection. The

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perks that tech companies loaded into these campuses reflected the kind of employee they wanted to recruit and retain: young, unattached, able to put work first at any cost. Apple’s new corporate headquarters, opened in 2017, featured custom-designed ergonomic desk chairs and a two-story yoga room.10 Missing from the $5 billion facility: a child-care center.11 Even firms that once embraced telecommuting pulled back from it. IBM had made a big remote-work push at the start of the “electronic cottage” era, but slumping stock prices and employee attrition helped prompt a reversal in policy. In a preview of what many would experience in 2020, IBM found that remote work made it difficult to build strong teams and mentor junior employees. Workers could easily be lured away by superstar tech companies with glitzy campuses where they could, as Amazon’s employee motto put it, “work hard, have fun, make history.”12 By the mid-2010s, Big Blue had joined the rush to build perk-filled offices in what one executive termed “really creative and inspiring locations.”13 Soon after Marissa Mayer, a longtime Googler, became CEO of Yahoo! in 2012, she banned remote work altogether. “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” the company’s human-resources director said at the time.14 Many employees found Mayer’s move particularly distressing because the CEO was the mother of young children. They had hoped she would be more sympathetic to the pressures working mothers faced. Discouragement of telecommuting supercharged the workaholic vibe of the tech world and contributed to an abysmal record on gender diversity that has worsened over time. A 2018 survey of eighty tech companies found that women made up only 24 percent of the technical workforce, down from 36  percent in 1991. Employees—many of whom, as ever, were mothers of young children—asking for partial or full-time work-from-home

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arrangements found themselves sidelined from important projects or denied permission altogether. Generous parental benefits were at odds with the realities of workplace culture, one Seattlearea engineer lamented to a labor researcher in 2019. “Everyone is supported before they take maternity leave, but when it comes time to be promoted they are questioned for being absent.”15 Q Q Q

Into this state of affairs came the novel coronavirus. The American workforce suddenly divided into three: those thrown out of work by the shutdowns, those deemed “essential”—from grocery clerks to surgeons—who continued to work outside the home, and those now working through screens, with nearly all human contact filtered through software. The vast majority of America’s children and college-age adults abruptly began learning online as well, their teachers and professors scrambling to catch up. The economic and psychic effects rippled outward from the electronic cottage. “Weekends and weekdays are the same,” one Chicago-area mother remarked to a reporter in September. “I don’t really know where I am in time, if that makes sense.”16 Working parents, meanwhile, were not alright. “All the choices stink,” one researcher noted as the school year prepared to gear up for another term of mostly remote education in August. “Parents tell me about not being able to sleep because they’re so anxious, or tell me they’ve been crying a lot.”17 As the homebound classes logged onto Facebook, ordered necessities from Amazon, and upgraded laptops and smartphones, the quarterly earnings and market valuations of tech’s largest companies soared into the stratosphere. The most popular portal for

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work and learning, Zoom, transformed from a software product into a verb. By the end of summer, the value of the American tech sector exceeded that of the entire European stock market. But as public events were canceled, so too were serendipitous connections and accidental meetings. Online events meant that human experience was opted into, not happened upon. Running into strangers immediately signaled danger, whether on the subway or in the grocery aisle. City dwellers no longer wandered down the street to choose a restaurant; delivery-app algorithms chose the restaurant for you. Even in this placeless fog, geography was destiny, perhaps more than ever. Generations of racial and economic segregation of the housing market meant that where you lived at the start of the pandemic greatly determined how well you survived its physical and economic hardships. America’s pixelated portals filled with scenes of stark inequity. Hundreds of cars lined up outside food banks as the unemployment rate soared to levels unseen since the Great Depression. The toxic combination of spatial segregation, health-care inequity, and economic precarity was compounded by a profoundly bungled federal response that left Black Americans and other racial minorities more likely to fall ill and die from COVID-19. The destiny of geography, race, and income was evident in the Department of Labor’s September  2020 jobs report, which revealed that the COVID recession was starkly different from those before it.18 The Great Depression had generated social solidarity partly because the economic pain was so broadly felt across social classes. So too had the Great Recession of 2008–2009 left its impact on nearly every income tier. But 2020’s great disruption made already-staggering inequality even greater. Employment in upper income brackets—including

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and especially within the roaringly profitable tech industry—was bouncing above pre-COVID levels while employment among working-class and poor Americans spiraled down. Q Q Q

What comes next? The uncertain trajectory and duration of the pandemic makes it particularly difficult to see what work, school, and life will look like on the other side, but clues are emerging. It is now easier to see why earlier forecasters got the electronic revolution wrong, and why telecommuting and online education never quite gained traction. Months without normal social interaction have reinforced the value of ordinary human connection and the power of place, whether it be a national park or a café table on a car-free city street. The deficit is particularly keen in education, most glaringly for younger children but even visible at the collegiate level, as professors struggle mightily to maintain student engagement via Zoom. These trends uncovered something that information-society futurists and the techno-optimistic Silicon Valley moguls long pushed to one side: computers do not change everything. Digital tools and connections neither transcend society’s problems nor solve them. Sometimes, in fact, they make inequities greater. Analog ways of doing things—going to work in an office, going to school in a classroom, attending college on a physical campus— have persisted not only because of technological limitations but because they serve human needs that digital tools cannot fulfill. Yet the great disruption of 2020 is establishing digital habits that are unlikely to disappear. It turns out that Google and Amazon can continue to generate enormous profits even while their employees work from home. Smaller companies don’t need costly office leases dragging down their bottom line, nor do employees

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need to live in expensive places like the Bay Area, where the average home price exceeds $1 million. Some companies have declared they are giving up the office for good. Others may return, but would only ask their workers to come in a few days per week. The partly-from-home arrangements so many workers hungered for in the past may now become commonplace. Some workdays will be spent in the office, the others in the electronic cottage. But the old, familiar issues with remote work are still with us, no closer to being addressed by employers or government regulators. There are worrisome signs, too, that the bifurcated economy of our pandemic year may continue to intensify. The commercialreal-estate sector faces a reckoning as offices shrink or disappear, and the retailers and restaurants that depend on office-worker business will fade away with them. As the urban job base shrinks, large American cities face a possible redux of the fiscal crises of the 1970s and 1980s, with the urban working class again suffering the brunt of the pain from cuts to transit, housing, and healthcare programs. Public universities, their budgets never fully restored since state legislatures slashed funding during the last decade’s financial crisis, are newly reeling from the economic impact of lost tuition and the costs of online instruction. In some ways, the nation’s public realm is back to where it was at the time Alvin Toffler was writing The Third Wave at the end of the stagflating 1970s: sapped of resources, riven by social discord and public distrust, unable to serve all fairly. At the time, technologists saw technology as the answer to all of America’s many problems. A computer on every desk, a modem to communicate, an electronic cottage to free oneself from workplace drudgery. But it was already clear in 1980 that the digital realm is ultimately a poor substitution for the public one. Our responsibility, after 2020, is to realize how these digital shortcomings are reflections

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of the analog world: job insecurity for too many, a child-care system that remains piecemeal and patchwork, standards of work performance that rarely take into account the realities and rhythms of everyday life for workers of every age, gender, and caregiving status. If we do that, we might finally create the sort of electronic cottage that works for everyone.

NOTES 1. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1980). 2. Nicholas Bloom, “How Working from Home Works Out,” Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, June 2020, https://siepr.stanford .edu/research/publications/how-working-home-works-out. 3. Lauren Weber, “Women’s Careers Could Take a Long-Term Hit from Coronavirus Pandemic,” Wall Street Journal, July 15, 2020, https://www .wsj . com /articles / womens - careers - could - take - long - term - hit -from -coronavirus-pandemic-11594814403. 4. Olivia Rockeman, Reade Pickert, and Catarina Saraiva, “The First Female Recession Threatens to Wipe Out Decades of Progress for U.S. Women,” Bloomberg, September 30, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com /news /articles /2020– 09–30/u -s -recovery-women -s -job -losses -will -hit -entire-economy. 5. Anya Strzemien et al., “Out of Office: A Survey of Our New Work Lives,” New York Times, August 20, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/20 /style/working-from-home.html; Arne Duncan, Andreas Schleicher, Mona Mourshed, Jennifer Nuzzo, Ludger Woessmann, Salvatore Babones, Devesh Kapur, Michael D. Smith, and Dick Startz, “Will Schools and Universities Ever Return to Normal?,” Foreign Policy, September 5, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com /2020 /09 /05 /education -schools -universities -future-after-pandemic/; Derek Thompson, “Get Ready for the Giant Urban Comeback,” The Atlantic, October 2020, https://www.theatlantic .com /magazine/archive/2020/10/ how-disaster-shaped-the-modern-city /615484/. 6. Katya Goncharoff, “The Computer: Telecommuters Say There’s No Workplace Like Home,” New York Times, March 24, 1985, https://www .nytimes .com /1985/03/24 /jobs/the-computer-telecommuters-say-theres -no-workplace-like-home.html.

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7. Myra Mensh Patner, “Careers: Life Inside an Electronic Cottage,” Washington Post, December  30, 1980, https://www.washingtonpost.com /archive / lifestyle /1980/12 /30/careers -life -inside -an - electronic - cottage /27955c38–2726-4c6b-ae11-d811521dac7b/. 8. National Research Council, Office Workstations in the Home (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1985), https://www.nap.edu/read/168 /chapter/24. 9. “Census Bureau Report Shows Steady Increase in Home-Based Workers Since 1999,” United States Census Bureau, October 4, 2012, https://www .census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/employment_occupations/cb12 -188.html. 10. Cliff Kuang, “What Apple’s New Office Chairs Reveal About Work in 2018,” Fast Company, January  2, 2018, https://www.fastcompany.com /90155533 /what- apples -new - office - chairs -reveal - about-work-in -2018; Steven Levy, “Apple’s New Campus: An Exclusive Look Inside the Mothership,” Wired, May 16, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/05/apple-park -new-silicon-valley-campus/. 11. Mike Murphy, “Apple’s New $5 Billion Campus Has a 100,000Square-Foot Gym and No Daycare,” Quartz, May 16, 2017, https://qz.com /984785/apples-new-5-billion-apple-park-campus-has-a-100000 -square -foot-gym-and-no-daycare-aapl/. 12. Levy, “Apple’s New Campus.” 13. Sarah Kessler, “IBM, Remote-Work Pioneer, Is Calling Thousands of Employees Back to the Office,” Quartz, March  21, 2017, https://qz.com /924167/ibm-remote -work-pioneer-is - calling-thousands - of- employees -back-to-the-office/. 14. Kara Swisher, “Survey Says: Despite Yahoo Ban, Most Tech Companies Support Work-From-Home for Employees,” AllThingsD (blog), February 23, 2013, http://allthingsd.com/20130225/survey-says-despite-yahoo-ban -most-tech-companies-support-work-from-home-for-employees/. 15. Kimberly Earles, “The Gender Divide in the Tech Sector: A Plan to Address the Bias and Change the Culture,” Washington State Labor Education and Research Center and SEIU 925, 2019, https://static1.squarespace . com /static /5ee271b31871b23eb1789f1b / t /5f7b8b5bd632513a6b14088d /1601932134363/GenderDivideInTechReport.pdf. 16. Maura Judkis, “It’s Been Six Months. Our Sense of Time Is Still Broken,” Washington Post, September 11, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com / lifestyle /style /its -been-six-months -our-sense -of-time -is - still-broken /2020/09/10/1f6a5442-6dc7-11ea-a3ec-70d7479d83f0_story.html.

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17. Claire Cain Miller, “ ‘I’m Only One Human Being’: Parents Brace for a Go-It-Alone School Year,” New York Times, August  19, 2020, https:// www . nytimes . com /2020 /08 / 19 / upshot /coronavirus - home - school -parents.html. 18. “Employment Situation Summary,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 2021, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm.

A QUIET DISASTER Mexico City, Mexico ALFONSO FIERRO

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fter the pandemic struck Mexico City in early March, the frantic rhythm of urban life slowly began to wind down to a standstill, like a giant animal clumsily tumbling into its deathbed. The hip and thriving Roma neighborhood, a usual meeting point for both young residents and tourists, suddenly looked like a little provincial town in the middle of nowhere: a car here or there, forsaken gardens in once-crowded plazas, businesses in ruin, all sounds safely sealed behind the walls of its mid-twentieth-century townhouses and apartment buildings. It was a peaceful image but also, in a way, an apocalyptic one. And, to be sure, for most residents of the capital, it was like witnessing an impossible sight, an aberration. Historians date the explosion of Mexico City’s growth as somewhere in the 1970s. By the mideighties, in any case, the city’s population had already reached 14 to 16 million inhabitants (the figure is a little above 20, nowadays). In just one decade (1970–80), the number of registered cars tripled.1 Suburban neighborhoods probably did so, too. Pollution expelled the volcanoes from the landscape, and crime grew out of control. Witnessing such a rapid and dramatic transformation, writers in the 1990s, such as Carlos Fuentes, Hugo Hiriart, or Guillermo Sheridan, could not

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help but turn the city into the setting of a series of apocalyptic novels that flirted with the idea of a coming disaster. With the pandemic, Mexico City is living through a disaster of its own, a very real one. Those apocalyptic writers in the 1990s could only imagine the end of the city as a tumultuous affair, so they would likely be surprised by the suddenness with which the capital took on the guise of a ghost town. Hiriart published, in 1992, a novel titled La destrucción de todas las cosas (which could be rendered in English as The destruction of everything). Closely rewriting the history of the Spanish conquest of Aztec Tenochtitlan, Hiriart describes the conquest of modern Mexico City by an army of aliens. The aliens arrive to a city already drowning in chaos, so much so that they are forced to assume that it is actually a Mexican war strategy. The narrator, a chronicler of his hometown’s destruction, gloomily dispels this notion: “But you will ask, who governed Mexico? Truth is nobody knew anything. We weren’t dribbling or shadow boxing; we simply couldn’t look far ahead.” Hiriart’s novel thus places its bet for the capital’s end in the boisterous self-sabotage of a disorganized urban machinery, in which, as a traditional saying goes, everyone just wanted to draw water to their own mill.2 But by far the best-known chronicler of daily life in the apocalyptic Mexico City of the 1990s was pop-culture enthusiast Carlos Monsiváis. His 1995 Los rituales del caos (loosely, The chaos rituals) employs the street-level point of view of the flaneur, in order to capture an array of fleeting scenes in the megalopolis. His chronicles combine description with a series of statements that revolve around the unrestrained chaos of urban life. He claims, for instance, that the city “is the multitude that surrounds the multitude” and that daily traffic jams are “a prison with mobile cells.” He further brands the city “the lab of extinction” and argues that people who use the subway in rush hour have to learn the skill of

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losing body mass all of a sudden only to recover “their usual weight and form” once they step out of the train (YouTube videos featuring the infamous Pantitlán station may confirm this). In the end, Monsiváis claims, “staying in the capital of the republic means facing the risks of pollution, the ozone, thermal inversion, lead in the blood, the rat race, the loss of individual meaning.”3 Monsiváis, like Hiriart, is baroque in style. Both authors provide labyrinthine sentences riddled with complex syntaxes—not to mention an overdose of adjectives or the fact that enumeration is their distinctive stylistic trait, one that creates a sense of excess. It is as if these authors want their sentences to be as chaotic and exaggerated, as crowded and paradoxical, as agglomerated as the city they are trying to describe appears to them. After almost half a year disguised as a quiet little town that would have shocked the likes of Monsiváis and Hiriart, Mexico City seems to be slowly waking up again, quite possibly to a new reality. With the region still surfing the pandemic wave and already on the shore of a severe economic depression, though, the lingering calm feels like the few seconds that precede one of those deafening summer storms that, every afternoon, fall on top of the city that used to be a big lake hidden high up in the mountains.

NOTES 1. I found these figures in Peter  H. Smith’s article “Mexico Since 1946,” included in the collection Mexico Since Independence, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 364. Population includes both the city proper and the surrounding metropolitan area. 2. Hugo Hiriart, La destrucción de todas las cosas (Mexico City: Era, 1992), 19. 3. Carlos Monsiváis, Los rituales del caos (Mexico City: Era, 1995), 17–111.

HEALTH SELF-DEFENSE IN A SÃO PAULO FAVELA ERICK CORRÊA

“There is no new normal, only just a way to cover up the genocide of people who live in favelas.” In Brazil, there is a public discourse that associates the spread of epidemic diseases with favelas and urban peripheries. It is based on epidemiological bulletins and maps, produced by the federal government’s official organs, which employ a global perspective that often hides the realities specific to Brazil’s metropolitan areas. In times of crisis, these kinds of communications fuel the stigmatization of marginal territories by treating them as places perilous to public health and safety.1 Pólis, a São Paulo association that campaigns for “the right to the city,” however, presented on June  23, 2020, an important study that counters this discourse. Entitled  The Pandemic of Inequalities,  it highlighted the case of the Paraisópolis favela, which by May 18 presented a death rate of 21.7 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, a rate significantly lower than the city’s average of 56.6 deaths per 100,000.2 Since then, public health experts have recognized the health self-defense measures put into practice by this favela’s inhabitants and community organizations as an advanced example of how to fight against the virus. The national  and

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international press, like Washington Post, soon reported on the positive results obtained by the Paraisópolis community in the fight against the coronavirus.3

“The virus is democratic but we live in a country that isn’t” When talking about a country the size of a continent like Brazil, it is important to take into account its complex and heterogeneous reality, which translates into a multiplicity of cultural differences and extraordinary socioeconomic inequalities. Moreover, it is a country on the periphery of the capitalist system. For this reason, we should not lose sight of the fact that Paraisópolis is only one favela in a vast network of favelas and poor suburbs that exist in the country. In the state capital of São Paulo alone, around two million people live in several favelas. Economically, as well as geographically, these favelas are situated on the peripheries of the periphery of the capitalist system. Located in the southern zone of the capital and nestled around Morumbi, one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, Paraisópolis is São Paulo’s second-largest favela. With a hundred thousand inhabitants and a population density greater than most Brazilian cities, it consists of a “city center” surrounded by areas where living conditions and urbanization are even more precarious. Poor workers from the northeastern region of the country, largely employed in the building and public works sector, notably in the construction of the São Paulo soccer stadium, have gradually occupied much of Paraisópolis, in the area where it has been anchored since the 1950s. In recent decades, Paraisópolis has become an active center for dozens of community organizations, notably neighborhood

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or popular education collectives, cooperatives of cooks and seamstresses, and women’s rights groups, which work with public organizations, associations, and local businesses. The pandemic has only intensified and given more visibility to this community work that has gone on for years and has now been channeled towards community self-defense against the coronavirus.

“Ourselves for ourselves” Among the initiatives that have emerged during this health crisis is the creation of street presidents, volunteers who are mostly unemployed women between the ages of eighteen and forty. They act as mediators between favela families and the Favelas G10, a nationwide organization of favela leaders and entrepreneurs, which is responsible for the strategic coordination of various health actions.4 Each street president in Paraisópolis takes care of about fifty families, reaching a combined total of nearly 21,000 households or around 2,500 families. Between the street presidents and the Favelas G10 is an administrative team of volunteers between the ages of twenty and thirty-six, who map out, through interviews and data collected from families, the neighborhoods requiring the most urgent intervention. From there, the street presidents promote COVID19 awareness by talking daily with residents, using car-mounted loudspeakers to broadcast the importance of wearing masks and observing social distancing and lockdowns, and using social media and WhatsApp to counteract the proliferation of fake news about the virus. The street presidents have also trained 240 people to act as  brigadistas, who,  together with firefighters, have constructed

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sixty emergency health assistance units. This self-defense network has rented an ambulance that operates exclusively in Paraisópolis twenty-four hours a day and has constructed a medical care station to which symptomatic people are directed. In order to guarantee access to tests and effective masks for COVID-19, some of these collectives and community associations try to maintain regular contact with such state sectors as the Unidades Básicas de Saúde (Basic Health Units of the Public Health Service) and the University of São Paulo. Cooperatives of Paraisopolis seamstresses, which used to make “ecological handbags and shopping bags” from used fabrics, have turned to making masks; some are distributed free in the community, others are sold to local businesses to generate income. Since the beginning of the pandemic, cooperatives of cooks have made thousands of meals to combat hunger as a result of the sudden rise of unemployment. Already high even before lockdown measures were decreed, unemployment rose exponentially after the firings of many female heads of households who worked as cleaners of private condominiums, commercial spaces, and apartments in wealthy neighborhoods such as Morumbi. Faced with this situation, the national association CUFA (Favelas Central) went so far as to set up an entire humanitarian program to provide a minimum income called Mothers of the Favelas,  which gives stipends of R$120 (US$11) to single mothers in Paraisópolis.5 In addition to these actions, favela residents have pressured the state to shoulder its responsibility to promote social policies to help people living in slums and metropolitan peripheries. On May  18, the Favelas G10 organized a demonstration in front of São Paulo state headquarters; 500 Paraisópolis residents carried signs reading “Governo lento mata o povo [Slow government kills people].”

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Terms like self-management for the periphery and health selfmanagement have been used to designate these practices of community solidarity. However, while “health self-defense” suggests an extension of self-management practices, it is not yet the same thing. The production and distribution of masks and meals, though essential for securing a minimum of self-defense against the virus, do not address the community’s long-term needs for clean water and sewage treatment, which would fulfill an important role in controlling the pandemic. In Paraisópolis, running water stops after eight p.m. and some six thousand people live off a stream running through the zone. For these reasons and others, the slogan often voiced by the favela’s young residents, “Ourselves for ourselves,” is for now less a cry for freedom than a cry for help.

“The rulers live on the moon” The helplessness caused by the systematic failure of the state to guarantee basic health care to precarious populations has created an opening for drug traffickers and Penecostal churches to exploit by offering their assistance, all the while serving their own interests. Artists collectives within the community have worked to raise awareness to thwart these groups. To some degree, these cultural associations are responsible for the high level of political awareness shown by young people, the most involved in health self-defense practices, not only in Paraisópolis but in other Brazilian favelas as well. The role played by so many community organizations in the favelas and suburbs of Brazil today is somewhat analogous to that developed by certain fringes of the extreme left that survived the military dictatorship’s repression during the 1970s. In the 1980s,

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distancing themselves from armed struggles and working alongside progressive factions of the Catholic church, they developed important grassroots activism in the peripheries of São Paulo, which would play a decisive role both in the redemocratization of the Brazilian state and in the formation of the Workers Party (PT). Later, the link between the PT and the lower classes would become a determining factor in the PT’s electoral victories in the years 2002–10, after the political dominance of the neoliberals throughout the 1990s. However, since PT leader Lula’s first government (2003– 2006)  there has been a growing bureaucratization of the PT, accompanied by the co-optation of its original popular base, thanks to the new techniques of “citizen participation” that the party created within the state apparatus.6 The party’s establishment of “management councils” to represent civil society in planning and controlling the public budget on the municipal level and its national policies aimed at Afro-Brazilians, women, youth, the elderly, and LGBT+ have functioned to defuse social conflicts. These “councils” were never tools created from below, by the self-organization of the people, but always instituted from above, by municipal and state authorities politically aligned with the federal government. We are not talking about a simple abandonment of the PT’s popular bases but about a process of sophisticated cooptation, in which the most combative community activists were diverted from grassroots struggles and drawn into the PT’s management of public policy.7 Added to this is the fact that the major organizations representing workers, peasants, and students—such as the CUT (Workers’ Central, the main national trade union), the Movement of the Landless, and the UNE (National Student Union, Brazil’s largest student union)—all remained under the hegemony of the PT and its allied parties under Lula and the

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Dilma government that followed him and offered no opposition to the government’s labor, agrarian, or educational policies. This long process of recuperation led the rapper Mano Brown, a member of the Racionais Mc’s, one of Brazil’s most popular rap groups, to declare in the presence of PT candidate Farnando Haddad, at a PT-organized rally during the last election, “If we are the Workers’ Party, we must understand what the people want. If you don’t know, go back to the field to find out.” For these reasons, the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and Jair Bolsonaro’s electoral victory in 2018 cannot be separated from the PT’s politics of conciliation of the economic forces of capital, on the one hand, and the controlled integration of popular bases into its mechanisms of state management, on the other. As for the political alliance established with the centrist MDB party (Brazilian Democratic Movement), which Lula and Dilma justified as a necessary compromise, it has been replaced by the alliance between the military and pro-Bolsonaro militias. Under the ideological cover of an anticorruption campaign, the antidemocratic, extreme right has simply surfed the waves of anti-PT sentiment among the former centrist allies of the MDB that were initiated by the social democracy. Thus the social explosion set off in June 2013 by protests against the city public-transportation fare increase, lasting until the anti– World Cup protests of 2014, was not the historical turning point in Brazil’s “great step backward,” as PT ideologues want us to think. The PT will not and cannot admit that the events of 2013, 2016, and 2018 are not anomalies or regressions in Brazil’s capitalist development but only the logical results of its own administration. The ongoing social experiment in Paraisópolis shows that the people of the peripheries speak and act for themselves, all the while keeping a potentially emancipatory skepticism toward

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the state technocracy and its party representatives—a skepticism far removed from the old resentments of the fascist-leaning middle classes and their illusions of social advancement in a worldsystem in ruins. Young community activists’ clear-cut demands, which come out of their daily contact with social reality in its most precarious material forms, radically contrast with the demagoguery and obscurantism of most party and union leaders, who pretend to supervise people’s struggles and represent their interests. The street presidents have shown themselves to be alert to the parties’ opportunist exploitation of their energies to mobilize for elections—elections that have long proved to bring more problems than solutions. On the other hand, we know that the organizations operating in Paraisópolis, such as the national association of CUFA, are not without commercial or political aims. On the contrary, CUFA’s founders own Favela Holding, a group of about twenty companies focused on the favela’s “internal market,”  and they are involved in the creation of a new party, the Favela Front of Brazil. Based on a “pro-favela ideology,” this party proposes “a more just and egalitarian society, where Blacks and favela populations will become contenders in elections to gain access to positions of power.”8 Without going into an analysis of such a project, we can ask: is such a society possible if it rests on the replacement of its ruling elites, which thereby legitimizes the “positions of power” that those elites created and merely perpetuates the structures of political domination and economic exploitation that guarantee their reproduction? Likewise, the Favelas G10 aims “to make communities into major commercial centers, attractive to investors, so as to transform the excluded into start-ups and social enterprises.”9 Thus it is clear that conditions are already present in the

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favelas to enable the economic and state powers to recuperate the self-organizing forces of precarious populations. For the moment, the solidarity actions of the health selfdefense of Paraisópolis reveal the positive aspect of the deep crisis of political representation affecting the old power structures of parliamentary democracy. These solidarity actions are complementary to the rejection of political parties by an ever-larger part of the population, as expressed in the rising levels of voter abstention. They are symptoms of the reality that the political party form—exclusively focused on its own reproduction in the sphere of political power and on its atavistic link with economic forces— has reached its historical limit as a tool of social emancipation. Through its actions, the Paraisópolis community has shown that the emancipation of precarious populations will be the work of those populations themselves.

NOTES Translated by Janet Koenig. 1. The headings in quotations are the words of the Paraisopolis residents involved in local collectives, associations or cooperatives.  Sergio  R.  V. Bernardo, “Práticas Comunitárias Inovadoras e Auto-organização para Enfrentar a Crise em Paraisópolis: O que Essas Experiências Estão nos Mostrando?,” Institute de Estudos Avançados da Universidade de São Paulo, July 3, 2020, http://www.iea.usp.br/midiateca/video/videos-2020 /praticas-comunitarias-. 2. Agência Galo, https://agenciagalo.com/polis. 3. Juliana Domingos de Lima, “Por que Paraisópolis se destaca no combate ao coronavirus,” Nexo, July  1, 2020, https://www.nexojornal.com.br /expresso/2020/07/01/Por-que-Parais%C3%B3polis; Marina Lopes, “Brazil’s Favelas, Neglected by the Government, Organize Their Own Coronavirus Fight,” Washington Post, July 10, 2020, https://www.washing ton post .com /world /the_americas/coronavirus-brazil-favela-sao -paulo -rio -janeiro-bolsonaro/2020/06/09/8b03eee0-aa74-11ea-9063-e69bd6520940 _story.html. 4. G10Favelas, http://www.g10favelas.org /.

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5. Mães da Favela, https://www.maesdafavela.com.br. 6. The PT won four consecutive presidential elections. It exercised federal executive power during Lula’s terms in office (2003–2006, 2007–2010) and Dilma’s (2011–2014, 2015–2016). 7. We are talking about co-optation in the strongest sense of the term, historically, politically and socially. The vertically organized “management councils” that the PT established during its hold in office have nothing to do with the essentially antiparty council forms that were created spontaneously by the working classes in revolutionary movements in the twentieth century: Russia in 1905 and 1917; Germany in 1918–1921; Spain in 1936–1937; Hungary and Poland in 1956; France in 1968; Portugal in 1974– 1975, Italy in 1977. However, council forms can be reestablished: for example, when high school students decide to occupy their schools and form autonomous assemblies, in defiance of the mediating mechanisms of the student unions, as happened in 2015–2016, in the Brazilian states of São Paulo, Paraná, and Goiás. 8. Marcos Augusto Gonçalves, “Celso Athayde Launches Party and Bets on the Market to Promote Blacks,” Folha de S. Paulo, September  24, 2017, https://www1 . folha .uol .com .br /poder /2017/09 /1921297 - celso - athayde -lanca -partido - e - aposta -no -mercado -para -promover -negros . shtml; Frente Favela Brasil, “Programa Partidário,” https://www.frentefavela brasil.org.br/downloads/downloads.pdf. 9. G10Favelas, http://www.g10favelas.org /.

EMERGENCY URBANISM ANANYA ROY

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os Angeles is on the brink of one of the largest mass displacements in the history of the region. As eviction courts reopen, nearly half a million renter households, concentrated in Black and Latinx neighborhoods, are at risk of expulsion through unlawful detainers or eviction filings—UD Day is here.1 In a deal struck with the landlord and banker lobbies, the California legislature has put forward tenant protections that postpone some evictions, keeping tenants in a state of permanent displaceability.2 In a cruel hoax, such protections convert unpaid rent into debt, turning the small-claims court into yet, another arena of violence against working-class communities of color. Los Angeles is the paradigm, not the exception. Writing from Los Angeles, I interpret the present conjuncture as emergency urbanism— the suturing of the ongoing “state of emergency” that is global racial capitalism with the declaration of emergency by the postcolonial state under the sign of public health. The most obvious manifestation of a public health emergency is the COVID-19 pandemic and its racialized maps of infection and death that make visible the disposability of Black, Brown, and Indigenous life. But COVID-19 is conjoined with other takings of life. Patrisse Cullors, cofounder of Black Lives

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Matter, explains the state of emergency thus: “That black folks across the country and the globe are systematically targeted, and that our lives are on the line on a daily basis, and, that, ultimately, this is a life and death issue for us.”3 The state of emergency has always been here. In Los Angeles, as well as in other U.S. cities, working-class communities of color are subject to what I call “racial banishment,” the enactment of their expulsion and disappearance from urban life.4 It would be a mistake to understand such processes as gentrification or eviction, in other words, as market-driven displacement, for they are part of the through line of the forced removals of people of color. Racial banishment is state-organized violence, instituted through regimes of racialized policing, such as gang injunctions, nuisance abatement, and place-based surveillance.5 Taking place in the name of the state’s police power to protect the “free use of property” and ensure the “comfortable enjoyment of life and property,” such forms of policing secure dispossession and enable formations of settler urbanism.6 The Black Lives Matter uprising seeks to make such racialized policing and the dispossession of life untenable. Alongside such uprising in the streets, a reconfiguration of the social and spatial arrangements that make up urban life is also underway. In particular, property has become the insurgent ground of emergency urbanism, a site of rebellion against global racial capitalism and its protocols of rent and debt. The question at hand is whether such emergency presents the opportunity for a radical reconfiguration of the relationship among sovereignty, life, and property that is so central to American liberal democracy. On May Day, amid the eerie quiet of the COVID-19 shutdown, activists with Street Watch LA, a tenant rights coalition, staged the occupation of a suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.7 The key protagonist, Davon Brown, one of the

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nearly 70,000 unhoused Angelenos, had been until then living in a tent in Echo Park Lake, a public park that has been the site of fierce contestations over homeless encampments. Brown, who was portrayed in the national media as “Lady Gaga’s ex-model,” embodies the life-and-death emergency that is homelessness in America.8 With average life expectancy rates that rival the world’s so-called failed states—forty-eight years for an unhoused woman and fifty-one years for an unhoused man—Angelenos experiencing homelessness are disproportionately Black, heavily policed, and subject to unrelenting criminalization by propertied interests, such as business improvement districts.9 While cities such as Los Angeles imposed “safer-at-home” orders to protect life during the COVID-19 pandemic, the unhoused remain abandoned, excluded from state and social protection. The Ritz-Carlton occupation, part of a state-wide No Vacancy! California campaign, drew attention to another dimension of emergency: the relationship between state power and private property.10 Fed up with the slow progress of Project Roomkey, a program that utilizes vacant hotel and motel rooms as emergency shelter for the unhoused, activists demanded the commandeering of hotels. They focused on “publicly subsidized” hotels, such as the Ritz-Carlton, that have benefited from tax rebates, land assembly, and many other such “geobribes,” Neil Smith’s felicitous phrase for the public subsidies provided by local governments to landed interest in order to facilitate urban development.11 Just in downtown Los Angeles, public subsidies to luxury hotel development have amounted to $1 billion between 2005 and 2018.12 When housing-justice movements demand that hotels be seized to shelter the unhoused, they are seeking redress and reparation for such diversions of public money. Commandeering is not only a political demand but also the vocabulary of legal reason. Early on in the COVID-19 shutdown,

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the law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP, delivered a definitive legal argument stating that the Mayor of Los Angeles had “broad authority” to commandeer property, including hotel rooms, “to protect public health in a declared emergency . . . without providing preseizure notice, an opportunity to be heard, or compensation,” as long as a “post-deprivation process” provided “just compensation.”13 A few days later, the city attorney of San Francisco arrived at a similar legal conclusion.14 While, to date, no government executive in California has deployed such authority, these legal statements linger as a haunting, gesturing at the possible interruption of established relationships between state power and property rights. The emergency that is recognized in these legal declarations is not the takings of life under conditions of global racial capitalism. The relevant emergency is public health, which has long been a key domain for governments to manage class and race relations through the management of disease. The roots of modern urban planning lie in efforts to hold the line against the spread of diseases, such as cholera, through various forms of spatial segregation and social exclusion.15 While such practices were perfected in colonial settings where maintaining “the sanitary city” required containing and quarantining native populations,16 they persist in what I call the postcolonial state.17 Colonial logics of rule and subordination proliferate in and through the postcolonial state, vividly apparent in how disease is racialized and space is controlled. Does the public health emergency at hand interrupt or consolidate such logics? On September  1, 2020, as eviction courts reopened in states such as California, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), citing health risks, announced a nationwide moratorium on evictions, an order that supersedes local measures that “do not meet or exceed these minimum protections” and imposes criminal penalties on those violating the

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moratorium.18 While similar state-level eviction moratoria have faced legal challenges, the courts have repeatedly ruled that a halt on evictions does not violate the Takings clause of the Fifth Amendment. If the CDC moratorium stands, it would mean that, for a moment, for this moment of emergency, the police power of the state would serve to protect human life rather than to protect property. Well after the emergency is over, such an eviction ban could linger as a haunting. It could become insurgent ground. Integral to the making of insurgent ground is a practice of space, what Saidiya Hartman calls “waywardness.” In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, one of the most important books of our time, she describes the long arc of Black freedom, foregrounding the lives of young, Black women who “struggled to create autonomous and beautiful lives” through “open rebellion.”19 Along similar lines, Salwa Ismail argues that behind the spectacular occupations of plazas and squares of the Arab Spring was the prolonged emergency wrought by impoverished livelihoods, precarious housing, and intensifying policing. These oppressions and grievances took shape in the informal neighborhoods of cities such as Cairo, “in the microprocesses of everyday life,” creating “oppositional subjectivities” and “infrastructures of protest.”20 Such also has been the making of insurgent ground in Los Angeles. Take, for example, the People’s City Council LA and People’s Budget LA, emergent structures of popular sovereignty that demand the defunding of police and “a budget centered on humanity.”21 Coalitions of racial justice and housing justice movements are rooted in long-standing struggles over redevelopment, gentrification, and policing and now stand as a powerful challenge to the governing of/through crisis. Yet another beautiful experiment is the popular appropriation of eminent domain, or the police power of the state to expropriate private property for public purpose. In El Sereno, Reclaiming Our

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Homes has occupied vacant houses that were acquired through eminent domain by Caltrans, California’s transportation agency, for a freeway that was never built.22 The COVID-19 pandemic led the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times to argue for such use of property, “The state cannot allow its own vacant houses or other public properties to sit unused and crumbling in a housing and public health emergency.”23 The editorial board went on to state: “Are the ‘reclaimers’ breaking the law? Of course. They’re trespassing on state-owned land and, essentially, claiming public property as their own.” Housing justice movements refuse such frames of illegal occupation. They instead ask, “What is this state-owned/stolen land on which unhoused people are trespassers? What is the law of the postcolonial state that upholds the rights of settlement and enforces the rightlessness of the dispossessed?” Organized theft has been legitimized through the protocols of market rationality, masking the forced removals of people of color as the improvement of property value in gentrifying neighborhoods. Unrecognizable dispossession is the prolonged state of emergency that is racial capitalism. If property is the insurgent ground of emergency urbanism, then such insurgency is, perhaps, most evident in the political demand of rent cancelation. Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal, organizer with the Los Angeles Tenants Union, notes that most rent-relief funds are “pass-throughs for money that ends up in landlords’ pockets” rather than entitlements.24 By contrast, rent cancelation “would rewrite the script of power relations.” A rent strike, then, is more than the withholding of payment. It is a political demand for the protection of human life over the protection of property. While Dennis Block, Los Angeles’s infamous eviction attorney, argues that a moratorium on evictions constitutes “legal theft” from landlords, sanctioned by state power, the Los Angeles

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Tenants Union responds that rent is theft. They invoke the dire emergency of life and death for which housing is “the only prescription.” Such are the capacious imaginations of emergency urbanism. In the strange articulations of crisis and uprising, an open rebellion is being made against the meaning of property as it has been established in the afterlife of colonialism and slavery.

NOTES 1. Gary Blasi, “UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles,” Housing Justice in the Time of COVID-19 (UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, May  28, 2020), https:// escholarship.org /uc/item/2gz6c8cv. 2. Oren Yiftachel, “Displaceability—a Southeastern Perspective,” MIT Displacement Research & Action Network (blog), July 2017, http://mit displacement.org /symposium-oren-yiftachel. 3. Jamil Smith, “Black Lives Matter Co-Founder: ‘We are in a State of Emergency,’ ” New Republic, July 20, 2015. 4. Ananya Roy, “Dis/possessive Collectivism: Property and Personhood at City’s End,” Geoforum 80 (2017): A1–A11. 5. Ananya Roy, Terra Graziani, and Pamela Stephens, “Unhousing the Poor: Interlocking Regimes of Racialized Policing.” White Paper for the Square One Project, Columbia University, 2020. 6. Calif. Civil Code §3479 (1872), https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces /codes_displaySection.xhtml?sectionNum=3479.&lawCode=CIV. 7. “Street Watch Los Angeles,” Street Watch Los Angeles, accessed April 8, 2021, https://streetwatchla.com/. 8. Tarpley Hitt, “Why Lady Gaga’s Ex-Model Seized a Luxury Hotel Suite in L.A.,” Daily Beast, May 3, 2020, https://www.thedailybeast.com/why -lady-gagas-ex-model-seized-a-luxury-hotel-suite-in-los-angeles. 9. Anna Gorman and Harriet Blair Rowan, “The Homeless Are Dying in Record Numbers on the Streets of L.A.,” California Healthline (blog), April 23, 2019, https://californiahealthline.org /multimedia /the-homeless -are-dying-in-record-numbers-on-the-streets-of-l-a /. 10. “Our Demands,” No Vacancy! California, accessed April 8, 2021, https:// novacancyca.org /. 11. Ananya Roy et al., “Hotel California: Housing the Crisis,” Housing Justice in the Time of COVID-19 (UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and

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Democracy, July  9, 2020), https://escholarship.org /uc/item/0k8932p6; Neil Smith, “New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy” Antipode 34, no. 3 (2002): 427–50. Ananya Roy and Jonny Coleman, “People Are About to Be Pushed Into Homelessness on a Large Scale. Hotels Are Key to Keeping Them off the Streets,” The Appeal, July 17, 2020, https://theappeal.org /hotels-housing -homelessness-crisis-coronavirus-evictions/. Munger, Tolles, and Olson LLP to Mayor Eric Garcetti, “Re: Authority to Commandeer Hotels in Connection with COVID-19 Emergency,” April 7, 2020, https://ucla.app.box.com/s/junhodztu32pukaj9gz8nl088hs bvox8. Kristen  A. Jensen and Brian  F. Crossman to Mayor London  N. Breed, “RE: City Power to Commandeer Private Property for COVID-19 Emergency Purposes,” April  13, 2020, https://www.sfcityattorney.org / wp - content /uploads /2020 /04 /City -Power -to - Commandeer -Private -Property-for-COVID-19-Emergency-Purposes.pdf. As scholars like Paul Rabinow and Susan Craddock have shown in their works. Susan Craddock, City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San Francisco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); and Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Colin McFarlane, “Governing the Contaminated City: Infrastructure and Sanitation in Colonial and Post-Colonial Bombay,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32, no. 2 (2008): 415–35. In keeping with Saidiya Hartman’s work on the “afterlife of slavery,” I intend the postcolonial as the afterlife of colonialism, rather than aftercolonialism. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007). Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Department of Health and Human Services, “Temporary Halt in Residential Evictions to Prevent the Further Spread of COVID-19,” September  4, 2020, https://s3 .amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2020-19654.pdf. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: Norton, 2019). Salwa Ismail, “Urban Subalterns in the Arab Revolutions: Cairo and Damascus in Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 4 (2013): 865–94. “About Us,” People’s City Council LA, accessed April  8, 2021, https:// www.peoplescitycouncil-la.com/about-us; “People’s Budget LA,” People’s Budget LA, accessed April 8, 2021, https://peoplesbudgetla.com/.

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22. “Home,” accessed April 8, 2021, https://reclaimingourhomes.org /. 23. The Times Editorial Board, “Editorial: Caltrans Is Sitting On Vacant Houses During a Pandemic? Put Homeless Families in Them Immediately,” Los Angeles Times, March  21, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story /2020–03–21/vacant-homes-caltrans-homeless-coronavirus. 24. Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal, “It’s Time to Cancel the Rent,” The Nation, May 29, 2020, https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/tenants-rent -strike-evictions/.

A CRISIS TOO BIG TO WASTE What Comes After Private Housing Fails? GIANPAOLO BAIOCCHI AND H. JACOB CARLSON

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f the pandemic and its afterlives will be remembered by its images, some of the most poignant ones remind us of how housing has been central to everything that has gone wrong: painted squares in a parking lots to impose social distancing for the homeless in Las Vegas; the refrigerated trucks for bodies outside of Elmhurst hospital in Queens, the crowded immigrant neighborhood that became the epicenter within the epicenter; deserted luxury neighborhoods, like New York’s Upper East Side, as the wealthy fled to second homes; or the “rent strike” banners hanging from the apartment buildings of absentee landlords.1 Housing inequality is no doubt, as Sugrue suggests in the introduction, one of the “pre-existing conditions” that allowed COVID-19 to metastasize into the social crisis it has become. Already before COVID, we, in the richest country on the planet, were living through an era of growing unaffordability and profound inequities. But now, at the time of this writing, we have come to the brink of a generation-defining housing emergency that is putting tens of millions of people, particularly Black and brown people, at risk. A patchwork of moratoria and stopgap provisions—and an immense backlog in the courts—is the only thing that is keeping many people sheltered. One estimate is that,

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by the end of 2020, the total back rent owed was in the order of $70 billion, and, unless something is done, that between 30 and 40 million renters will face eviction.2 We think this crisis has led us to a moment where a real, fundamental, reform of our housing system is not only necessary but, for the first time in a long time, really possible.

A Crisis Decades in the Making But for the last few decades, housing has been increasingly unaffordable and precarious for an ever-larger share of the population. Before the pandemic, rent constituted a third of the income for 47 percent of all renters, while one in four renters gave more than half of their income to their landlords in rent payments. Displacement—or the fear of it—is a fact of life for the working poor of this country. Despite the overall economic growth in the U.S. since 2001 (and the profitability of the real estate industry), the numbers of renters increased and they have become worse off: since then they have paid more in rent, were displaced more often, and the quality of rental units did not improve.3 According to a GAO analysis, nearly one in six rental units were not adequate, as landlords skimp on maintenance needs and flaunt local laws. These problems are especially worse at the bottom of the market. Severe rent burden is especially common among people of color and low-wage workers. And it is not just renters or the less-well-off who are struggling. For years, predatory lenders lured families into risky mortgages with the promise of a fast track to wealth. Then, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, nearly eight million families lost their homes to foreclosure, and in the wake investors swooped in to

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turn the scraps into profitable assets. These new corporate landlords sometimes rented the homes out to the same families who originally owned them.4 The foreclosures were also deeply damaging to communities, turning back the clock on racial disparities in homeownership to pre–Jim Crow levels. For those who have kept their houses, homeownership can be a double-edged sword. While ownership can build economic wealth, middle-class families are often locked into the “schoolproperty trap.” They consolidate themselves into suburban enclaves in desirable school districts, which have adequate funding because of their property taxes but are also expensive to live in. Well-to-do middle-class families today work longer hours and commute farther than their predecessors, only to have less money left each month because housing costs have never been higher. If the American Dream is to own a home, it comes with a uniquely American paradox: the housing system that generates unimaginable wealth does so because it has instability, conflict, and exclusion baked into the core. Indeed, homeownership has been the primary driver of wealth accumulation in the United States, with more than a third of household assets held in real estate.5 Yet from day one, not only was access to that wealth sharply limited by race, but also the economic engine of real estate has been one of the primary drivers of racism. From the historical examples of red-lining to the racialized experiences of gentrification and displacement, real estate creates the context for so much of our politics today, like homeowner politics and suburban revolts, while generating incentives for unscrupulous actors like private equity firms that own modern-day slum housing. Real estate is thus one of the knots that joins together the vice grip of race and class, one entrenching the other in a system that only exacerbates inequalities. What is the government’s role in alleviating these inequalities and providing adequate housing to those in need? The unique

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combination of pro-homeownership policies, a fiscal structure that ties local government funding to property taxes, and the near-absence of social housing has created an expensive system that generates ample profits for some yet inadequate housing for the rest. The public housing that we do have is understood not as an entitlement but as a reluctant concession by the state to the very poor, and it is treated as such. It is consistently underfunded, is badly managed, and serves as a convenient political punching bag. One of the remarkable features of this decades-long housing crisis has been a nearly unshakable policy consensus. Despite the numerous voices in housing policy, there is a remarkable agreement that underlies all mainstream proposals: with the right mix of incentives and subsidies, the market will solve housing problems for everyone. For the last sixty years, Republicans and Democrats have largely agreed that housing policy should be marketled. Indeed, the biggest issue in housing policy today is the “supply problem,” which claims that the reason that housing is unaffordable in many places is because various forces conspire to constrain new housing construction. Thus, the silver bullet to solve the housing crisis is to remove these barriers, which would free up market forces to meet rising demand and lower prices. Under this view, even “luxury housing” is actually beneficial for all, since expanding supply at the top will eventually allow affordability to trickle down to everyone.

How COVID Made Things Much Worse Just as the United States stands nearly alone among wealthy nations in how privatized housing provision is, its response to the

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current crisis was also uniquely brutal. It often surprises Americans to learn that while social insecurity did increase in other wealthy nations, COVID has not become a social emergency of the magnitude it has in the United States. In Europe, for example, the unemployment rate stayed essentially unchanged throughout the pandemic, as many national governments directly stepped into the labor market through jobretention schemes that directly cover salaries of furloughed workers of businesses that cannot do so. Throughout the continent, as many as 50 million workers had their wages paid for the state sector in such programs.6 Many countries in Europe stepped into the real estate market as well.7 Spain, a country that, like the United States, experienced the terrible effects of the 2008 crisis, introduced a national rent moratorium for economically vulnerable tenants as well as zerointerest ten-year microcredit loans to cover housing payments. It also introduced rent freezes for leases that were up for renewal; Greece offered rent reductions; and Ireland and Portugal offered direct financial support for those struggling to pay rent. And several individual cities like Vienna or Lisbon suspended payments from tenants in social housing. In the United States, in contrast, the focus of recovery was protecting large businesses. At the beginning of the pandemic, some states passed emergency renter protections, but these have been only temporary measures. The CARES Act banned evictions, but only in rental properties backed by federal programs (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FHA, etc). As a renter, figuring out if your home qualified near-impossible, if you even knew that it was something you should check for. As a result, many landlords flaunted the restrictions and evicted people illegally.8 Eventually, in September, the CDC implemented a universal eviction moratorium for those affected by pandemic-induced job

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loss. The order prevents eviction but does not relieve renters from any accumulated back rent owed. The CARES Act created $4.3 billion for rental assistance, but states and localities left millions on the table as the bureaucratic red tape to prove deservingness made it impossible to give out the money in time.9 The lateDecember stimulus bill added $25 billion in rental assistance but will not be enough to cover all the back rent owed. While tenants go into debt, placing their rent payments and other expenses on their credit cards, the main concern of policy makers is to make landlords whole.10 The pandemic has demanded sacrifice from everyone, and property owners and investors should not be excluded. The pandemic thus did not create new problems so much as laid bare and intensified our existing ones. It revealed the inequality and injustice of the system, as well as its fragility.

The Moment for Reform Is Now Sometimes when you cut into an onion, you find out that its inside has rotted out. But you may also find the stalk of a new onion growing out of the top. Crises provide moments when people are shown a raw glimpse of the system as it is. They also are moments to imagine a different future. We have to imagine that there will be interventions to bail out renters, including rental assistance. While rental-assistance support as pandemic relief has the benefit of speed, it does little to address the long-standing issues in housing. How do we ensure a more stable and just system that makes crises less likely in the first place? We have reason to believe that the moment for real, lasting, reform is here.

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Alongside the suffering it created, the pandemic also generated fertile ground for social-movement activity. Mutual aid flourished, less out of ideological commitment than survival. Amid the pandemic, the movement of a lifetime around the right to housing surged around the banner of #cancelrent. Organizations like Housing Justice for All were suddenly flooded with requests on how to organize rent strikes. Independent tenants’ unions began to swell with members, and new ones appeared. This work built on a history of tenant organizing around the country, which has been on the rise since the early 2000s. Before the start of the pandemic, in fact, the tenant movement had been finally notching some wins on its belt, expanding renter protections and rent control across numerous states.11 In addition to defensive measures, these social movements are pushing solutions to address the current, past, and future crises by seeking to “decommodify housing”—meaning reduce the extent to which the cost and access to housing is determined by the private market. Already we have abundant and successful examples of actually existing decommodified housing, from community land trusts, to limited-equity tenant cooperatives, to public housing. While the United States has a checkered history with public housing, Europe shows how public housing can be a vital community asset that is well maintained. There have been numerous exciting and viable proposals to address the current and long-standing problems with housing. The Homes Guarantee Platform seeks to create millions of units of European-style social housing with democratic community control. At the same time, Right to the City Alliance has been working to build a loan fund to seed community-level social housing. Representative Ilhan Omar introduced a bill to cancel rent payments for the duration of the pandemic and reimburse

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small-scale landlords. We have proposed a Social Housing Development Authority (SHDA) to acquire distressed real estate, rehabilitate it to livability and environmental standards, and then transfer to the social housing sector. All of these proposals, though, are still outside of the policy-making mainstream. Policy experts from both parties continue to be wedded to market orthodoxy that dictates that housing should be, above all, a profitgenerating good. This same orthodoxy sees basic protection of tenants, like rent control and regulation of housing conditions, as interferences with the free market that unnaturally limit supply. Yet we have to ask ourselves if the market vision of housing has not by now exhausted itself. Can we finally now say that this country’s decades-long experiment with market-centered housing has failed? It has certainly generated wealth, but at the cost of inequality and precarity for too many, including the millions for whom “staying home” during COVID was fraught with uncertainty. The pandemic emphasized the fundamental conflict between housing’s role as asset for investment versus a home for shelter. To really tackle the root causes of the housing crisis, we have to downplay housing’s value as real estate, something that is bought and sold and generates profits, and think of it more in terms of what it provides as a social good: shelter, home, stability, the basis of community, and the soul of place. If we think of housing provision that way, like we do education or health care, something to which there should be universal access, policy questions will shift. Instead of looking to “coax the market” to provide affordable quality housing, we will need to ask “how much market interference should we tolerate” in the first place. This will require a fundamental shift in policy making as well as in our thinking. In the near term, it will mean shifting the equation from how many billions of dollars of public funds have to be spent to keep insolvent landlords and strapped renters afloat

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to the cost of building permanent solutions. It will mean thinking of building family wealth across generations differently, and finding new models of funding localities that do not rely on property taxes. It might mean figuring out how to wean our public investment portfolios from real estate. These are profoundly difficult issues that are deeply baked into American policy, economics, and culture. The change won’t happen overnight, but this crisis provides a chance to reevaluate the path we’re on, and start looking to chart a new one.

NOTES 1. Mario Koran, “Las Vegas Parking Lot Turned Into ‘Homeless Shelter’ with social Distancing Markers,” The Guardian, March 30, 2020, https:// www.theguardian .com /us -news /2020 /mar /30 / las -vegas -parking -lot -homeless-shelter; Julia Marsh, “FEMA Sending 85 Refrigerated Trucks to New York City for COVID-19 Bodies,” New York Post, March 30, 2020, https://nypost .com /2020 /03 /30 /fema - sending -refrigerated -trucks -to -new-york-city-for-covid-19-bodies/; Amanda L Gordon, “They’re the Last Rich People Left on the Upper East Side,” Bloomberg, March 27,  2020, https://www.bloomberg.com /news/articles/2020– 03–27/they -re-the-last-rich-people-left-on-the-upper-east-side; Jake Offenhartz, “Thousands of NYC Tenants Kick off Historic Rent Strike, Distressing Landlords,” Gothamist, May  1, 2020, https://gothamist.com/news/thou sands-nyc-tenants-kick-historic-rent-strike-distressing-landlords. 2. Jim Parrott and Mark Zandi, “Congress Needs to Provide Eviction and Mortgage Relief Now Before the Coming Crisis,” Washington Post, November 30, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ business/2020/11 /30/commentary-congress-needs-provide-eviction-mortgage-relief-now -before-coming-surge/. 3. “Rental Housing: As More Households Rent, the Poorest Face Affordability and Housing Quality Challenges,” United States Government Accountability Office, May 2020, https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-20-427 .pdf. 4. Francesca Mari, “$60 Billion Housing Grab by Wall Street,” New York Times Magazine, March  4, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04 /magazine/wall-street-landlords.html.

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5. Jonathan Eggleston and Robert Munk, “Net Worth of Households: 2014,” United States Census, August  2018, https://www.census.gov /content/dam/Census/library/publications/2018/demo/P70BR_155.pdf. 6. “Job Retention Schemes During the COVID-19 Lockdown and Beyond,” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, October 12, 2020, https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/view/?ref=135_135415–6bardplc5q&titl e=Job-retention-schemes-during-the-COVID-19-lockdown-and-beyond. 7. “Housing Amid Covid-19: Policy Responses and Challenges,” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, July 22, 2020, https:// www.oecd .org /coronavirus /policy-responses / housing-amid - covid -19 -policy-responses-and-challenges-cfdc08a8/. 8. “Stopping COVID-19 Evictions Survey Results,” National Housing Law Project, July 2020, https://www.nhlp.org /wp-content/uploads/Evictions -Survey-Results-2020.pdf. 9. Conor Dougherty, “Use It or Lose It: Tenant Aid Effort Nears a Federal Cutoff,” New York Times, December 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com /2020/12/15/ business/economy/rental-aid.html. 10. Will Parker, “Out-of-Work Apartment Tenants Putting Monthly Rent on Plastic,” Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles /out - of -work - apartment - tenants - putting - monthly - rent - on - plastic -11586966251. 11. H. Jacob Carlson, Marnie Brady, and Gianpaolo Baiocchi, “When Progressive Mayors Aren’t Enough: Homes for All and Trans-Local Social Movements,” Metropoltiics, November 13, 2018, https://metropolitics.org / When-Progressive -Mayors -Aren-t-Enough-Homes -for-All-and-Trans -Local-Social.html.

PART VII The Failure of the State

COVID BLINDNESS QUENTIN RAVELLI

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round the world, the war against COVID-19 has created unexpected opportunities for governments to repress their critics. In March, Hong Kong police used coronavirus-related restrictions on public gatherings to disperse dissidents protesting against the encroachment of Chinese authority upon the island. That same month, Palestinian citizens suffered increased violence by Israeli forces. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte told authorities who felt threatened by lockdown violators to simply “shoot them dead”; 120,000 people were subsequently detained. In Kenya, at least twenty deaths related to police misconduct during the lockdown are being investigated, in addition to systematic extrajudicial executions in poor neighborhoods. This situation is not new, as evidenced by the Great Plague of 1348, which killed approximately a third of the European population. Women, Jews, and outcasts were falsely accused of spreading the disease and were discriminated against. We can see parallels in 2020’s violence against the poor, the elderly, and those from racial minorities. Those groups also happen to be the ones at increased risk of severe complications from COVID-19. But how do we really know who experiences this double discrimination—stemming from the disease and from society—if

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statistics are kept hidden from the public? That is exactly what is happening, as governments work to cover up the pandemic’s true toll. Week after week, we are bombarded with statistics that hide as much as they reveal. One underestimated and devastating side effect of the virus, it turns out, is COVID blindness: a withholding of accurate information, which has obscured the impact of the pandemic on the most vulnerable communities and the resurgence of institutional violence that has accompanied it. Q Q Q

Epidemics carefully select their targets. In 1991, a wave of tuberculosis in New York City disproportionately affected the homeless. In the 1980s, HIV decimated the gay population. In 1918, the Spanish flu—which infected a third of the world’s population and caused at least 17 million deaths, though some estimates place the figure closer to 50 million1—first killed rank-and-file soldiers already exhausted by World War I before traveling worldwide along commercial and migrant routes. One would think that efforts to fight epidemics would focus on minimizing the risk to the most affected populations. But recent experience proves otherwise. Many governments have tried to hide their most upsetting COVID figures—the number of cases and the number of deaths. These statistics are not only scientific but political: they represent the failure of governments to contain the virus. So perhaps it is not surprising that these numbers are contested. In Spain, significant discrepancies appear between the official Department of Health statistics and those published by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística, the official agency that collects data about Spanish society. According to critics, some discrepancies are the result of deliberate delays in the transmission of the data

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by government officials, which make some provinces look better than others.2 In late April, the Spanish government tried to cite declining numbers of infections to end a particularly harsh lockdown—but it turned out these favorable figures excluded asymptomatic cases.3 Unsurprisingly, older people, who are more affected by the virus, have found themselves at the very heart of this battle over statistics. In France’s retirement homes, the increase in the mortality rate in March was twice as high as in hospitals and homes (21.3 percent versus 10.9 percent). But Santé Publique France did not include statistics on mortality in nursing homes in its daily report until March  26. The government claimed that nursinghome statistics weren’t as reliable as those from hospitals—but later, confusingly, contradicted itself by citing them in official press releases. For almost one whole month, millions of French people simply did not have the right figures—and they didn’t know what they didn’t know. This is all the more surprising given that in twenty-six countries, nursing-home residents represent, on average, 47 percent of all COVID-19 deaths.4 The fight for accurate numbers is part of a more general fight for knowledge of the disease. As the World Health Organization director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on March 16, 2020, “The most effective way to prevent infections and save lives is breaking the chains of transmission. And to do that, you must test and isolate. You cannot fight a fire blindfolded. And we cannot stop this pandemic if we don’t know who is infected.” But testing is not efficient if it remains out of reach for the majority of the population. The access to free, fast, and accurate testing remains a class privilege. And the head of the WHO is not beyond reproach: after a trip to Beijing in late January, he affirmed “China’s speed, China’s scale, and China’s efficiency” in fighting the virus, a statement that was blind to China’s policy against

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systematic testing, public information, and whistleblowers, which helped the virus multiply. Q Q Q

One of the most salient features of the global COVID crackdown is the way it has exacerbated police violence, often along racial lines. In February 2020, before London went into lockdown, 9,063 Black people were stopped and searched by the city’s police, in comparison to 9,176 white people. Those numbers look fairly even, until you take into account the fact that Blacks represent only 11.5 percent of the city’s population.5 During lockdown, from March to April  2020, police searches of Blacks surged in comparison to those of whites. In April, 11,999 searches of Black people were conducted, versus 11,516 of white people. The situation came back to “normal” in May, at the end of the lockdown. These figures, official statistics published by the London police,6 clearly demonstrate the intensification of police discrimination during the lockdown. In many countries, however, a detailed accounting of police violence by race or ethnic group doesn’t exist, and the issue surfaces only when a particularly frightening individual case captures the public imagination. In March 2020, a policeman in the Indian state of Assam beat three indigenous women for violating the lockdown by venturing out to collect firewood and vegetables. The policeman was caught on tape, and the video went viral. In France, many videos capturing police violence have circulated on the internet since the beginning of the confinement. One such video, recorded on March 23, a week after the beginning of the lockdown, shows a twenty-three-year-old man called Yassim, with his face swollen. “They smashed my head twice against the wall and hurt my head with a Flash Ball rifle butt,” he says.

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According to Assa Traoré, an antiracist activist whose brother was killed by the police in 2016, “With the lockdown, our neighborhoods have become attraction parks for the cops.” In most cases, however, no video is available, and real numbers won’t find their way into the official statistics. In France, Italy, and Spain, statistics based on race are simply not allowed. This official colorblindness conceals racist behavior and exacerbates collective ignorance. In France, collecting census information about race has been forbidden since 1978. As a result, activists and scholars lack the proper tools to sharpen their analyses and make their voices heard. The issue has spawned heated debates, but since the situation has not changed, we still need to look elsewhere to find information that proves discrimination. One strategy would be to use “geographical tricks.” Here, geography is used to signify race: one talks of place of birth or residency, noting cities where the majority of the population is Black, for instance. In Seine-Saint-Denis, a working-class area northeast of Paris, where the majority of the population is Arab and Black, the mortality rate between March 1 and April 30 was 124 percent higher than it had been during the same period in 2019.7 In France as a whole, the increase was, on average, 26  percent. Smaller apartments, seclusion, limited financial resources, and less access to basic necessities such as health care, PCR tests, and food probably explain why the coronavirus was able to kill so many more people in Seine-Saint-Denis. In addition to its increased death toll from the virus, the area also experienced an increase in police repression. According to an Amnesty International report, titled “Policing the Pandemic,” in Seine-Saint-Denis the number of fines for not respecting the lockdown was three times higher than in the rest of the country, even though, “according to local authorities, respect of lockdown

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measures in Seine-Saint-Denis was comparable to other departments in France.” Unfortunately, as long as we don’t have a way to measure racism directly, colorblind sociologists will always claim that the only important factors are social and economic ones, and not racial ones—as if being Black or white didn’t also entail, unfortunately, strong differences in economic and material conditions of existence. However, despite increased repression, the manipulation of statistics, and rampant racism in the scientific community, forms of resistance break through. They are all the more admirable given the current global context, in which even the closing of borders appears to be a gesture of humanitarian prudence based on scientific facts, rather than irrational chauvinism. Q Q Q

After Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd on May 25, an international wave of antiracist protests traveled around the world, fueled by the experience in the previous months of increased but also hidden repression. Is this global outcry only a coincidence, or is it a reaction to the more overt racism that came along with lockdown? Floyd’s autopsy showed he was positive for COVID-19. We know that, as a forty-six-yearold Black man, he was more likely to experience serious complications. From April 13 to September 15, 2020, 97.7 Black Americans and 81.9 Indigenous Americans out of 100,000 inhabitants died of COVID, compared to 46.6 white Americans.8 Of course, the epidemic doesn’t explain George Floyd’s tragic fate. But the COVID lockdowns, which have encouraged a sense of impunity among police forces, have proven to be a handy excuse for renewed repression, which in turn triggers protest.

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In France, in the wake of Floyd’s death, and in spite of government attempts to cancel demonstrations, antiracist protests attracted thousands to the Eiffel Tower and the U.S. embassy. They were not only the largest rallies since the beginning of the lockdown but also the largest antiracist gatherings in decades. And they spread beyond Paris: in Marseille, Bordeaux, Lyon, Nantes, and Lille, thousands of people took to the streets. Many demonstrators took a knee, as Martin Luther King Jr. did in 1965, to pray with civil rights activists, as well as raised their fists in solidarity with the Black Power movement. The COVID lockdowns, paradoxically, have raised awareness of racial issues and provoked defiance against the state apparatus, even as protesters have maintained respect for sanitary measures. On April 10, Collin Khosa, a forty-year-old Black South African man, was killed by four soldiers after a dispute over his alleged drinking of beer in front of his home in Alexandra township during a coronavirus lockdown. His death might have gone unnoticed, had the uprisings in America in the wake of Floyd’s death not shed light on persistent structural racism far beyond Minneapolis. In South Africa, racial discrimination is so acute that the incident reverberated throughout the nation’s courts: during April and May, 403 lawsuits were filed against police and soldiers—271 for assault and 9 for murder. One can only hope that these antiracist demonstrations will contribute to the end of COVID blindness and give way to stronger social movements. After all, there are more devastating consequences of the pandemic and the lockdown still to come, especially a global economic crisis that is already affecting vulnerable segments of the working class. This optimistic view of the protests may turn out to be accurate, but there is still a long way to go. It is difficult to know exactly how and when the economic downturn

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will strike and where resistances will appear. Once again, battles over numbers, with all their partial truths and contradictions, will obscure the situation. Powerful social struggles will be needed to steer our current reality toward a new, egalitarian society, and to avoid the rise of the far-right forces in the midst of the crisis.

NOTES 1. Jeffery  K. Taubenberger and David  M. Morens, “1918 Influenza: The Mother of All Pandemics,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 12, no. 1 (2006), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291398/; Peter Spreeuwenberg, Madelon Kroneman, and John Paget, “Reassessing the Global Mortality Burden of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic,” American Journal of Epidemiology 187, no. 12 (2018), https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/187 /12/2561/5092383. 2. Carlos Cuesta, “Cataluña Oculta 500 Muertos por Covid en dos Semanas para Figurar Mejor en las Estadísticas Oficiales,” OK Diario, June  10, 2020, https://okdiario.com/espana/cataluna-oculta-500-muertos-covid -dos-semanas-figurar-mejor-estadisticas-oficiales-6235602. 3. Laura G. Ibañes, “Illa Manipula la Estadística para Anunciar Que Hay Más Curados Que Positivos,” El Mundo, April 24, 2020, https://www.elmundo .es/ciencia-y-salud/salud/2020/04/24/5ea2f57321efa093388b463e.html. 4. Adelina Comas-Herrera, Joseba Zalakaín, Elizabeth Lemmon, David Henderson, Charles Litwin, Amy  T. Hsu, Andrea  E. Schmidt, Greg Arling, and Jose-Luis Fernández, “Mortality Associated with COVID-19 Outbreaks in Care Homes: Early International Evidence,” LTCcovid.org, April 12, 2020, https://ltccovid.org/2020/04/12/mortality-associated-with -covid-19-outbreaks-in-care-homes-early-international-evidence/. 5. According to the census of 2011. 6. Metropolitan Police, “Search Volumes for Reporting Period: October 2018 to End October 2020,” https://www.met.police.uk /sd/stats-and -data /met/stop-and-search-dashboard/ (accessed November 19, 2020). 7. Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques, “Nombre de Décès Quotidiens: France, Régions et Départements,” November 13, 2020, https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/4500439?sommaire=4487854. 8. And Black Americans still “continue to experience the highest actual COVID-19 mortality rates nationwide.” APM Research Lab, “The Color of Coronavirus: COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the US,” November 12, 2020, https://www.apmresearchlab.org/covid/deaths-by-race.

FIVE LESSONS FOR DEMOCRACY FROM THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC JEAN- PAUL GAGNON, RIKKI J. DEAN, AFSOUN AFSAHI, EMILY BEAUSOLEIL, AND SELEN A. ERCAN

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ho could have guessed, even one year ago, that America’s postal service would be central to the U.S. presidential election?1 That political party conventions would become online events? Or that protests could be suppressed in the name of biosecurity and protesters could be fined for not wearing face masks?2 The COVID-19 pandemic has had myriad unpredictable impacts on democratic institutions around the world. We need to understand these changes and how they impact the way we think about and enact democracy. But there have been few systematic attempts to examine the implications of the pandemic for democracy, beyond an overly simplistic concern about rising authoritarianism.3 So in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the world went into lockdown, we reached out to thirty-two scholars working on different aspects of democracy. We asked them how the pandemic is affecting democracy and democratic institutions. This exchange culminated in a twenty-article special issue of the academic journal Democratic Theory.4 Here are five lessons we learned from their answers to that question:

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Lesson 1: COVID-19 has had corrosive effects on already endangered democratic institutions. The politics of COVID-19 have, the world over, been conducted as “emergency politics.”5 Parliaments have subordinated themselves to rule by government decree to hasten decision making.6 In places where democracy was already threatened by executive power grabs, COVID-19 has provided a convenient excuse to accelerate the erosion of democratic oversight of government. As Petra Guasti writes about the declaration of an indefinite state of emergency in Hungary, “The effects of the law are chilling—the rule by decree is the ultimate form of executive aggrandizement.” 7 COVID-19 has also provided cover to delay and perhaps eventually prevent the resolution of democratic crises in Israel, Chile, Bolivia, and Venezuela, enabling incumbent administrations to consolidate their power.8 Nevertheless, there is little to suggest the pandemic is a general threat to democracy everywhere.9 The majority of European democracies have not violated liberal democratic norms during the state of emergency and there is little evidence of any erosion of public support for democracy in established democracies.10 Moreover, civil society has not lost its voice and has successfully challenged executive overreach. So, while COVID-19 has accelerated the erosion of already endangered institutions, it has also demonstrated this is not inevitable. It is conditioned by both the intentions of the incumbent executive and the response from other democratic actors and institutions.

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Lesson 2: COVID-19 has revealed alternative possibilities for democratic politics in the state of emergency. The universal turn to unhindered executive decision making suggests normal democratic politics are not built for times of emergency. Yet the pandemic has demonstrated the fallacy of this assumption. While some executives have handled this crisis relatively well, others—notably the United States, United Kingdom, Mexico, and Brazil—have been slow and indecisive, undermining the very justification for emergency rule by the executive.11 At the same time, other key democratic institutions— parliaments, media, and civil society—have proven flexible, resilient, and resourceful. This raises the question of whether emergency politics has to be conducted by executive fiat. When parliaments and civil society continue to operate effectively, it is questionable how far normal democratic politics needs to be abandoned. COVID-19 is not a strategic actor, unlike a wartime foe; thus, there is little need to abandon robust practices of transparency and accountability. In addition, if democracies make better policy, as epistemic democrats argue, then it is strange, illogical even, that we abandon these strengths in favor of a more authoritarian mode of policy making as soon as our greatest challenges arrive. As Wolfgang Merkel argues, we should fight against executive rule coming to be seen as “the new normal”: “We cannot rule out recurring pandemic infection waves or other deep crisis, such as climate change. . . . This means that the safeguarding of public health from pandemics could lead the government time and again to suspend basic rights and govern in emergency mode.

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And: why not govern the climate crisis in an emergency mode as well? The critical democratic citizen is in high demand in postcorona democracies.”12 The pandemic has demonstrated both the need and the possibilities for a more democratic emergency politics, one that protects democratic oversight and opportunities for diverse interests to influence policy making.13 This would help avoid the injustices or policy failures that have in many places characterized this pandemic when the next crisis arrives.14

Lesson 3: COVID-19 has amplified the inequalities and injustices within democracies. The virus has not only laid bare the gross inequalities within our societies, it has intensified them. There is ample evidence showing that the virus spreads more quickly among those who are poorly housed, kills more of those with existing poor health, and hits hardest the most precariously employed. As Bonnie Honig writes: “The very word ‘quarantine’ has the power to remind us that as a democracy we should do better, by attending not just to the virus but to the disease of a polity in which, fifty years after the Fair Housing Act, we have yet to secure for everyone a right to housing and in which some of those who do have housing are not secure in their homes.”15 Policy responses to COVID-19 too often protect the already protected and further expose those who are vulnerable.16 This points to an important limitation of emergency politics practiced as executive politics: the reduction in pluralist perspective taking that accompanies it.17

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Those most affected by the pandemic have had little voice in determining responses to it.18 Instead this response has frequently been constructed to suit the needs of politically dominant groups, taken for the archetypal citizen, and neglected or misunderstood the needs of those who do not fit this mold.19 This has reinforced gender, racial, intergenerational, economic, and health inequalities, undermining the political equality that is an essential condition of democracy.20 It has inevitably provoked protest. As Jodi Dean witnessed during the antiracist protests in the United States, COVID-19 layered upon police violence created a situation for Black, Brown, and Indigenous people where “between the virus and the economy, there was nothing left to lose. And there is a world to win.”21

Lesson 4: COVID-19 has demonstrated the need for institutional infrastructure for prolonged solidarity. Contrary to initial hopes, COVID-19 has shown that a pandemic does not produce long-term solidarity by itself.22 While remarkable and heart-warming stories of person-to-person solidarity have been reported since the COVID-19 virus began its spread in the world, Barbara Prainsack reminds us that “focusing only on solidarity at this level risks ignoring more important systemic and structural factors.[23] We need to address the causes of inequality and strengthen solidaristic institutions” now, ahead of later waves of infection. Solidaristic institutional structures that provide people with the resilience in a crisis to support others are key to maintaining that support. It is easier to protect others by staying away

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from work when you know that welfare institutions will support you to do so. However, COVID-19 arrived on the back of a decade of austerity that eroded the institutional bases of solidarity.24 Welfare systems became increasingly miserly, conditional, and punitive. Civil society organizations, increasingly reliant on wealthy donors and government contracts, have also been hard hit by the financial crisis and the pandemic. The economic stimulus packages, already begun in many places, are an opportunity to build stability and resilience back into our social and economic relations, reversing the growing precarity of recent years, and preparing the groundwork for the solidarity that will sustain us for the next crisis. “We can surmise,” as Louise Haagh does, “that post-COVID-19 planning ought to feature not just stimulus but a new appreciation of stability in core institutions—those which frame our sense of autonomy and permanence in work, care, education, and basic economic security— to enable humanist justice and effective government.”25

Lesson 5: COVID-19 has highlighted the predominance of the nation-state and its limitations. Though COVID-19 is a global problem, the primary actors in the policy response have been nation-states.26 National borders were almost universally closed, and absentee citizens were brought back “home.” Even within the EU’s supposedly borderless Schengen zone, national borders were reasserted, violating quasiconstitutional protections to free movement of goods, services, and persons on dubious legal grounds.27

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The norm has been for national responses that prioritize national populations, with little international collaboration.28 Yet the very predominance of the nation-state has demonstrated its limitations in dealing with a global problem in a globalized world, particularly for those who live between and across state lines. A pandemic that pays no heed to national borders cannot be permanently eradicated within a nation by its own efforts alone. David Owen makes it clear: “COVID-19 is, among other things, a lens through which we can be brought to recognize not only the presence of inequalities within and across borders, but the dangers of such inequalities in a world of globalized interdependency—in a world striving, perhaps, for global democracy.”29 The virus accordingly draws attention to the interdependencies between democracies in securing public health. Successfully controlling or eradicating the virus is, by this logic, best achieved through transnational collaboration. Q Q Q

Together these five lessons show us what to avoid and what to cultivate for democracy in times of emergency. They also demonstrate the breadth of this task. Understanding democracy in a pandemic is not just about articulating the relationships among national-level executives, their interactions with parliaments, and the laws they pass. It concerns all of the ways we come together to make decisions and undertake collective actions. There is a chain of interactions running from the everyday democracy of the neighborhood to the international relations among states. Political institutions are only one part of this picture. Economic and social relations have proved to be just as

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important in providing stability and solidarity or inducing precarity and division. The pandemic is an object lesson in the need to struggle for further democratization of our political, social, and economic relations, from the street to the world.

NOTES 1. “US 2020: Postal Service Warns of Delays in Mail-in Vote Count,” BBC News, August  15, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020 -53782331. 2. “Coronavirus: Anti-mask Protests Held Across the World,” News.com .au, August 30, 2020, https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/global /coronavirus-antimask-protests-held-across-the-world /news-story/2d25 13d5b503050c8a0a25e7e6d48e30. 3. Nick Schifrin and Layla Quran, “How Authoritarianism Has Spread Since the Coronavirus Pandemic Began,” PBS News Hour, August  4, 2020, https://www.pbs.org /newshour/show/how-authoritarianism-has -spread-since-the-coronavirus-pandemic-began. 4. Democratic Theory 7, no.  2 (Winter 2020): Democracy in the Time of COVID-19, guest editors Afsoun Afsahi, Emily Beausoleil, Rikki Dean, Selen A. Ercan, Jean-Paul Gagnon. 5. Danielle Celermajer and Dalia Nassar, “COVID and the Era of Emergencies,” Democratic Theory 7, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 12–24. 6. Wolfgang Merkel, “Who Governs in Deep Crises?,” Democratic Theory 7, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 1–11. 7. Petra Guasti, “The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Central and Eastern Europe,” Democratic Theory 7, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 47–60. 8. Brigitte Weiffen, “Latin America and COVID-19,” Democratic Theory 7, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 61–68. 9. Jennifer Gaskell and Gerry Stoker, “Centralized or Decentralized,” Democratic Theory 7, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 33–40. 10. Lauri Rapeli and Inga Saikkonen, “How Will the COVID-19 Pandemic Affect Democracy?” Democratic Theory 7, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 25–32. 11. Gaskell and Stoker, “Centralized or Decentralized,” 33–40. 12. Merkel, “Who Governs in Deep Crises?,” 1–11. 13. Shobita Parthasarathy, “Innovation Policy, Structural Inequality, and COVID-19,” Democratic Theory 7, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 104–9.

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14. Asma Abbas, “No Demos in the Pandemic,” Democratic Theory 7, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 166–71. 15. Bonnie Honig, “American Quarantine,” Democratic Theory 7, no.  2 (Winter 2020): 143–51. 16. Louise Haagh, “Rethinking Democratic Theories of Justice in the Economy After COVID-19,” Democratic Theory 7, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 110–23. 17. Milja Kurki, “Coronavirus, Democracy, and the Challenges of Engaging a Planetary Order,” Democratic Theory 7, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 172–79. 18. David Owen, “Open Borders and the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Democratic Theory 7, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 152–59. 19. Ulrike Guérot and Michael Hunklinger, “European Democracy After COVID-19,” Democratic Theory 7, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 160–65. 20. Kim Rubenstein, Trish Bergin, and Pia Rowe, “Gender, Leadership, and Representative Democracy,” Democratic Theory 7, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 94–103; Toby Rollo, “Babies and Boomers,” Democratic Theory 7, no.  2 (Winter 2020): 75–81; Afsoun Afsahi, Emily Beausoleil, and Rikki Dean, “Democracy in a Global Emergency,” Democratic Theory 7, no. 2 (Winter 2020): v–xix. 21. Jodi Dean, “COVID Revolution,” Democratic Theory 7, no.  2 (Winter 2020): 41–46. 22. Barbara Prainsack, “Solidarity in Times of Pandemics,” Democratic Theory 7, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 124–33. 23. Prainsack, “Solidarity in Times of Pandemics.” 24. Peter Levine, “Theorizing Democracy in a Pandemic,” Democratic Theory 7, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 134–42. 25. Haagh, “Rethinking Democratic Theories.” 26. Owen, “Open Borders.” 27. Guérot and Hunklinger, “European Democracy.” 28. Florian Bieber, “Global Nationalism in Times of the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Nationalities Papers, 2020, 1–13. doi:10.1017/nps.2020.35. 29. Owen, “Open Borders.”

CAN DEMOCRACIES HANDLE SYSTEMIC RISKS? MIGUEL CENTENO

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he year 2020 may mark the lowest point in the legitimacy of liberal democracy since the 1930s. Then, a world facing instability and economic depression increasingly wondered if liberal democracy could face such systemic challenges. More recently, a new assault on democratic legitimacy began with the 2008 financial crisis, mirroring the tragic 1930s. The frustrations with inequality and uneven economic growth clearly contributed to the rise of two (often coterminous) trends: a wish for “decisive” leadership that would cut through the political swamp and an appeal to new forms of national identity as a way of clarifying which actors the state should serve. Not a single region of the world has been immune. The number of articles and books on threats to democracy have increased dramatically, and the systems used as models in the past were widely questioned. Can democracies deal with systemic challenges? Can democracies deal with crises that span the globe and involve myriad domains, dynamically interacting and producing asynchronous and unevenly distributed costs and benefits? Does democratic governance hinder the appropriate response to natural disasters, conflicts, or migration flows? What about in a new social space where the relevant unit of analysis is the entire globe? Can democratic

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governance make the next leap in the aggregation and complexity of societal pressures? In short, is COVID-19 a potentially existential threat to democracy? Ultimately, we must ask: what is democratic governance? The answer might begin with T. H. Marshall’s famous trilogy of civil, political, and social rights.1 Civil rights were the first to be sanctioned and institutionalized, and focus on the rights of individuals to self-determination with their bodies and property. The second of the trilogy, political rights, involve the process of selecting a government and must include broad access to voting, respect for the outcomes of such decisions, and the possibility of government turnover. The third, social rights, are usually the last to develop and include the “positive” liberties of social goods, such as education and health care. If we take them in reverse order, systemic crises may represent a challenge to some very fundamental principles and foundations of democratic rights, but not to others. As the newest and most debated of democratic rights, social rights may be the easiest to defend with these new challenges. Systemic risks make it clear that we have to worry about our neighbors’ house burning as much as we do our own. Systems are only as strong as their weakest node and most fragile link. The social welfare revolution from the late nineteenth century to the neoliberal era created a safety net for individuals in society. This also cemented a sense of community and assured that there would be enough domestic stability to address emergent challenges. The positive correlation between well-developed welfare states and performance during the COVID-19 pandemic (as of early May 2020) is evidence of this. Extensive public health capacity and infrastructure have lowered the mortality rate from the novel coronavirus in countries like Germany and Taiwan and thus assured the continued functioning of society.2 Moreover, the situation in the

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United States indicates that relying on fragile and for-profit health systems courts a disaster when the need for care exceeds that which is expected and when it is critical to treat all people, despite their ability to pay. What about political rights? At first glance, these seem to conflict least with dealing with a crisis. There is nothing about systemic risks that disqualifies a regular process of asking the population for its approval. Perhaps we will need to stop depending on the anachronistic process of voting in person, but the principle of popular representation does not hamper our ability to deal with systemic challenges. One caveat: the possibility of the population being moved by fear or misinformation, leading citizens to elect the wrong candidates—a risk inherent in democratic politics. Moreover, there is no guarantee that an authoritarian regime will produce better or even more coherent policies than its democratic equivalent. The optics of authoritarianism tend to favor it in the short run (“getting things done”), but China’s initial experience addressing the COVID-19 crisis also indicates the risks of having limited information flows. Similarly, the foundational guarantees of political democracy, such as a free press, may represent a challenge at first, but the flow of information will favor the open market of ideas. One challenge here that democratic governance must address is the contradiction between a global web of links and a territorially or ethnically defined right to citizenship. For example, I may not vote for a neighboring government deciding to tighten or loosen quarantine, but that decision will affect my own society. The decisions of any individual country have global systemic effects—since a pandemic like COVID-19 knows no borders— and those across various boundaries not able to vote often bear the price for the decisions of others. In the case of the United

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States, how am I endangered or constrained by the decision of an adjoining state’s governor or city’s mayor? The real rub for democratic governance during systemic crises is the most well developed and widely defended set of rights dealing with individual autonomy. By this principle, each citizen has an absolute right to determining their future, disposing of their property, and deciding what to do with their bodies. Any systemic risk involves necessarily curtailing these personal rights. A bank panic might require limiting withdrawals; a food or medicine shortage might necessitate price controls or rationing. In our latest crisis, the need to enforce social distancing and quarantine is a clear possible violation of democratic civil rights. Those protesting such enforcement measures have a very solid constitutional basis for their demands and the response has been disappointingly caustic and insulting. Protestors are right in challenging the ability of the government to restrict their freedoms for the sake of the common good. In this way, systemic crises represent the same challenge to democracy as do other emergencies, such as war or natural disasters. As the systemic risks increase and become more complex, democratic theory must deal with these kinds of challenges: when is the collective good allowed to supersede individual freedom? A more explicit discussion of such conditions is desperately needed. As in all challenges to democratic rule, some semblance of law and universality becomes ever more important. Curtailing the rights of a few for the sake of the many may be acceptable if the standards for making decisions and the processes by which these decisions are implemented are applied equally and transparently. Here, democracies may have a distinct advantage. Certainly, authoritarian systems are much more prone to selective application and hidden deal making. In this way, the very methods of democratic governance may represent not a challenge to

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dealing with systemic risks but actually a way of assuring that the responses adequately fit the challenges faced. The very complexity of systemic risks also requires the division of powers inherent in a liberal democracy. These risks stem from the interactions of many conditions, some with long historical legacies. The messiness of democracy and the frustrating process of arriving at the right collective solution may represent a significant improvement over men on horseback making potentially disastrous errors. We may be reassured by expressions of omnipotence, but they come with significant risks.

NOTES 1. T.  H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class: And Other Essays, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950). 2. William Noah Glucroft, “Coronavirus in Germany: 100 Days Later,” DW Akademie, June  5, 2020, https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-in -germany-100-days-later/a-53341745; James Griffiths, “Taiwan’s Coronavirus Response is Among the Best Globally,” CNN, April 5, 2020, https:// www.cnn.com /2020/04 /04 /asia /taiwan-coronavirus-response-who -intl -hnk /index.html.

THE VULNERABLE FOUNDATIONS OF INDIA’S URBANISM GAUTAM BHAN

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he dominant image of the COVID-19 pandemic in India is of thousands of people leaving cities for rural districts, despite lockdowns, forced to walk hundreds of kilometers along highways, because interstate transport was shut down. They were driven out of urban areas by a host of factors: uncertainty of the length of the lockdowns, sudden loss of income and employment, inability to bear the costs of urban life (especially rent), concern for families, or the possibility of using expanded benefits available only outside cities through the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA).1 Cities that were meant to hold the promise of social and economic mobility seem, in this moment, to have failed. We must, however, step further back. The story of the pandemic and its attendant lockdowns in India is not one of a singular crisis. It is, instead, a continuation of an everyday vulnerability that preceded this moment. Two snapshots paint a picture of this vulnerability. The first is in Delhi—a city of 17 million people—where the government announced temporary food relief during the first COVID-19 lockdowns: nearly 7.2 million of the city’s residents already qualified for food aid. Anticipating more need, the government sought to reach an additional 1 million people. Within

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weeks of the new program opening for applications online, however, 3.8 million applied. The second is from a union of domestic workers in the northern Indian city of Jaipur.2 The union conducted a rapid survey of its members to understand the immediate impact of the lockdown. The findings were unsurprisingly severe, but two stand out. Even before COVID, most households had savings to cover only twenty days of household expenses without new income. The survey asked what concerned the domestic workers most on the day lockdowns were announced. Food came first, job security and income second, and health a distant third. Responses to the pandemic did not anticipate how this vulnerability would shape both the impact of the virus and people’s ability to cope with it. Calls to stay at home and work from home—rooted in imaginations of a northern urbanism where either of these are possible—misrecognized India’s urban conditions. Eight out of ten Indian workers have jobs in the informal economy. Most of them work in public space—as street vendors, waste pickers, and construction workers—or in other people’s homes as domestic workers. This is not work that can be done “at home.” For most of them, COVID was a crisis of health and livelihood. It was less an epidemiological problem than one of a far broader urban vulnerability. When migrants started walking hundreds of kilometers, defying lockdown orders, they were not unaware of the risks they were taking. They were, in fact, doing what health professionals wanted them to do: avoiding death. For them, death could occur not just from COVID but equally from shocks to their livelihood, without the safety nets of socialprotection systems. The pandemic feels global. It is something happening everywhere, monumental in its scale and universal in its impact. Yet the way it is experienced in different places is particular, different

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for New Delhi than for New York. For some time now, southern urban theorists have been insisting on the need to think from particular places, to listen to the particular questions they compel us to consider. One way to think from Indian cities at this moment is precisely to listen to the vulnerability that preceded this “crisis.” It is to ask questions about the efficacy of urban social protection regimes within a political economy dominated by informal employment where, in the words of Edgar Pieterse and AbdouMaliq Simone, as they described the “South,” it is “the majority that holds social and economic vulnerability.”3

Patchworks The pandemic has showed us that the safety net in India’s cities is a patchwork, its threads worn and in need of repair. It has also showed us that even if mended, it would not be enough. As urban Indians, we knew this, even if we had collectively learned ways to look away from the everyday inequality that surrounds us. In this moment, at least, that evasion seems impossible. Yet when we look straight at the problem, it is not immediately clear what repair looks like. How does one strengthen patchwork? Does one incrementally fill in, or expand the borders first? Do we layer, differently at each end, or try and standardize? Social protection systems were designed in the context of industrial work, meaning that workers, workplaces, and employers all took on specific roles. Claims were based on a person’s identification as a worker: the employer became the delivery agent, and the workplace rooted the transactions in space. How does one reframe this relationship without the employment contract implicit in this imagination? How do we do so, when the

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work is hidden under categories of “unrecognized” and “informal” employment or when the workplace is unrecognized, such as in the case of a vendor on a public street? Disconnected from the particular nature of India’s urban employment, many state efforts to suddenly respond to the needs of workers failed. When the pandemic began, for example, every level of the Indian state issued directives to not retrench workers or hold back wages. These were, for the most part, ineffective— utterances rather than mandates. The nature of informal employment meant that it was unclear who they were directed to or how they could possibly be enforced. The domestic workers whose story we began with, for instance, were each employed by a private household without a written contract. They saw wages fall by 93  percent between February and April, just as 25  percent lost work and an additional 28 percent were uncertain of their employment status. This disconnect between policy mechanisms and realities of urban lives extended beyond conditions of work. Most workers in southern cities also live in forms of informal housing that mirror the precarity of their work status. Many that left cities at the start of the pandemic lived in homes that offered so little security that they could be left overnight, even after years of residence, with a single bag of possessions in hand. For those that stayed, their housing conditions exacerbated, rather than alleviated, their vulnerability. When domestic workers reported they were exiting the first lockdown with $150—a month’s income—in debt, threefourths of that debt was rent. Similar to state directives on wages, moratoria on rent payments also found no mechanisms of enforcement within informal rental arrangements and with landlords who remained opaque to state systems. While social protection programs have taken food, income, and health more seriously, rarely have they reached out to include

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housing. Yet spatial and economic vulnerability are deeply intertwined, at every scale, and nowhere more so than in self-built cities where property is incrementally constructed and consolidated over time.4 When migrants left urban centers, it showed how vulnerability and absent social protection determines where workers settle as much as the more familiar economic logics of wage and income.

Reimagining Social Protection Particular configurations of vulnerability—including their economic, social, and spatial dimensions—must shape both the determination of entitlements, as well as the mechanisms of delivery. When faced with the COVID crisis, the Indian state responded to the challenge of delivery in a number of ways. It first turned to existing methods. The most effective, by far, was within food. A system of entitlements was already in place because of India’s National Food Security Act. Households held food cards that entitled them to subsidized grain and sugar through an already existing institutional structure of food-distribution shops. Both federal and state programs added quantities of rice, wheat, and other essentials to the preexisting rations. The contours of the system were in place. The pandemic tested whether that system could deliver twice the quantity of food and more often. Precisely because of the government’s precrisis investments, the system held. Its expansion is essential but, also, imaginable in its form. The second set of challenges is more difficult. How does one build a set of entitlements based on work, as the history of social protection has done, but do so within the informal economy?

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Over the past decade, this is where innovations have come, led mostly by worker federations. In India, the strongest examples are of specific protections for construction workers (under the Building and Construction Workers Act 1996) and street vendors (under the Street Vendors Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending Act 2014).5 Here, specific recognition of forms of actually existing work became the basis of demanding not just entitlements and social protection but also rights to decent work, wage, and job security. Yet the pandemic showed us the difficulty of fulfilling the promises of these acts without having equivalent procedures of delivery that work for informal workers. For construction, to be recognized as a worker meant having to register with the state. Nationally, no more than half of all construction workers are registered, and even fewer of those registrations are current. In Delhi, this meant that only 10 percent or so of the city’s estimated 500,000 construction workers received promised cash transfers.6 The lack of registration is not a simple “implementation gap.” Worker unions have long argued that low enrollment is a result of procedural mechanisms of registration not designed to trust workers or to fit into their lives. Social protection for formal workers is not divided by sectors of employment, with labor rights and entitlements often standardized no matter where one works. Should new systems for informal employment also consolidate in this manner? While many implications of informal work are shared—the absence of meaningful recognition, the reliance on public rather than firm or enterprise-based infrastructure—conditions specific to different types of work impact how certain protections can be delivered. Minimum wages, for example, cannot be ensured the same way for domestic workers paid by and within private homes as they are for street vendors who earn their own income without a

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specific “employer.” Expanding the social safety net, then, is not just a question of increasing registration and multiplying schemes for innumerable categories of workers. It requires thinking both through a more universal set of claims and entitlements, as well as retaining specificity when it comes to modes of delivery.

Openings and Categories One archive that is essential to look to, in order to imagine new possibilities, is relief itself. To respond to the pandemic, different arms of the Indian state had to innovate. Could these innovations offer more than just an exposure of the limitations of the current safety net? Could they also offer new practices to expand, strengthen, and repair it? Realizing that existing databases and schemes would only reach a fraction of those who needed relief, government officials sought to expand their reach. Some states began to use one database to integrate and layer entitlements—giving food to all those holding construction-worker registrations or cash to all those holding food cards. States sought to expand database enrollment through multiple drives—new surveys, helplines, online applications—greatly expanding the means through which citizens could ask for help. They renewed expired registrations and fast-tracked pending applications. All of these methods hold critical lessons for what could be done by a state seeking an equal urgency to universalize social protection and not just respond to a crisis. Indeed, relief, in a sense, offers a map of what everyday social protection must look like in a post-COVID world. One innovation is particularly noteworthy. As governments sought to expand the categories of who could avail relief, a new

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language emerged. From a range of government orders, we find those “stranded or distressed,” “daily wager workers, migrant, casual or construction site workers, hawkers,” “migrants,” “contractual/casual/daily wage/outsourced staff,” and even “marginal sections of the society who have been deprived of their daily wages during the lockdown period.” For many of these new categories of claims and claimants that the state was willing to recognize, the procedures emphasized self-declaration rather than means testing, without a demand of evidentiary proof of vulnerability. There was greater concern for genuine exclusion, rather than for false inclusion, a move away from the emphasis on registration, for example. These new categories of work, need, and workers, as well as the expanded and temporary databases that relief has created, represent an opportunity. Many of them are precisely the overlap of spatial and sectoral identities, of work and place-based identities, of subjectivities that straddle, and seek to integrate social and work status with spatial location. The language of these new categories is, in other words, one that emerges from the specificities of our urban conditions, offering new roots for reimagination.

Repair Writing about Hurricane Katrina, the geographer Neil Smith once said that “there is no such thing as a natural disaster.” Crises, he argued, only reveal preexisting fault lines of inequality, along which new risks run, deepening and sedimenting them. COVID and its attendant lockdowns have made the inequities of India’s urbanization evident. They have not caused them. Insisting on this shift in diagnosis must be where we all begin.

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This chapter has spoken of relief, but the assessments it offers will apply equally to recovery and, moving forward, to any possibility of resilience. Thinking from Indian cities insists that we ask anew questions that specify and detail the empirical configurations of vulnerability in our own cities, wherever they are. It insists on rooting these vulnerabilities in specific urban conditions, asking how urbanism has shaped them and is shaped by them in turn. It insists that we imagine frameworks of social protection that take rent as central to a dignified human life as wage; that acknowledge informal employment as decent, meaningful, and valued work; that invest and expand in public institutions like the fooddistribution system; and that find new ways to deliver entitlements that fit into the lifeworlds of the majority of urban residents. This is, above all, however, a moment of warning. No amount of social protection can alleviate the fallout of an urbanism that has entrenched social, economic, and spatial inequalities. India’s growth story has been a global narrative for nearly two decades. A lot, indeed, has changed. Yet the foundations of this growth have, as this past year has shown us, been a patchwork. If paradigms of urban development do not recognize the vulnerabilities of their foundations, if we find new ways of forgetting and evasion, once again, then there will remain little to separate the crisis and the everyday.

NOTES 1. “SWAN 2020: Stranded Workers Action Network,” http://stranded workers.in/. 2. Antara Rai Chowdhury, Gautam Bhan, and Kinjal Sampat, “Impact of COVID-19 and Lockdowns on Domestic Workers: First Report,” Rajasthan Mahila Kaamgaar Union (RMKU) and the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), 2020, https://iihs.co.in/knowledge-gateway /impact-of-covid-19-and-lockdowns-on-the-domestic-workers/.

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3. AbdouMaliq Simone and Edgar Pieterse, New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017). 4. Gautam Bhan, Teresa Caldeira, Kelly Gillespie, and AbdouMaliq Simone, “The Pandemic, Southern Urbanisms, and Collective Life,” Society and Space, August 3, 2020, https://www.societyandspace.org /articles/the -pandemic-southern-urbanisms-and-collective-life. 5. “Building and Construction Workers Act, 1996,” Government of India, Chief Labour Commissioner, 1996, https://clc.gov.in/clc/acts-rules / building-and-other-construction-workers; “The Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014,” Government of India, Ministry of Law and Justice, 2014, https://legislative .gov.in/sites/default/files/A2014-7.pdf. 6. Express News Service, “Second Round of Rs 5,000 Aid for Construction Workers,” New Indian Express, May 12, 2020, https://www.new indianexpress.com /cities/delhi /2020/may/12/second-round-of-rs-5000-aid-for -construction-workers-2142254.html.

PANDEMICS IN THE POST-GRID IMAGINARY JOANNE RANDA NUCHO

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he COVID-19 pandemic has forced a reckoning with the deep inequalities in the United States. Racism and poverty are life-and-death matters. But the virus also reveals what has long been unraveling in this country—a universal approach to the provision of public goods, infrastructures, and services. As an anthropologist who works on infrastructural politics in Lebanon and lives and teaches in California, I realize there are deep vulnerabilities that come with fragmented, patchwork approaches to the provision of essential services. Not only does the United States lack a public system that guarantees medical care, but there has been a lack of basic coordination among federal, state, and local jurisdictions. As state governors scramble to expand testing and obtain personal protective equipment (PPE) and ventilators, the president tells them to “try getting it yourselves.”1 This federal inaction on COVID-19 stands in stark contrast to the immediate mobilization of the national guard to suppress ongoing protests sparked by the murder of  George Floyd  by the Minneapolis police.2 In the context of this federal vacuum in relation to COVID-19, California, Oregon, and Washington have created a “western states pact” that aims to coordinate health guidelines.

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States in the northeast have joined together to consolidate buying power for PPE.3 Despite these ad hoc regional alliances, the absence of a coordinated, national response has left individual hospitals to grapple with transnational supply chains on their own. One harrowing letter in the New England Journal of Medicine describes the convoluted way in which a hospital imported PPE and how it was nearly seized by federal agents.4 The doctor ends the letter with a question that registers shock at the level of disarray: “Did I foresee, as a health-system leader working in a rich, highly developed country with state-of-the-art science and technology and incredible talent, that my organization would ever be faced with such a set of circumstances?” The coronavirus can infect anyone, but the absence of universal public programs and the lack of a broad federal approach exacerbate existing inequalities within the United States, making some people more vulnerable to contagion, death, homelessness, and joblessness—especially along race and class lines. As KeeangaYamahtta Taylor writes, “Black vulnerability is especially heightened by the continued ineptitude of the federal government in response to the coronavirus.”5 These spatialized inequalities are made clear within the context of one city,  New York.6 Rates of infection were higher in working-class neighborhoods in Queens, where people live in closer quarters and are less likely to be able to stay home from work, than in the wealthy Upper East Side of Manhattan.7 These spatial inequalities are evident well beyond regional, state, or city health infrastructures. Some of the largest spikes of COVID-19 cases are concentrated in  prisons, nursing homes, and meat-packing plants  across the country.8 Racialized mass incarceration and a lack of workplace protections and universal health care are issues that affect and implicate many regions and

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institutions. Through the stroke of a pen, President Trump ordered that meat-packing plants remain open under the Defense Production Act.9 There has been no such action on the federal level to address deadly workplace conditions or, ironically, given that the act was invoked to protect the food supply chain, even to remedy food insecurity.10 Without a coordinated federal response that includes expanded access to testing, PPE, and medical equipment, these spatialized inequalities will continue to have deadly consequences. The chaotic government response to COVID-19 in the United States reminds me of that often-heard phrase in Lebanon, uttered whenever something breaks down: “Wayn al dawleh?” (“Where is the state?”). Like that of the United States, Lebanese infrastructure is also crumbling and uneven. The evidence of breakdown is everywhere: the streets in the capital city of Beirut flood during rain; garbage is thrown in improperly prepared informal landfills; and the coastline is polluted by runoff.11 The national electricity grid, a public utility, cuts for three hours a day in the capital of Beirut and much longer outside of the city’s boundaries. Resentment over Lebanon’s uneven infrastructures has been building over a number of years. In 2015, after years of calling on the government to remediate an informal landfill in a town outside of Beirut, residents blocked access. The private sanitation firm responsible for collecting Beirut’s garbage was unable to do so. As trash piled up, frustrated protestors, many of them organized as the #youstink movement, took to the streets, calling for government officials to take accountability for this and other infrastructural failures.12 Garbage became a symbol of the state’s failure to manage even its most critical infrastructures. “Where is the state?” protestors  asked, amid brutal suppression.13 A call for universal access to functioning public services through national government infrastructure, rather than through

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private contractors or membership in a sect or residence in a particular neighborhood, animated some of the protestors’ urgent  demands.14  Many Lebanese are weary of the patchwork system of infrastructure and service delivery. Service interruptions are not merely inconvenient in Lebanon; they are part of everyday life, cutting across class lines but with disproportionate impact on working-class people who struggle to pay multiple utility bills. Electricity cuts leave people on low-wattage, unreliable generator power for hours without air conditioning during heat waves, without elevator service, and without the ability to do laundry. All around Lebanon, people are left with two electricity bills: one to the national public utility, Electricité du Liban, and another to their local generator owners, who make huge profits off of this privatized, shadow infrastructure.15 While the town of Zahle has their own 24/7  microgrid, most of the country remains caught between a national grid that does not work and generators that are expensive, unsustainable, and inconvenient.16 In workingclass urban areas like Bourj Hammoud, the center of much of my ethnographic research, the municipality even sets a  fixed price across all of the generator subscription services.17 In the absence of universal access to electricity and other utilities, localized sectarian geographies  influence how infrastructures are built or maintained and who or what entities dominate or profit from these industries.18 This unevenness in service has led to a permanently temporary patchwork arrangement, a post-grid reality that is both present and future. This reality is not confined to the so-called developing world but is also in the United States, in places like Flint, Michigan, that lack potable water.19 In Lebanon, people rely on subscriptions to generator services owned by people with the right connections, usually to a locally dominant sect-affiliated political

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party. While this fact makes Lebanon appear unique, in many ways it is not exceptional. In California, private utilities like PG&E dominate the energy sector while their failing electricity infrastructure has been linked to deadly fires.20 Lebanon’s system reflects a logic of hyperlocal distribution, one in which the state does not step in to coordinate, maintain, or expand public goods. Lebanon’s disintegration during a fifteen-year civil war (1975–1990) bears only some responsibility for this arrangement.  Rampant privatization in the postwar era is another reason it has continued, even accelerated.21 Many industries in the United States are also profiting from the lack of state-federal coordination; the American private health-insurance industry is one major example. In the absence of a functioning national grid, Lebanese secure access to electricity and medical care through sectarian political parties and organizations. These entities act as channels to vital services in particular regions or municipal areas. What we might call sectarianism is inextricable from the everyday ways that people obtain basic services, where they get their electricity, and, importantly, the geographies in which they feel a sense of belonging. The relationship among infrastructures, geographies, and political sectarianism helps to undermine the notion that sectarian identity and conflict between political parties in Lebanon is fundamentally connected to religious difference or theology.22 In fact, one does not have to be religious, practicing, or pious to identify as a member of a religious sect.23 Lebanon’s fragmented infrastructures and distribution of services demonstrates what we might call a post-grid imaginary, in which the failure of the grid and the emergence of patchwork solutions leads to uneven access and sustains and reproduces spatial inequality. The federal and national government responses to COVID-19 in the United States demonstrate even more gravely and immediately that Americans live in this imaginary too. The

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vacuum left by a lack of coordinated federal responsibility has left health-care infrastructures in shambles. Access to  clean water and broadband internet, two essential services in the pandemic, are unevenly distributed across this country, despite its collective wealth.24 Perhaps in this context we can understand the turn to GoFundMe campaigns to pay for medical emergencies, a kind of ad hoc mutual aid initiative to compensate for an absent state. This looks a lot like what happens under structural adjustment.25 In Lebanon citizens address resource and infrastructure inequalities by mobilizing to secure necessary services through sectarian organizations but also through neighborhood networks that cut across sectarian lines. Likewise, mutual aid networks in U.S. cities try to account for the major gaps in public services and social welfare. Some argue that these efforts may lay important groundwork in forming  solidarity  networks in the struggle for demanding better public, universal services.26 These mutual aid networks are not as visible as the anti-lockdown protestors, who assemble at state capitals and beaches demanding a return to the status quo.27 But mutual aid networks and the forms of solidarity they create may indeed be more important than many realize. Many did not expect Lebanon’s 2015 garbage protests to be so broadly attended and so decidedly nonsectarian in their calls for better infrastructure and more transparency in government processes. A post-grid imaginary is inadequate for dealing with a pandemic. Ultimately COVID-19 tests our fragile, fragmented infrastructures—whether in Lebanon or the United States or elsewhere—and the differentiated access they provide to lifesaving resources. The virus moves easily across cities and states. But without a functioning grid, including a universal public health

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program and broad coordination across government agencies, we are no match for it.

NOTES 1. Jonathan Martin, “Trump to Governors on Ventilators: ‘Try Getting It Yourselves,’ ” New York Times, March  16, 2020, https://www.nytimes .com/2020/03/16/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-respirators.html. 2. Ben Gittleson and Jordyn Phelps, “Police Use Munitions to Forcibly Push Back Peaceful Protesters for Trump Church Visit,” ABC News, June  2, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com /Politics/national-guard-troops -deployed-white-house-trump-calls/story?id=71004151; Sam Levin and Joanna Walters, “George Floyd: Medical Examiner Says Death was a Homicide,” The Guardian, June 1, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com /us-news/2020/jun /01 /george-floyd-death-homicide-police-brutality. 3. Office of Governor Gavin Newsom, “California, Oregon & Washington Announce Western States Pact,” April  13, 2020, https://www.gov.ca.gov /2020/04/13/california-oregon-washington-announce-western-states-pact /; Andrew Dunn, “Instead of Bidding Against Each Other, New York and Six Other States are Pooling Their Purchasing Power to Buy Ventilators, Protective Gear, and Coronavirus Tests,” Business Insider, May  3, 2020, https:// www . businessinsider . com /new -york - gov - cuomo - announces -coronavirus-state-purchasing-coalition-2020–5. 4. Andrew W. Artenstein, MD, “In Pursuit of PPE,” New England Journal of Medicine, 382:e46 (April 30, 2020). 5. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “The Black Plague,” New Yorker, April 16, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-black-plague. 6. Nikhil Pal Singh, “Racial Disparity in Covid Infection/Morbidity in NYC Is Staggering,” Twitter, May  5, 2020, https://twitter.com/nikhil_ palsingh/status/1257730594764619776; Larry Buchanan, Jugal  K. Patel, Brian  M. Rosenthal, and Anjali Singhvi, “A Month of Coronavirus in New York City: See the Hardest-Hit Areas,” New York Times, April 1, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/01/nyregion/nyc -coronavirus-cases-map.html. 7. Michael Rothfeld, Somini Sengupta, Joseph Goldstein, and Brian  M. Rosenthal, “13 Deaths in a Day: An ‘Apocalyptic’ Coronavirus Surge at an N.Y.C. Hospital,” New York Times, March  25, 2020, https://www .nytimes.com/2020/03/25/nyregion/nyc-coronavirus-hospitals.html.

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8. “Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count,” New York Times. https://www. nytimes .com /interactive /2020 /us /coronavirus -us - cases .html#clusters. 9. “President Donald J. Trump Is Taking Action to Ensure the Safety of Our Nation’s Food Supply Chain,” Trump White House Archives, April 28, 2020, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/ briefings-statements/presi dent-donald-j-trump -taking-action-ensure-safety-nations-food-supply -chain/. 10. Michael Grabell, Bernice Yeung, and Maryam Jameel, “Millions of Essential Workers Are Being Left Out of COVID-19 Workplace Safety Protections, Thanks to OSHA,” ProPublica, April 16, 2020, https://www .propublica .org /article /millions - of- essential -workers - are - being -left -out- of- covid-19 -workplace-safety-protections-thanks -to - osha; Jason DeParle, “As Hunger Swells, Food Stamps Become a Partisan Flash Point,” New York Times, May 6, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05 /06/us/politics/coronavirus-hunger-food-stamps.html. 11. Associated Press, “Beirut Crippled by Flooding; Residents Use Surfboards for Transportation,” Weather Channel, December 9, 2019, https://weather .com/safety/floods/news/2019-12-09-beirut-lebanon-flooding; Ziad AbuRish, “Garbage Politics,” Merip, 277 (Winter 2015); Ruth Sherlock, “Environmentalists Warn of Mediterranean Pollution from Lebanon Land Reclamation,” NPR, January  11, 2018, https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels /2018 /01 / 11 /575925118 /environmentalists - warn - of - mediterranean -pollution-from-lebanon-land-reclamation. 12. Malihe Razazan, “A Perfect Metaphor? The Trash Crisis in Lebanon: An Interview with Ziad Abu-Rish.” Jadaliyya, September  3, 2015, https:// www.jadaliyya.com/Details/32429. 13. Jana Traboulsi, “Lebanon: What Do You Mean There Is No State?” Jadaliyya, August 29, 2015, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/32409. 14. Joanne Randa Nucho, “Garbage Infrastructure, Sanitation, and New Meanings of Citizenship in Lebanon,” Postmodern Culture 30, no.  1 (2019) doi:10.1353/pmc.2019.0018. 15. Electricity of Lebanon, http://www.edl.gov.lb/page.php?pid=1&lang=en. 16. Najib, “How EDZ Brought 24/7 Electricity To Zahle?,” BlogBalidi, February  8, 2016, https:// blogbaladi.com/how-edz-brought-247-electricity-to -zahle-full-story-exclusive-pictures/. 17. Éric Verdeil, “Beirut: The Metropolis of Darkness and the Politics of Urban Electricity Grid,” in Energy, Power, and Protest on the Urban Grid: Geographies of the Electric City, ed. Andrès Luque Ayala and Jonathan Silver (New York: Routledge, 2016), 155–75.

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18. Hiba Bou Akar, For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). 19. Khushbu Shah, “The Pandemic Has Exposed America’s Clean Water Crisis,” Vox, April  17, 2020, https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/4/17 /21223565/coronavirus-clean-water-crisis-america. 20. Morgan McFall-Johnsen, “Over 1,500 California Fires in the Past 6 Years—Including the Deadliest Ever—Were Caused by One Company: PG&E. Here’s What It Could Have Done but Didn’t,” Business Insider, November  3, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com /pge-caused-cali fornia-wildfires-safety-measures-2019-10. 21. Hannes Baumann, Citizen Hariri: Lebanon’s Neoliberal Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 22. Suad Joseph, “Pensée 2: Sectarianism as Imagined Sociological Concept and as Imagined Social Formation,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 40, no. 4 (2008): 553–54, doi:10.1017/S0020743808081464. 23. Lara Deeb, “Beyond Sectarianism: Intermarriage and Social Difference in Lebanon,”  International Journal of Middle East Studies  52, no.  2 (2020): 215–28, doi:10.1017/S0020743819000898. 24. James Queally, “ ‘She Hadn’t Showered in Nine Days’: L.A. Makes It Hard to Be Homeless, Avoid Coronavirus,” Los Angeles Times, March  29, 2020. https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2020–03–29/corona virus -homeless -wash-hands -hygiene -los -angeles -shutdown-shower-of -hope; Gigi Sohn, “During the Pandemic, the FCC Must Provide Internet for All,” Wired, April  28, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/opinion -during-covid-19-the-fcc-needs-to-provide-internet-for-all/. 25. Julia Elyachar, “Mappings of Power: The State, NGOs, and International Organizations in the Informal Economy of Cairo,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 3 (2003): 571–605. 26. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Are We at the Start of a New Protest Movement?,” New York Times, April 13, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020 /04/13/opinion/protest-social-distancing-covid.html. 27. Editorial Board, “In this Pandemic, it’s ‘Live Free—and Die,’” Los Angeles Times, April 21, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020–04–21 /live-free-or-die-isnt-a-hypothetical-choice-in-a-pandemic.

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n Puerto Rico, 2020 began with a jolt. January brought the onset of an earthquake “swarm” that rattled the southern coast, bringing homes and schools to the ground while sending emotional nerves skyward. In just one month, over 2,500 seismic events were registered by the local seismic network along with over 272 “felt events” of magnitudes between 2.0 and 6.4. Most of the quakes came in the wee hours of the night. As a result, thousands found themselves sleeping in their cars, in tents, or on park benches, afraid to reenter their homes. That is, if their homes were still standing. As with Hurricane Maria, the tremors were followed by political corruption scandals, mismanaged emergency aid, and failures within state agencies. Once again, locals were left to their own devices, forced to take recovery and community care into their own hands. While the Department of Education dithered in inspecting quake-damaged schools, parent groups and community organizations began organizing homeschooling efforts and setting up donated tents for makeshift outdoor classrooms. While the central government stalled in delivering aid, caravans of citizens created traffic jams bringing emergency supplies to earthquake-impacted neighborhoods.

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Unpredictably but unsurprisingly, the earth kept shaking, and citizens eventually became accustomed to the unstable ground. Hurricane Maria taught many to live without electricity or running water. Now the earthquakes forced us to sleep in our running shoes, with our survival kits by the door. After all, Puerto Ricans are experts in resilience. We’ve learned how to live with state failure. We’ve become accustomed to crisis. Maybe because of this, when the COVID-19 outbreak began in March, Puerto Ricans quickly treated it as yet another plot point in our compounding disaster. This feeling of layered crisis is perhaps best visible in the popular memes that began to circulate on social media in the wake of the pandemic. One example features a book cover for an imagined illustrated guide to recent Puerto Rican history. It displays three emblematic objects: first, a gas canister like the ones used to fill generators during power outages after Hurricane Maria. Second, a backpack representing the survival kits that residents were exhorted to prepare during the onset of the quakes. And lastly, a surgical mask, the latest emergency object that residents are obliged to acquire in order to mitigate the latest existential threat. Like other forms of crisis and emergency, the pandemic is a socially produced event, driven not by biological forces or natural hazards, but by the deeply rooted social inequalities that shape our experiences of those hazards to begin with. The pandemic is thus also a disaster in the manner often described by anthropologists and other social scientists: a totalizing and disruptive event that reveals long-standing fragilities and creates new possibilities— both economic and political. Disasters not only destroy and damage, they also reveal. They peel away the blinders of habit and routine and cast new light on what might otherwise remain obscured. In the wake of Hurricane Maria, some began to see Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship to the United States in a new light.

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Across the states, many “discovered” that their nation was actually an empire. They felt outrage at the unequal treatment of the colonial citizens they never knew were their political kin. Even within Puerto Rico, where we do not have the privilege of forgetting our imperial ties, the true nature of Puerto Rico’s colonial status was laid bare. For decades we had been told that the tradeoff for our lack of sovereignty was the protection we received from “the most powerful nation in the world.” Yet after Maria, weeks turned into months and eventually years without the federal aid we had been gaslit to believe would come.1 The revelation of this political lie began long before Maria or even Trump arrived on our shores. During the Obama administration, the severity of Puerto Rico’s debt crisis began to reveal itself, and our colonial status, long obscured by euphemisms and legal sleights of hand, was suddenly and crassly asserted.2 In lieu of a bailout, the federal government installed a Fiscal Control Board, funded by Puerto Rican taxpayers but accountable only to the federal government. Caught in a political limbo with neither the protections of a state nor the fiscal sovereignty of a nation, we found ourselves unable to define the nature of our debts, the severity of our austerity, or the limits of our endurance. When President Trump arrived in Puerto Rico hurling paper towels in lieu of emergency assistance, many in the United States were scandalized. But in Puerto Rico, Trump’s spectacle was simply an unvarnished symbol of the state violence that has underpinned our relationship to the United States since our acquisition. His tweets and stunts are but an extension of how Congress has long treated the administering of federal programs as colonial benevolence rather than as a national responsibility.3 Perhaps this long history of imperial disdain and forced resilience prepared us for the pandemic or at the very least paved the way for our lack of surprise at its mishandling. Long before

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testing kits were scarce and PPE was in short supply, Puerto Ricans had learned that they alone were in charge of their wellbeing. When Jared Kushner stated, in a White House briefing, that pandemic supplies in federal stockpiles were not meant for distribution throughout the fifty states but were, instead, meant for “us,” many in the mainland United States wondered what he referred to.4 But in Puerto Rico we had already discovered the rhetorical figure of a federal government with its own set of needs, priorities, and logics that don’t necessarily align with the desires of its constituents, much less the needs of the disenfranchised. Puerto Ricans thus have watched the many scandals that have shaken the nation during the pandemic with an eerie sense of déjà vu. When the USNS Comfort spent weeks virtually unused in New York City’s harbor, Puerto Ricans immediately thought back to when that very same ship circled empty off our shores, even as local hospitals were overloaded and forced to turn away the sick.5 While many in the United States were appalled at the politicization of medical equipment and the ways in which Trump bragged about refusing to help governors who were not “nice” to him, we remembered all too well how he sparred with the mayor of San Juan while residents struggled without electricity, phone service, or running water.6 When mainland citizens were shocked to learn that stockpiled ventilators had gone to waste due to lack of maintenance, Puerto Ricans saw this as yet another instance of spoiled aid discovered in mysterious warehouses, abandoned airstrips, or rotted shipping containers on the vacant lots of party loyalists.7 In Puerto Rico some have speculated that COVID-19 has become the United States’ “Maria moment,” that is, the point at which residents discover that they live in a “failed state,” with gutted infrastructure, inefficient state agencies, and a populace that emerged from the 2008 economic crisis with stark divisions

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between those who can manage to live through a hurricane, an earthquake, or a pandemic and those who cannot.8 This might also be the moment in which Americans discover that the future is a canceled promise. Puerto Ricans and many others across the globe long ago realized that climate change, neoliberal austerity politics, the dismantling of social safety nets, and unsustainable global capitalism were heralding a troubling future. Long before Maria, young people in Puerto Rico were grappling with bleak prospects for even finding employment, much less for achieving a better standard of living than their parents. It is thus with great irony that we view a headline from the Wall Street Journal lamenting the state of millennial graduates from top universities in the United States who, because of the COVID crisis, are now said to be “walking into a hurricane.”9 This feeling of déjà vu is not exclusive to Puerto Rico. Within the United States, what for some is a sudden crisis for others is simply the extension of an already existing state of insecurity. While some are only beginning to discover a negligent government capable of putting their lives at risk, residents of Flint, MI, enter the pandemic on the sixth anniversary of their still unresolved water crisis.10 While many wring their hands over government officials who minimize the harm of a deadly virus, AIDS activists recall battling against the negligence of some of the very same politicians who are in charge of managing the current pandemic.11 As controversy swirls around the nature of a newly revalued “state sovereignty” in places like California, indigenous communities wrestle with their decimated ability to manage their own affairs and care for their own communities.12 And while some discover the limits of federalism, others have long known that the United States is a federated empire structured precisely to ensure an unequal distribution of rights.13

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The truth is that the pandemic is a disaster in the sociological sense: a sudden catastrophic event but also a revelation of failures, an episode that exacerbates already existing inequalities, and a moment of reckoning. Many across the globe are currently struggling with feelings of collective mourning and grief for the loss of loved ones, for the sacrifice of strangers, for vanished personal goals, projects, and plans for the future. For some this is experienced as a sudden crisis while for others it forms yet another chapter in a larger narrative arc of shock, trauma, sacrifice, and forced endurance. However, we must be careful not to romanticize this knowing déjà vu through well-worn platitudes about “resilience” that reduce the harm of repetitive trauma, the slow wear and tear produced by structural violence, and the risks that come with being deemed “essential” while being treated as expendable.14 Indeed, it is partly their overrepresentation as essential workers in industries such as health care, sanitation, and food service that has placed African Americans, Latinx, and other minority groups at greater risk of exposure to COVID-19. And it is their already constituted vulnerability that makes this exposure much more deadly.15 In the context of Puerto Rico, the COVID crisis has been depicted in memes and other popular representations as simply the latest “season” of a long-running drama that has featured hurricanes, earthquakes, mass uprisings against government corruption, and years of austerity measures and colonial governance. Yet the way the pandemic is experienced in this space of catastrophic sedimentation might offer some lessons to a world that now collectively faces a postdisaster future. It is telling that two kinds of protest movements have emerged in the United States in the wake of COVID-19. On the one hand, there are protestors who long for a return to “normal” and who

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resent how the lockdown has restricted their individual “freedoms.” On the other hand, there have been the historic uprisings for Black Lives as well as demonstrations supporting rent strikes, demanding greater social assistance, and requesting more protective gear for essential workers.16 Thus, while some remain desperate to uphold exclusive notions of individual liberty, others are fighting for structural change and denouncing how both the risks of the virus and the burdens of the lockdown are unfairly distributed. While some seek to narrowly circumscribe lockdown politics into false debates over individual versus collective rights or social versus financial health, others are questioning the very terms of these debates. Across the many communities for whom COVID19 arrived with the déjà vu of state violence, demonstrators have emphasized how gender violence, poverty, food scarcity, colonialism, racism, and austerity were already threatening community health, long before the arrival of the novel virus. In fact, the very same day that armed protestors stormed the Michigan capitol with loaded weapons, activists in Puerto Rico carried out a “caravan for life” demanding increased testing, more government accountability, and greater social assistance for those struggling with food insecurity, domestic violence, and police brutality during the lockdown.17 Much of this work has been carried out by feminist and LGBTQ activists who have also been using the lockdown as an opportunity to educate residents about the rise of gender and transphobic violence, to denounce predators, and to seek justice for the victims of hate crimes.18 These communities are also forging new ways of thinking about state obligation by pushing back on the scripts of coerced resilience that for so long have placed an uneven burden of care on individuals. Rather than simply accepting that they must work to “flatten the curve,” citizens are also calling upon the

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government to “raise the bar” and provide an infrastructure and a social safety net that can protect us from future pandemics, disasters, and the crises endemic to pervasive health and wealth disparity. At present, Puerto Ricans, like so many others around the globe, are being precipitously ushered out of lockdown and implored to get back to the work of producing and consuming, even as rates of COVID-19 continue to climb. This is not because the state has taken the necessary public-health measures; in fact, Puerto Rico remains dead last in terms of testing rates across the United States and its territories. Contact tracing has yet to be properly implemented, and even basic statistical modeling and information sharing has failed.19 However, as in other parts of the world, business owners are exerting pressure to get back to business, suggesting that employers are best equipped to ensure the health and safety of their workers.20 All while Washington debates immunity legislation to protect employers from litigation if they fail to do so.21 While both local and federal governments increasingly shrink away from their responsibilities—failing at testing, tracing, and prevention—the burden of care is increasingly placed on individuals who have become the targets of both intervention and blame. However, the political effects of all this coerced resilience should not be underestimated. Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico was soon followed by historic protests that led to the toppling of the governor who had mismanaged the disaster. Many involved in the protests cited as a motivating factor the awakening they experienced after the government failed to protect its citizens from infrastructural collapse and refused to account for its human toll.22 If COVID-19 is indeed the United States’ “Maria moment,” it remains to be seen how nationwide protests and the collective

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awakening produced by state failures of care might open up new political possibilities and bring an end to the violent déjà vu.

NOTES 1. Jane  C. Timm, “Fact Check: Trump Says Puerto Rico Got $92 Billion. They’ve Seen Only a Fraction,” NBC News, July  18, 2019, https://www . nbcnews .com /politics /donald -trump /fact- check-trump - says -puerto -rico-got-92-billion-they-n1031276. 2. Alyosha Goldstein, “Promises Are Over: Puerto Rico and the Ends of Decolonization,” Theory & Event 19, no.  4 (2016), https://muse.jhu.edu /article/633271. 3. Yarimar Bonilla, “Trump’s False Claims About Puerto Rico Are Insulting, but They Reveal a Deeper Truth,” Washington Post, September  14, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook /2018/09/14/trumps-false -claims-about-puerto-rico-are-insulting-they-reveal-deeper-truth/. 4. Ed Mazza, “Jared Kushner Ripped for Saying ‘Our Stockpile’ Isn’t Meant for States to Use,” HuffPost, April  3, 2020, https://www.huffpost.com /entry/jared-kushner-stockpile_n_5e86dca8c5b6a949183425ca. 5. Michael Schwirtz, “The 1,000-Bed Comfort Was Supposed to Aid New York. It Has 20 Patients,” New York Times, April  2, 2020, https://www . nytimes . com /2020 /04 /02 /nyregion /ny - coronavirus - usns - comfort .html; Frances Robles and Sheri Fink, “Amid Puerto Rico Disaster, Hospital Ship Admitted Just 6 Patients a Day,” New York Times, December 6, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/us/puerto-rico-hurricane -maria-hospital-ship.html. 6. Josh Marshall, “PPE and Ventilators Becomes Patronage in Trump’s Hands,” Talking Points Memo, April 9, 2020, https://talkingpointsmemo .com/edblog/ppe-and-ventilators-becomes-patronage-in-trumps-hands. 7. Veronica Stracqualursi, “New York Times: 2,000 Ventilators in Federal Stockpile Don’t Work Because of a Maintenance Lapse,” CNN, April 2, 2020, https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/02/politics/trump-ventilators -stockpile-coronavirus/index.html; David Begnaud and Stefan Becket, “FEMA Official Says Bottled Water in Puerto Rico Was Moved to Runway to Save Money,” CBS News, September 13, 2018, https://www.cbsnews .com /news /puerto -rico -water-bottles -were -moved-to -runway-to -save -money-fema-official-says/; “FEMA Asegura Que Los 12 Vagones Perdidos Fueron Entregados Al Gobierno,” Primera Hora, August 22, 2018,

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https:// w w w . primerahora . com / noticias / puerto - rico / notas / fema -asegura-que-los-12-vagones-perdidos-fueron-entregados-al-gobierno/. George Packer, “We Are Living in a Failed State,” The Atlantic, June 2020, https://www.theatlantic . com /magazine /archive /2020 /06 /underlying -conditions/610261/. “Class of 2020 Job Seekers May Be ‘Walking Into a Hurricane,’ ” Wall Street Journal Video, April 29, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/video/class-of -2020 -job -seekers -may-be -walking-into -a-hurricane /D54FC13E -FE9A -4C00-860C-E359C7541085.html. Ben Crump, “COVID-19’s Effects Show Our Leaders Learned Little from the Flint Water Crisis,” Detroit Free Press, April 24, 2020, https://www . freep . com /story /opinion /contributors /2020 /04 /24 / leaders - learned -little-flint-water-crisis-coronavirus-covid-19/3011828001/. Masha Gessen, “What Lessons Does the AIDS Crisis Offer for the Coronavirus Pandemic?” New Yorker, April 8, 2020, https://www.newyorker .com /news/our-columnists/what-lessons -does -the -aids -crisis -offer-for -the-coronavirus-pandemic. Francis Wilkinson, “Gavin Newsom Declares California a ‘NationState,’ ” Yahoo Finance, April  9, 2020, https://finance.yahoo.com/news /gavin-newsom-declares-california-nation-160012001.html; Stephanie Sy, Lena  I. Jackson, and Casey Kuhn, “Navajo Nation, Hit Hard by COVID-19, Comes Together to Protect Its Most Vulnerable,” PBS News Hour, April 24, 2020, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/navajo-nation -hit-hard-by-covid-19-comes-together-to-protect-its-most-vulnerable. John Cassidy, “Trump’s Coronavirus Response Has Single-Handedly Created a New Federalism,” New Yorker, April  14, 2020, https://www . newyorker . com /news /our - columnists /trump - has - single - handedly -created-a-new-federalism. Christine Vestal, “ ‘Katrina Brain’: The Invisible Long-Term Toll of Megastorms,” Politico, October  12, 2017, https://www.politico.com /agenda /story/2017/10/12/psychological-toll-natural-disasters-000547/. Jeffery C.Mays and Andy Newman. “Virus Is Twice as Deadly for Black and Latino People Than Whites in N.Y.C,” New York Times, April  8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/nyregion/coronavirus-race -deaths.html. ABC News, “COVID-19 Sparks Rent Strikes,” Youtube video, 5:01, May 1, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76GRHxwoJik; Audrey McNamara, “Nurses Holding May Day Protests Nationwide Demanding PPE, Union Says,” CBS News, May  1, 2020, https://www.cbsnews.com /news/may-day-protest-nurses-ppe/.

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17. Yarimar Bonilla, “Drive Through Covid-19 Protests in Puerto Rico,” Youtube video, 6:29, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcpRdW0V9b U&t=83s. 18. La Redacción Digital, “Lanzan Campaña Exige Acción Ante #Laotrapandemia,” La Perla del Sur, April 20, 2020, https://www.periodicolaperla .com/ lanzan-campana-exige-accion-ante-laotrapandemia/. 19. Patricia Mazzei, “Puerto Rico Lags Behind Everywhere Else in U.S. in Virus Testing,” New York Times, April  21, 2020, https://www.nytimes .com/2020/04/21/us/puerto-rico-coronavirus.html; Eliván Martínez Mercado, “Puerto Rico Never Set Up an Information Network to Gather Data on COVID-19,” Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, May  4, 2020, https://periodismoinvestigativo.com /2020/05/puerto -rico -never-set-up -an-information-network-to-gather-data-on-covid-19/. 20. Alex Delgado, “Lo Que Nadie Contesta,” Metro, April 30, 2020, https:// www. metro . pr /pr / blogs /2020 /04 /30 /opinion - alex- delgado -lo -nadie -contesta.html. 21. Erica Werner and Tom Hamburger, “White House and Congress Clash Over Liability Protections for Businesses as Firms Cautiously Weigh Virus Reopening Plans,” Washington Post, May  3, 2020, https://www .washingtonpost .com /us-policy/2020/05/03/congress-coronavirus-legal -liability/. 22. Jonah Walters, “Puerto Rican Politics Will Never Be the Same,” Jacobin, August 2019, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/08/puerto-rico-ricardo -rossello-governor-unrest.

COVID-19 IN A BORDER NATION JACOB A. C. REMES

B

y dint of good luck and a night owl cousin, I happened to be awake in Paris the night of March  11, when Donald Trump announced—incorrectly, as it turned out—that he was closing the U.S. border to all flights arriving from most European countries. I’d been in France on what was supposed to be a threeweek fellowship, but even before Trump finished speaking, I rebooked a ticket and was in the air less than twelve hours later. I was lucky; Americans in Europe who weren’t up late that night ended up crammed into customs halls, where some of them likely acquired the SARS-CoV-19, the virus that causes COVID-19.1 All this despite the fact that the virus was already firmly in the United States, and it came when the Trump administration instead ought to have been taking firm public health measures to encourage social distancing while ramping up testing and contact tracing.2 A pandemic is, by definition, global, or at least international “and over a wide area.”3 Yet disease transmission, medical treatment, and the social experience of disease are all necessarily local.4 In that way, pandemics are like many other disasters. The Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 struck the coasts of fourteen countries, yet although the event was transnational, its effects were experienced in and shaped by specific national and local contexts.

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Or take the seemingly local event of a munitions ship exploding in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in December 1917. Not only were the ships that collided internationally owned and bound for international locations, but the response to the disaster was shaped both by elite and working-class people and ideas that crossed and recrossed borders.5 Pandemics and other disasters force us to think in different scales of time and space.6 COVID-19, particularly the bungled U.S. response to it, should encourage us to interrogate the construction, place, and logic of borders in U.S. culture and society. To borrow a phrase from Canadian studies, we should understand the United States as a border nation.7 After all, over 65 percent of Americans live within the one-hundred-mile border zone claimed by the U.S. Border Patrol for their activities (and even more if one includes airports as “borders,” as the Border Patrol might).8  As Thomas Bollyky, director of the global health program at the Council on Foreign Relations, told a journalist when Trump issued his European travel ban, “Coronavirus knows no borders, but borders are the only thing that President Trump knows with regard to COVID-19.”9 What comes into focus when we use COVID-19 to consider the United States as a border nation? Conversely, what do we see about COVID-19 when we examine it in the context of the United States as border nation?

COVID-19 and Immigration: Xenophobia as Structuring Logic When describing the U.S. response to COVID-19, especially that of the federal government, it is easy to fall back on words like “bungled,” “incompetent,” or “haphazard.” Yet those words usually connote randomness, as if the Trump administration’s response was simply absent.10  Instead, we must understand the

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Trump administration’s malign failures as structured by the ideology and policy goal that has motivated most of the administration: racist xenophobia.11  From the first days of his administration— indeed, from the earliest days of his campaign for president— Trump’s first priority was to end immigration.12  Indeed, for an administration largely characterized by bombastic bumbling, it was in immigration that Trump had his greatest successes because, as the immigration reporter Dara Lind put it, he was able to “push on the soft parts of the immigration system.”13 It is not surprising, then, that the few decisive actions the Trump administration took against COVID-19 were to ban crossborder migration. For instance, Trump frequently heralded what he claimed was an early and unpopular decision to ban travel from China. Yet the travel ban did little to stop the spread of the virus to the United States, which arrived from Europe rather than China.14 But the epidemiologic failure of the ban was also guaranteed because, in fact, it was not a travel ban. Nearly 40,000 people—mostly U.S. citizens and long-term residents—entered the United States from China from the beginning of the “ban” to early April.15  Trump’s goal was not to stop the virus but to stop Chinese people from entering the United States. This antiforeigner logic pervaded the federal public health response to COVID-19.16 In one of the most crucial failures, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) rejected the German-designed, global standard test approved by the World Health Organization (WHO), preferring a Made in America solution. The  U.S. test, it turned out, did not work, but the federal government continued to refuse to approve foreign tests.17  The shortage of working test kits then drove policy decisions about who would have access to tests, which in turn meant that the shape and extent of the epidemic was unknowable until patients started arriving in hospitals. But the U.S. failure to test, trace, and isolate cases was not only a technical failure born of an absence of

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tests. It was also a failure of the imagination. Countries that instituted successful testing and contact tracing programs were overwhelmingly East Asian countries. That Americans generally compared ourselves to European countries and not to, say, South Korea or Taiwan, signaled how little most Americans could imagine themselves or their governments acting like East Asian democracies.18  COVID-19 as a problem and solutions to that problem were both imagined and presented as intractably foreign. This racism was pervasive in U.S. society and institutions. As early as February, people who appeared Chinese began facing harassment and violence, both in the United States and elsewhere. As 2020 went on, violence skyrocketed against people of Asian descent in the United States, especially women.19  Donald Trump and his followers, who spent much of March and April on calling COVID-19 “the Chinese virus” or, even less accurately, “the Chinese flu” or “the Wuhan flu,” abetted this behavior.20 Doing so had an obvious political purpose: it sought to displace blame from Trump’s own failures to those of the Chinese government. In early April, the Trump reelection campaign made this strategy explicit by releasing an advertisement accusing his opponent Joe Biden of being “soft on China,” especially related to coronavirus.21  In July, Vice President Mike Pence combined Yellow Peril rhetoric with COVID-19, telling Fox News, “If Joe Biden would’ve had his way we literally would’ve had tens of millions of more Chinese coming into our country and spreading the pandemic.”22  Trump’s rhetoric made explicit the structure of his administration’s response. The Trump administration’s xenophobic response to COVID19 was not limited to China or people of Asian descent. Trump and his administration used COVID-19 as an excuse for pursuing their preexisting anti-immigrant agenda.23  In Texas, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Justice Department worked to speed construction of Trump’s anti-immigrant wall by taking advantage

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of landowners’ being stuck inside during COVID-19 shutdowns to survey land to be seized.24 On March 20, the CDC issued an order under the guise of public health authorizing the summary expulsion of any foreign national who arrives at the border without documentation. Crucially, the order included asylum applicants, thus abnegating U.S. obligations under international law to accept those who fear returning to their countries of origin.25 Just as the border was a cause for inaction on COVID-19, COVID-19 became a cause for action on the border. The structure of action and inaction was reversed, but the logic was the same: xenophobic racism. The short-lived rule that foreign students would be required to take classes in person highlighted the conjunction: it was simultaneously xenophobic and tried to encourage dangerous, in-person education to deny the continued threat of the pandemic.26 To be sure, governments around the world have closed borders and have closed borders selectively, in response to COVID-19. European countries, despite the Schengen Agreement, reestablished their borders, largely futilely, to prevent the spread of the pandemic.27  Japan, meanwhile, permitted Japanese citizens to return home but forbade reentry by foreign residents. That meant long-term foreign residents of Japan were either stuck inside Japan regardless of their need to travel or, worse, were stranded outside.28 Borders, of course, work both directions, and the closure of borders by other countries puts Americans in an unfamiliar position of exclusion.

COVID-19 and Emigration: Exporting Disease The United States, we are told over and over, is a nation of immigrants. At its best, the phrase invokes a tradition of welcome and

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asylum, a melting pot, a citizenship based on choice, not on blood.29  At its worst, the immigration narrative ignores— or hides—the Indigenous people who were never immigrants and whom settlers dispossessed and the enslaved Africans brought to the Western Hemisphere in chains. It also forgets the migrants who did not stay: the Italians and Greeks and other “birds of passage” who fly into U.S. history briefly as sojourners but depart it when they return home. Only their cousins who stayed get to be included in the U.S. national narrative. To imagine the United States as a nation of immigrants also makes us ignore that there are American emigrants. Indeed, it is so difficult to imagine American emigrants that there is a remarkable lack of consensus of even how to count them.30 In 2016, the State Department estimated 9 million American citizens lived abroad.31  Using a different methodology, a report in 2018 about overseas voters estimated that 5.5 million Americans lived abroad, about 3 million of whom were adults. According to that report, there were more Americans living in Mexico than in Delaware and more Americans living in Canada than in North Dakota. If Americans abroad were a state, it would be right in the middle by population, between Minnesota and South Carolina.32  Yet the existence of this U.S. diaspora is mostly ignored. COVID-19 makes us reckon with the United States not only as an importer of people—that is, a nation of immigrants—but also as an exporter of people. The utter and continued failure of the United States to control its epidemic meant that people of any nationality who traveled from the United States to other countries were potential vectors—and have been seen and treated that way.33 Obviously not all border crossers are emigrants, but COVID-19 makes us attend to outgoing border crossings of all sorts and to note how much even temporary travel is structured by familial connections abroad.34  To take but one

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example, one study found that 70  percent of Israeli COVID-19 cases came from travelers from the United States.35 The biological and medical facts of viral infection and disease force the recognition of a longstanding social fact: that the flow of migrants is not unidirectional.36 One place where that migrant flow is particularly obvious is across the U.S.-Canada border. By one estimate, 826,000 American citizens live in Canada.37 A long scholarly tradition celebrates, or at least notes, “the mingling of the Canadian and American peoples” stemming from migration in both directions.38 The close relationship between the two countries has been particularly remarked at times of crisis. After the Halifax Explosion of 1917, which flattened about a quarter of the city, Massachusetts sent the first relief train from outside the immediate region and continued to aid the city with money and personnel. The existence of a wellendowed Massachusetts-Halifax Relief Committee, along with the familial connections that existed across the border from a few generations of migration, gave explosion survivors and their friends and family the opportunity to build cross-border, transnational political power. People in Massachusetts made demands on Nova Scotian and Canadian elected officials; people in Halifax wrote to the governor of Massachusetts as they would their own official. Disaster created opportunities for experiments in transnationalism from the bottom up.39 What, then, of U.S.-Canada border crossing in the pandemic crisis? The land border is closed except for “essential and nondiscretionary” travel, and anyone entering Canada from the United States must agree to quarantine for fourteen days. The border closure makes clear how although the Canadian-U.S. relationship is often framed—by politicians and the press—as one that is primarily about trade, that trade is often carried by people. In the second week of May  2020, for instance, the Canadian Border Services

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Agency reported an 88 percent decrease in land border crossings compared to the previous year but that meant that more than 127,000 people still crossed the border, the majority of them truckers.40  For those not carrying goods, the border remains closed. Binational families living transnational lives—in one example, a  Canadian wife and her American husband who commutes between Windsor and Detroit—are separated indefinitely.41 As in Schengen-Area Europe, where people built their lives on the assumption of open borders, Americans and Canadians who relied on easy border crossings found their lives upended when the border closed. Air travel remains possible, and so some people continue to cross. Yet among other Canadians, watching the U.S. epidemic with concern, the border closure has popular support.42 Journalists on both sides of the border have been especially interested in a particular set of migrants: people of various nationalities who cross the border by foot from the United States seeking asylum in Canada. The Safe Third Country Agreement between the United States and Canada creates a loophole to international refugee law and requires that nearly all would-be asylees apply in the country in which they first arrive, which in practice usually means the United States. However, a loophole to the loophole means that asylees who enter Canada irregularly—that is, without inspection at an official border crossing—can seek asylum despite the agreement. In the four years following Trump’s election, about 50,000 people sought asylum in Canada by crossing irregularly, sparking considerable debate and upset.43 As part of the COVID-19 border closure, Canada announced that these irregular border crossers would be refused and handed over to U.S. authorities.44 But COVID-19 changed the discourse on these irregular refugees in the opposite direction, too. Asylum seekers in Canada may work, and many of them moved to Montreal or Toronto and began to make lives there while they awaited their

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cases’ adjudication. In Montreal, many found homes in the working-class borough of Montréal Nord and worked at nursing homes. During the height of the COVID-19 outbreak in Quebec, Montréal Nord had the highest number of cases. Several asylees working in long-term care facilities died from COVID-19. Their deaths shifted their portrayal from “queue jumpers” or cheaters to “guardian angels” and gave rise to proposals that they be allowed to stay in Canada.45 We can see here how COVID-19 and the discourses surrounding it have altered the politics of U.S.Canada border crossings, at least for some groups of crossers. But not all people who leave the United States do so willingly. A major way the United States is exporting COVID-19 is through the forced exportation of people: deportation. The United States deported at least 70 COVID-19-positive people to Guatemala before the beginning of May and an unknown number of COVID-19-positive patients to Haiti.46 Indeed, the true number of people deported who have COVID-19 is unknown, because there has been inadequate testing in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) prisons and ICE appears to have subverted what symptom screening there was.47 Popular attention to these deportations may have slowed but did not stop them; indeed, the Biden administration has accelerated deportations to Haiti under Trump’s so-called Title 42 order that facilitated summary deportations during the COVID emergency.48  But whether or not ICE successfully tests all potential deportees, the controversy highlights three things. First is the way prisons, jails, and other detention facilities like ICE’s private prisons and concentration camps are especially dangerous during a pandemic.49 Second is to force more consideration of the way deportation—exile, really—projects the United States into the world, distributing U.S. power and culture and, in this case, U.S. inability to control disease.50  Third, the danger of deporting COVID-19-positive

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patients to Haiti, which has only 124 intensive care beds and the capacity for 62 ventilated patients, highlights how global health inequalities are linked to global power. Take, for instance, tuberculosis, an infectious lung disease that kills 4,000 people globally every day despite the existence of a medical cure for about seventy years. Once tuberculosis was no longer a concern in rich countries, we allowed it to fester in poor countries, where its systematic non- and partial treatment led to the development of drug-resistant, multi-drug-resistant, and extensively drug resistant strains of the bacteria. The loss of antibiotic efficacy thanks to international malign neglect of global health then places even people in rich countries again at risk of the disease. U.S. exportation of COVID-19 is an acute version of a chronic condition.51 Pandemics, like other disasters, can make visible what has long existed. COVID-19 makes us see the importance of people and bodies who leave the United States, willingly or not. It forces us to see the centrality of border crossing people to the American place in the world. In turn, attention to borders helps us better analyze the failures of the Trump response to the pandemic. To reckon with the centrality of borders to U.S. politics, society, and culture is to see the United States as a border nation, and to do so helps us understand ourselves better. If the COVID-19 pandemic reveals that the United States as a border nation, it shows us a way forward in our analysis of the United States in the world and indeed of domestic politics.

NOTES 1. Greg Miller, Josh Dawsey, and Aaron C. Davis, “One Final Viral Infusion: Trump’s Move to Block Travel from Europe Triggered Chaos and a Surge of Passengers from the Outbreak’s Center,”  Washington Post, May 23, 2020; Sanya Mansoor, “ ‘A Hotbed for the Virus’: What Travelers

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Experienced Returning from Europe to Overwhelmed  U.S. Airports,” Time, March 15, 2020. Nicole Narea, “Coronavirus Is Already Here. Blocking Travelers Won’t Prevent Its Spread,” Vox, March 14, 2020. Heath Kelly, “The Classical Definition of a Pandemic Is Not Elusive,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 89 (2011): 540–41. On the local—or at least national—contexts of global disease, see Mari Armstrong-Hough, Biomedicalization and the Practice of Culture: Globalization and Type 2 Diabetes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Jacob A. C. Remes, “ ‘Committed as Near Neighbors’: The Halifax Explosion and Border-Crossing People and Ideas,” American Review of Canadian Studies 45, no. 1 (March 2015): 26–43. Scott Gabriel Knowles and Zachary Loeb, “The Voyage of the Paragon: Disaster as Method,” in Critical Disaster Studies, ed. Jacob A.C. Remes and Andy Horowitz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 11–31. See also Gabrielle Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence,”  Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 109–41. About three-quarters of Canadians live within 100 miles of the border and nine-tenths live within 200 miles, and the border features prominently in Canadian culture and economics. The phrase appears to originate in Wayne C. Thompson, Canada 2001 (Harper’s Ferry, WV: Stryker-Post, 2001), 14, but has been picked up widely. See, for instance, Stephen  T. Moore, “Defining the ‘Undefended’: Canadians, Americans, and the Multiple Meanings Border During Prohibition,” American Review of Canadian Studies 34, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 3–32. Tanvi Misra, “Inside the Massive U.S. ‘Border Zone,’ ” Citylab, May 14, 2018. For more on the border zone, see Elizabeth Cohen,  Illegal: How America’s Lawless Immigration Regime Threatens Us All  (New York: Basic, 2020). Narea, “Coronavirus Is Already Here.” I am grateful to Emily Pressman, whose question helped me formulate these ideas. See Emily Pressman (@emilypressman), “Here’s my question: with the AIDS crisis, inaction was so clearly driven by homophobia. Here it feels like incompetence, narcissism, and misguided thinking about the dangers of big government—does that distinction matter (still totally deadly, on a massive scale)?” Twitter, March 16, 2020, 4:23 p.m., https://twitter.com/emilypressman/status/1239648383117275138.

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11. Traditionally we have used the word “nativist” for this form of racist xenophobia, but I take Erika Lee’s argument that “nativism” obscures the dispossession of Indigenous peoples by declaring white Anglo-Saxons to be “native.” See Lee’s America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (New York: Basic, 2019), esp. 11–12. 12. Trump’s campaign announcement was when he made his infamous claim that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.” The Muslim ban was among his first acts as president. On the former, see Alexander Burns, “First Draft: Choice Words From Donald Trump, Presidential Candidate,” New York Times, June 16, 2015; on the latter, see “Timeline of the Muslim Ban,” ACLU of Washington. 13. See, e.g., Dara Lind, “Trump’s Stripping of Passports from Some Texas Latinos, Explained,” Vox, August 30, 2018; Lind, “Trump’s Administration Is a Horrifying Success: At Terrorizing Immigrants,” Vox, April 3, 2017. For a timeline of Trump administration immigration policies and initiatives, see “Timeline of Federal Policy on Immigration, 2017–2020,” Ballotopedia. 14. Ana  S. Gonzalez-Reiche et  al., “Introductions and Early Spread of SARS- CoV-2 in the New York City Area,” Science 369, no. 6501 (2020); Matthew T. Maurano et al., “Sequencing Identifies Multiple, Early Introductions of SARS-CoV2 to New York City Region,” medRxiv (preprint, submitted April 2020). 15. Steve Eder et  al., “After Wuhan Disclosure, 430,000 Flew to the U.S.,” New York Times, April 5, 2020. 16. For a similar point, see Vijay Prashad, “How the United States Government Failed to Prepare for the Global Pandemic,” CounterPunch, May 21, 2020. 17. Michael  D. Shear et  al., “Testing Blunders Cost Vital Month in U.S. Virus Fight,” New York Times, March 29, 2020; see also Shawn Boburg at al., “Inside the Coronavirus Testing Failure: Alarm and Dismay among the Scientists Who Sought to Help,” Washington Post, April 3, 2020. For an analysis of the CDC’s failures that emphasizes bureaucratic culture rather than the administration’s xenophobia, see Eric Lipton et al., “Built for This, C.D.C. Shows Flaws in Crisis,” New York Times, June 3, 2020. 18. On this point, see Indi Samarajiva, “In the NYTimes, Only White Leaders Stand Out,” Medium, May 4, 2020. 19. “FACT SHEET: Anti-Asian Prejudice March 2021,” report of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, California State University, San Bernardino, March  21, 2021; Kimmy Yam, “Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Increased by Nearly 150% in 2020, Mostly in N.Y. and L.A., New Report

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Says,” NBC News, March 9, 2021; Angela R. Grover, Shannon B. Harper, and Lynn Langton, “Anti-Asian Hate Crime During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploring the Reproduction of Inequality,” American Journal of Criminal Justice 45 (2020): 647–67. The rise in anti-Asian violence and harassment gained increased attention after the murder of six Asian women in Atlanta on March 16, 2021, but that attack also made evident that anti-Asian hatred and violence has deeper roots than just Donald Trump’s racist language. See Jennifer Lee and Tiffany Huang, “Reckoning with Asian America,” Science March 25, 2021: eabi6877; Minju Bae and Mark Tseng-Putterman, “Reviving the History of Black-Asian Internationalism,” ROAR, July  21, 2020; Shaila Dawn, “Racism and Sexism Shadow Many Interactions for Asian-American Women,” New York Times March 19, 2021; Anna Storti, Najwa Mayer, Mingwei Huang, Carolyn Choi, and Yanyi, “RMS Statement on Anti-Asian Violence,” March 17, 2021. For early reports of increasing anti-Asian violence, see Sabrina Tavernise and Richard  A. Oppel  Jr., “Spit On, Yelled At, Attacked: Chinese-Americans Fear for Safety,” New York Times, March 24, 2020; “Market Harborough Pupils Egged in ‘Coronavirus Attack,’ ” BBC .com, February  7, 2020; Kyodo News, “Coronavirus Outbreak Stokes AntiAsian Bigotry Worldwide,”  Japan Times, February  18, 2020. I started hearing of racist harassment of students of East Asian nationality or descent in New York City as early as February 9, 2020. 20. Sean Darling-Hammond et  al., “After ‘The China Virus’ Went Viral: Racially Charged Coronavirus Coverage and Trends in Bias Against Asian Americans,” Health Education & Behavior 47 no.  6 (December 2020): 870–79. For press coverage, see, e.g., Katie Rogers, Lara Jakes, and Ana Sanson, “Trump Calls It the ‘Chinese Virus.’ Critics Say That’s Racist and Provocative,”  New York Times, March  19, 2020; “Call It ‘Coronavirus,’ ” editorial,  New York Times, March  24, 2020. For an example of a Republican politician’s continued use of the racist name, see Lindsey Wise, “GOP Rep. Tom Rice Fell Ill From Coronavirus,” Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2020. At a June campaign rally, Trump returned to his racist rhetoric and called Covid-19 “kung flu”; see “Donald Trump Calls Covid-19 ‘Kung Flu’ at Tulsa Rally,” The Guardian, June 20, 2020. See also Mari Webel, “Calling COVID-19 a ‘Chinese Virus’ is Wrong and Dangerous—The Pandemic is Global,” The Conversation, March 25, 2020. 21. Daniel Dale, Tara Subramaniam, and Holmes Lybrand, “Fact Check: Trump Campaign Hits Biden for Being Soft on China with Deceptive Images and Audio Clips,” CNN, April 13, 2020.

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22. Pence interview with Brett Baier, Special Report, Fox News, July 7, 2020. A few days earlier, the trade official Peter Navarro made explicit the racist deflection of Trump administration onto China. “It is the Chinese Communist Party that is making us stay locked in our homes and lose our jobs,” he claimed on MSNBC. “They spawned the virus. They hid the virus. They sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals over here to seed and spread the virus before we knew.” See David Badash, “Trump Official Spins Out-of-Control Anti-China Conspiracy Theory,” Alternet, July 3, 2020. 23. Katie Rogers, “On Eve of Primary, Trump Weighs In on Democrats (and the Oscars),” New York Times, February 29, 2020. 24. Zolan Kanno-Youngs, “With Owners Trapped Indoors, U.S. Grabs Land to Build Wall,” New York Times, May 30, 2020. 25. Lucas Guttentag, “Coronavirus Border Expulsions: CDC’s Assault on Asylum Seekers and Unaccompanied Minors,”  Just Security, April  13, 2020; Joanna Naples-Mitchell, “There Is No Public Health Rationale for a Categorical Ban on Asylum Seekers,” Just Security, April 17, 2020; Oona Hathaway, “The Trump Administration’s Indefensible Legal Defense of Its Asylum Ban: Taking a Wrecking Ball to International Law,” Just Security, May 15, 2020. 26. Marcia Brown, “Trump’s War on International Students,”  American Prospect, July 14, 2020. 27. Steven Erlanger, “Across Europe, Virus Punctures a Cafe Society,” New York Times, March 16, 2020. 28. Magdalena Osumi, “Foreign Residents Stranded Abroad by Japan’s Coronavirus Controls,”  Japan Times, May  19, 2020; Osumi, “Tokyo’s Pandemic Border Policy Highlights Insecure Status of Foreign Residents,” Japan Times, December  30, 2020; Osumi, “Japan to Maintain Entry Ban on Nonresident Foreign Nationals,” Japan Times, March 19, 2021. 29. The literature that celebrates the United States as a land of immigrants is vast. See, for example, Michael Lind,  The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1996); David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, revised and updated ed. (New York: Basic, 2000); Noah M. J. Pickus, ed.,  Immigration and Citizenship in the 21st  Century  (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). On American citizenship as one of choice not birth, see Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (New York: Vintage, 2011).

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30. Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels, Migrants or Expatriates? Americans in Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 27–34; for a table of population estimates see page 33. 31. Helen  B. Marrow and Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels, “Modeling American Migration Aspirations: How Capital, Race, and National Identity Shape Americans’ Ideas about Living Abroad,”  International Migration Review 54, no. 1 (2020): 84. 32. Fors Marsh Group, “2016 Overseas Citizen Population Analysis Report” (report for the Federal Voting Assistance Program, September 2018). 33. That the United States has been a leader in vaccination even as it has continued to fail in nonpharmaceutical pandemic control may change this equation, but how it will is unpredictable as I revise this chapter. 34. Another group of Americans abroad is soldiers, who are also increasingly the subject of COVID-19 concern. See “Okinawa Demands Answers from US after 61 Marines Contract Coronavirus,” The Guardian, July 12, 2020; “Okinawa Taxi Driver Believed Infected by U.S. Personnel,” Asahi Shimbun, July 16, 2020. On soldiers and their bodies as a key element of the United States in the world, see Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 35. Ido Efrati, “Study: Israel Far from COVID-19 Herd Immunity, 70% of Cases Originate in U.S.,” Haaretz, May 18, 2020; Marcy Oster, “American Billionaire’s Son Ordered Out of Israel After Violating COVID-19 Restrictions to Meet Girlfriend,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, June 15, 2020. 36. On the now global rejection of U.S. citizens for fear of infection, see Indi Samarajiva, “American Passports Are Worthless Now,” Medium, July 9, 2020. On Europe, see Michael Birnbaum and Quentin Ariès, “Europe Prepares to Reopen to Foreign Travelers, but Americans Don’t Even Figure Into the Discussion,” Washington Post, June 26, 2020. 37. Fors Marsh Group, “2016 Overseas Citizen Population Analysis Report,” 10. This is substantially higher that previous estimates; cf. Susanna Groves, “Americans Abroad: US Emigration Policy and Perspectives,” in  Diasporas, Development, and Governance, ed. Abel Chikanda, Jonathan Crush, and Margaret Walton-Roberts (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2016), 241; and Klekowski von Koppenfels, Migrants or Expatriates?, 30. 38. Marcus Lee Hansen and John Bartlet Brebner, The Mingling of the Canadian and American Peoples (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940). On cross-border migration, see, among others, Bruno Ramirez, Crossing the 49th Parallel: Migration from Canada to the United States, 1900–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Sarah-Jane Mathieu, North

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of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada, 1870– 1955 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); John H. Thompson, “American Muckrakers and Western Canadian Reformers,” Journal of Popular Culture 4, no. 4 (Spring 1971): 1,060–70; Randy W. Widdis,  With Scarcely a Ripple: Anglo-Canadian Migration into the United States and Western Canada, 1880–1920 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998). Remes, “ ‘Committed as Near Neighbors.’ ” See also Remes,  Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016). It is important to note that the ability of people to access this transnational polity was not even and, for instance, people of African descent could be excluded from it even when they were part of the transnational community. See Remes, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Africville,” African American Review 51, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 225–26. Catharine Tunney, “Police Report 2,200 Home Quarantine Checks as Trudeau Talks About Stricter Border Measures,”  CBC, May  20, 2020; Tim O’Shea, “The New State of Our Border: Eerie, Surreal, Ghostly—and Guarded,” Buffalo News, April 14, 2020; Rachel Abrams, “Closed Border Cripples Once-Bustling Blaine,” New York Times, July 19, 2020. Nicholas Keung, “ ‘I’d Thought About Swimming Across’: Spouses Split by U.S.-Canada Border Grow Frustrated as Ottawa Mulls Options,” Toronto Star, May  29, 2020. See also Glenda Luymes, “COVID-19: Cross-border Couples Chafe at Border Restrictions,” Vancouver Sun, May 8, 2020. Janice Dickson, “Poll Finds 81% of Canadians Say the Canada-U.S. Border Should Remain Closed,”  Globe and Mail, July  6, 2020; Melanie Woods, “Canadians Say ‘Keep It’ To U.S. Congress Calls For Reopened Border,” HuffPost, July 13, 2020; Roxanne Egan-Elliott, “Americans Sailing North to Alaska Causing Waves of Worry Around Island,” Victoria Times Colonist, June 14, 2020. The fraught politics of border crossing was made especially clear after Christmas 2020, when a number of Canadian politicians were revealed to have traveled out of Canada and paid varyingly steep political consequences. See, e.g., “NDP Strip Niki Ashton of Critic Roles After Recent Trip to Greece,” Canadian Press, January  1, 2021; “Ontario’s Finance Minister Resigns After Returning from Caribbean Vacation,” CBC, December 31, 2020. Marcia Brown, “Trump’s Asylum Cruelty on Trial,” American Prospect, January 23, 2020; Elise von Scheel, “Special Report: Is The U.S. Safe for Asylum Seekers?,”  The House, CBC Radio 1, June  1, 2019; O’Shei, “The New State of Our Border.”

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44. This official closure was largely a sop to the Conservative opposition since few would-be refugees were crossing the border anyway. Emma Jacobs, “Canada Closes the Door at Roxham Road Asylum-Seeker Crossing,” North Country Public Radio, March 26, 2020; O’Shei, “The New State of Our Border”; Janice Dickson, “Four Asylum Seekers Turned Away at Canada-U.S. Border,”  Globe and Mail, April  3, 2020; Adrian Humphreys, “With COVID-19 Clampdown, Number of Asylum Seekers at Canada-U.S. Border Slows to a Trickle,”  National Post, April 6, 2020. 45. Verity Stevenson and Benjamin Shingler, “Quebec Relies on Hundreds of Asylum Seekers in Long-term Care Battle against COVID-19,” CBC, May  8, 2020; Benjamin Shingler and Verity Stevenson, “COVID-19’s Devastating Toll on Families in Montreal’s Poorest Neighbourhoods,”  CBC, May  15, 2020; Dan Bilefsky, “Risking Their Lives to Aid Canada, and Hoping That’s Enough to Stay,” New York Times, June 14, 2020; Don Macpherson, “Legault’s Response to Migrant ‘Angels’ Is Embarrassing,” op-ed column, Montreal Gazette, May 29, 2020. 46. Monique  O. Madan and Jacqueline Charles, “He Says He Has COVID and Has Never Been to Haiti. But ICE Still Wants to Deport Him There,”  Miami Herald, May  8, 2020. On Guatemala, see Yael Schacher and Rachel Schmidtke, “Harmful Returns: The Compounded Vulnerabilities of Returned Guatemalans in the Time of Covid-19,” field report, Refugees International, June 2020. 47. On COVID outbreaks in ICE prisons, see, e.g., Laura Gómez, “COVID19 Cases at Eloy Detention Center Surge by 460% Since Friday,” AZ Mirror, June 15, 2020. On ICE subverting testing, see “Whistleblowers from Richwood Correctional Center in Louisiana Report Unsafe Practices that Promote the Spread of COVID-19 in ICE Detention,” press release from the Government Accountability Project, July 13, 2020. 48. Melissa del Bosque and Isabel Macdonald, “Exporting the Virus: How Trump’s Deportation Flights Are Putting Latin America and the Caribbean at Risk,”  Type Investigations, June  26, 2020; Julian Borger, “Haiti Deportations Soar as Biden Administration Deploys Trump-Era Health Era,” Guardian March 25, 2021. 49. Timothy Williams, Libby Seline, and Rebecca Griesbach, “Infection Rates Escalate in Prisons, and Fear Among Inmates Does, Too,”  New York Times, June 17, 2020. 50. See David Brotherton and Luis Barrios,  Banished to the Homeland: Dominican Deportees and Their Stories of Exile  (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

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51. Paul Farmer, Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (Oakland: University of California Press, 1999). In 2021, we stand at risk of reproducing our error with tuberculosis by denying COVID vaccines to poor countries. If COVID continues to spread unabated in places that are denied access to vaccination, its continued reproduction may lead to variants that will render the hoarded vaccinations ineffective.

PART VIII Alternative Futures

ARE WE IN DENIAL ABOUT DENIAL? RODRIGO NUNES

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f you are reading this, this is probably your second once-in-alifetime crisis, and the memories of the first are still fresh. For me, the defining image of the 2008 financial meltdown was not panicking stock traders or the workers at bankrupt investment banks filing out of their offices with their personal belongings in boxes. It was Alan Greenspan, one of the chief architects of the deregulation that had made the subprime catastrophe possible, confessing to the United States Congress that he had been forced to revise one of his most fundamental assumptions: that the search for profit would never override the survival instincts of supposedly rational economic agents. Exposed in its very logic by market irrationality, stripped of its normative claims by the brazenly unmeritocratic denouement of the crisis, lacking a plausible new deal to offer to the vast majority of people— neoliberalism seemed to be hemorrhaging legitimacy from all sides. Like many around that time, I too found it hard to believe that it could survive the shock. Yet a decade and several further shocks later, neoliberalism staggers on. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, some were cautiously optimistic: surely the second major global crisis in just over a decade meant that real change might finally be in the cards. There

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were credible reasons for thinking this. The disease, this thinking went, would underline the risks of global capitalism’s long logistical chains, the importance of public services, and the many interdependencies among people and states, highlighting the value of cooperation. The virus was bringing the cold shock of the real back into a public debate increasingly contaminated by conspiracy theories and antiscientific fantasies. Finally, the ensuing economic downturn would throw rising inequality and the unresolved issues left by the Great Recession into sharper relief, resulting in conditions akin to those that irrupted into the Arab Spring and the 15M and Occupy movements in 2011. It is true that, in the first months of the pandemic, dogmas were temporarily jettisoned, and governments adopted policies— fiscal expansion, investments in public health, temporary suspensions of rents and evictions, and measures to guarantee wages and jobs—that would have been anathema just a month before. Even Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, who campaigned on an economic program of extreme market libertarianism, was pressured into creating a short-term basic income for the most vulnerable. From the start, however, these measures have come wrapped in demands for more austerity once things return to normal. What is more, they have been vastly compensated at the other end by policy that follows the 2008 playbook in pursuing the well-being of big corporations and financial institutions above all.1 In general, governments continue to minimize the scale of what is happening and how long it could go on so as to eschew a conversation about what would have to change were we to really protect people’s lives and livelihoods for the duration of a protracted crisis. Of course, powerful movements may still rise to demand a different solution this time. But it should be noted that the expectation that the virus would act as a solvent against fake news has unfortunately proved unfounded. If anything, what

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many considered irrefutable evidence seems to have accentuated irrational beliefs at the far-right end of the political spectrum. The gap between the realities inhabited by different parts of the population in places like Brazil and the United States appears to be so large now that, although these two countries are among those that have fared the worst during the pandemic, the leaders who oversaw this fiasco have retained much of their popularity even as they mobilized their social base against protective measures, scientific institutions, and health workers. For Trump’s followers, his merits were so indisputable that only a widespread conspiracy to rig the elections could explain his defeat. Bolsonaro, in turn, not only has managed to retain his base but in fact became more popular at a certain point during the pandemic than he had ever been. If there is one thing that the last decade ought to have taught us, it is that strong objective factors do not automatically translate into powerful movements, let alone into the spontaneous discovery of the “correct line” by the masses. This is usually the point at which the conversation might turn to fake news and propaganda, and it is undeniable that part of Bolsonaro’s and Trump’s surprising resilience stems from the fact that they possess a far more efficient informational infrastructure than the opposition to get their version of facts across. What I want to draw attention to here, however, is something else. To put it bluntly: if the far right has managed, through the use of disinformation or otherwise, to mobilize the antisystemic feelings of people who feel they have been failed and left behind, it is because those sentiments exist. It is only because many people sense that there is something profoundly wrong about the existing economic and political system that the far right’s message can take hold. Combating this message, therefore, is not just a matter of fighting deception; it is ultimately about addressing the issues

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that are at the source of those feelings. This cannot happen, however, for as long as we are in denial about those issues. Those who believed radical change was inevitable after 2008 underestimated two factors. First, we did not foresee the extent to which our political systems have become inured to running on low legitimacy. In the absence of any sustained challenge to their power, elites seem to trust their capacity to continually outmaneuver the majority of the population, regardless of whether or not they are trusted. Second, we failed to appreciate the sheer force of inertia produced by neoliberalism’s disciplinary mechanisms— none of which are more powerful than crisis. Although the way these mechanisms work in an age of austerity and uberization may have become starker, neoliberalism has contained a retributive aspect from the very start. Each new crisis it creates not only increases the economic coercion to which individuals are subjected; it also reactivates neoliberalism’s founding myth of being the rational, technocratic cure for the excesses of a previous period. If it seems that we are living in a new, punitive stage of neoliberalism,2 it is because calls to tighten our belts now come with only the faintest prospect of their ever being loosened again: whereas sacrifice was once presented as a means to a better life, it increasingly appears to be an end in itself—the naked imperative to adapt to diminishing expectations. This aspect reached a culmination with the pandemic, when official discourse in places like Brazil and the United States began to literally say that people had to choose between the economy and their lives. One of the reasons that Bolsonaro’s overall ratings have gone up 10 percent during the pandemic—despite him losing a sizable chunk of his upper-class support—is of course the very basicincome program that he initially opposed. Another reason, however, is that, for the poor voters who have come to approve of his

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government, framing the issue as a choice between life and the economy is objectively true. Since inequality makes quarantining an unattainable luxury for them, posing the situation as a choice between potentially dying from COVID and potentially starving to death showed that Bolsonaro understood their reality more profoundly than did the hypocrites telling them to stay at home when they had no option but to go to work. The painful reality is that, in cases such as this, the story that the far right tells effectively makes more sense to a lot of people than whatever the left is saying. This is because the far right’s story corresponds more clearly to the world as most people encounter it on a daily basis; it resonates with lived experience. For a lot of people, being told that life is a series of dark trade-offs in a deadly struggle over finite resources does not sound far-fetched at all. What is more, it resonates with the disciplining effect that these experiences actually have: the deeply entrenched feeling that this is all that is possible, that the fundamental facts of how we live could not change. For this is the great irony and paradox of far-right politics: what it proposes is a very conformist kind of revolt. Even as it purports to be an attack on elites—understood not in economic but in cultural and political terms, which explains how a billionaire could campaign as a champion of the common man in the United States—the future that the far right projects is very much like the present. As far as social structure is concerned, their vision is quite resigned to the status quo. What the far right promises is, in short, an antisystemic politics for people who do not really believe the system could change in any major way: everything stays essentially the same but yields better results for those who feel left out now. I believe this reveals a dimension of our present condition that is yet to be fully appreciated. I propose we call it “denialism,” but

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what I mean by that is a broader phenomenon than what people usually intend by that name. Of course, Holocaust denialism remains rife among the resurgent far right, as does climate denialism, whose methods have informed the right’s disinformation techniques; long-term scholars of denialism like Déborah Danowski have worked on these connections for some time.3 But what I have in mind here is not just the lies and stories spun by those we describe as “denialists” but rather how that deception relates to its public: the demand that it supplies. To be sure, the sheer volume of misinformation available today is a factor. Entire ecosystems of mutually reinforcing sources exist in order to interfere with individuals’ capacity to form sound beliefs, and the algorithms of our most popular online platforms constantly pull us toward those parallel worlds. (Something we failed to consider earlier on about the internet is that belief is statistical in nature: once the amount of available misinformation crosses a certain numerical threshold, it is hard for an entire social system of beliefs to bounce back.) But the processing of information is constrained by a number of cognitive biases that respond, in turn, to unconscious needs. The question we should ask ourselves, therefore, is: What needs do the far right’s narratives meet? We can start by noting that “denial” actually refers to two different things. When we call a member of the oil or tobacco lobby a “denialist,” we usually mean that they know that what they deny is real; in other words, that they are consciously lying. When we describe someone as being “in denial,” on the other hand, what we imply is that they are unconsciously protecting themselves from a traumatic experience or thought—what Freud called disavowal. This distinction immediately implies a potential relation between the two types of denial: one in which unconscious denial creates the demand that the “merchants of doubt”4 who trade in conscious denial come to fulfill. Should we not wonder, then, whether

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disavowal regarding the state of the world is a major component of the mood of our times, which the lies of the far right are highly effective at placating? To be sure, the far right does not paint a rosy picture of the present. On the contrary, theirs is a narrative of civilizational conflict, in which a fantasized spirit of the Crusades is retooled to fight such enemies as migrants, independent women, and Black people. What is remarkable about this narrative, however, is how it displaces the real threats looming on the horizon into distorted, fun-house-mirror versions of themselves. Thus, the problem with democracy is not political elites everywhere who are beholden to the interests of corporations and financial markets but a secret cabal of pedophiles planning to institute a world government. The problem with the economy is not that capital accumulation has become so autonomous from production as to make the very rich relatively indifferent to the vicissitudes of the real economy but that migrants and minorities are being given undue privileges. The problem with pandemics is not unbridled urbanization or the industrial production of low-quality food but a Chinese plot to stop the economy. Finally, the problem with the environment is not climate change but the weaponization of science by a political agenda bent on changing our lifestyles and preventing growth. Louis Althusser famously defined ideology as representing “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” If the reality of one’s conditions of existence becomes increasingly traumatic, should a flight further out into the imaginary not be expected? The truth behind the violent picture that the far right paints is that we are living in an age of diminishing horizons, in which everyday experience is increasingly colored by the diffuse sensation that, all things remaining equal, what the future holds is ever-worse conditions of reproduction for ever-more

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people. Climate change, a stagnating economy, growing precarization, the lack of democratic oversight, global pandemics—those are the things humming in the background or moving at the edges of our fields of vision. The far right addresses this atmospheric dread by at once recognizing that yes, we are facing an abyss, and fabulating an abyss that is less traumatic than the one we actually face as its causes and fixes, though painful, are comparatively simple. To the extent that they speak to this pervasive anxiety, the far right’s lies sound more truthful to many than any arguments claiming that things are generally getting better and this is only a bad patch that we will soon pull through. But they also do more. By generating identification with leaders that are constantly exposing the alleged lies and hypocrisies of the left, it offers obvious psychological rewards in the form of belonging, recognition, moral and intellectual superiority, and a sense of “winning.” More ominously, by locating the source of the problem in the misappropriation of resources by various others (countries, ethnicities, religions, cultures) and the solution in a fight to exclude those others from access to resources, the far right tells a story that is well adapted to a world in which inequality grows, resources decline, and those at the bottom have to compete for increasingly meager scraps. For people who already feel that they live on the edge of the state of nature, talk of civil war, however delirious it might actually be, could make perfect sense: it not only describes the world as they perceive it but offers them a certain competitive advantage by legitimizing moving first against the “enemy”—usually a direct competitor in the struggle for survival. As Theodor Adorno observed, it ultimately does not matter if one really believes that the other is the devil as long as one enacts the belief that the other must be defeated at all costs.5

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This is how the far right’s fantasies can be said to offer, in their own twisted way, a reasonable response to the insanity we are currently building. They lay out a “politics of antagonistic reproduction,” as Alberto Toscano summarized it,6 in a world in which social reproduction tends to become ever more antagonistic. Trying to reduce the interpellatory power of these fantasies to a mere effect of fake news is an attempt to disavow this basic fact. And because the attempt to evade the truth of our present predicament is a decisive affective dimension of our times, it should be no surprise that those who wish to resist mounting insanity and a politics that seeks to accelerate it would be entangled in disavowals of our own. We too are denialists; what else might we be in denial about? At the start, I alluded to the fact that the myth of spontaneity is a mirage that still leads many radicals astray. Obviously, no one denies that objective conditions have an effect on what people do and think or that sharp, sudden changes can transform the very limits of what is thinkable and doable at a given time. The problem is when people believe that, out of the various ways in which such transformations can go, they will inevitably go our way. By convincing us that a certain outcome can come to pass regardless of our efforts or capacity to produce it, this idea fulfills the obvious compensatory function of rationalizing away our organizational weaknesses and fear of becoming organized. But if banking on that outcome a decade ago was a mistake, it is even more so now, in an environment in which the far right is a real, active force. Only the capacity to make oneself present in people’s lives regularly and dependably can break through the informational redundancy that the right is able to produce by surrounding individuals with the same messages at church, on the radio, online, in their social lives, and so on. That demands organization.

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Liberals, on the other hand, often appear to be suffering from another illusion. It consists in drawing false symmetries between political extremes and idealizing the centrist consensus that prevailed until 2008. Ultimately, this attitude boils down to supposing that people have taken temporary leave of their senses but everything can carry on as before as soon as the sensible guys are in charge again. That mindset ignores that wealth distribution and political representation have become so lopsided as to demand an overhaul that cannot but seem radical compared to what we have now; and that, on an issue like the environment, the time for gradualism is long gone: winning slow is as good as losing. To the extent that it continues to ignore the magnitude of the tasks that lie before us and thus contributes to the conditions on which the far right thrives, this may well be the most dangerous form of disavowal around today.

NOTES 1. For a detailed (and infuriating) analysis of the rescue package passed by the United States Congress, see Robert Brenner, “Escalating Plunder,” New Left Review 123 (May/June 2020): 5–22. 2. Will Davies, “The New Neoliberalism,” New Left Review 101 (September/ October 2016): 121–34. 3. See Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World, trans. Rodrigo Nunes (Cambridge: Polity, 2016); Déborah Danowski, Negacionismos (São Paulo: n-1, 2018). 4. See Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). 5. Theodor Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gephardt (London: Continuum, 1997), 136–37. 6. Alberto Toscano, “Notes on Late Fascism,” Historical Materialism blog, April 2, 2017, http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/notes-late -fascism#_ftn25.

CAN THE CROWD SPEAK? WARREN BRECKMAN

In memory of David Graeber, 1961–2020

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n the rotten summer of 2020, the scale and persistence of Black Lives Matter protests—unfolding against centuries of racial injustice and the immediate life-and-death threat of statesanctioned violence—could make Occupy Wall Street look somewhat quaint, antiquated, and maybe even a bit self-indulgent. Yet we should not be too quick to forget the experience and, just as important, the form of Occupy Wall Street. In a time when the very survival of the American republic seems at stake, Occupy’s regenerative vision of direct democracy challenges us with the possibility of imagining and practicing democracy beyond the representative forms it takes in liberal regimes, and Occupy provokes us to reflect on the potential relationship between protest and moments of radical democratic founding. In such moments of creation, the voice should be collective and singular, heard not just in the chants of street protest but in lucid deliberation. Occupy began conventionally enough with rallies and marches but very quickly moved beyond familiar models of mass protest. Where those tend to accentuate the melting together of

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heterogeneous elements into one great body, Occupy resolutely refused to sacrifice diversity: “One No, Many Yeses.” And then there was the central role of speech. The movement’s unwillingness to articulate specific demands was a strategic refusal to speak to established power, but among participants, communication proliferated. Occupy was seen, at the time, as one of the first protest movements driven by social media. But even if individual blogs, Facebook, Tumblr, and live streaming channeled and networked a communicative flow, the primary scene of Occupy’s speech was in the physical and symbolically potent spaces it occupied. Space, itself, was at the core of the movement—contests over public and private uses of space; the need to claim space, if the right of assembly was to be exercised; and the struggle to reconfigure the materiality of space around the politics of assembly. The demand was not only for the rights of mobility and security in public space—“Whose streets? Our streets!”—but for a place imagined as an agora. Occupation moves by not moving. Occupy’s central action was the general assembly. In those assemblies, anyone could speak, but the rhythms of the people’s mic, a code of etiquette, trained facilitators, and a famous language of hand signals moderated the activity of speech. Occupy’s language went beyond chants, slogans, and demands of established power. In the daily practices that emerged, the movement tried to model an alternative form of sociality and politics, in which equality was the core value and fundamental telos of social and political relations. Occupy’s general assemblies, with their time-consuming and patient processes of discussion and consensus, invited some ridicule from the media, but participants saw these as crucial and transformative exercises in the practice of deep democracy. When members of the media tried to explain the aims of the Occupiers, they were frequently bemused by the apparent lack of

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leaders and official spokespeople. Yet this was not a failure of organization but a principle of organization—nonhierarchical, egalitarian, and open, its decision making operating horizontally among participants, rather than vertically between leaders and rank and file. Core participants pursued this project of forging a community founded upon equality and direct democracy with earnestness and, often, a touch of the carnivalesque. David Graeber, who was closely associated with the events leading up to the occupation, saw Occupy as an instance of prefigurative politics, which, as in other forms of direct action, seeks “to prefigure the genuinely free society one wishes to create. Revolutionary action is not a form of self-sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.” In this defiance, Occupy departed from standard leftist models of the crowd in action. Think of the Jacobin idea of the great revolutionary journée, exemplified by such moments as the storming of the Bastille or the return of the king and queen from Versailles. Or consider the Marxist-Leninist idea of a rank and file acting as an instrument of a vanguard leadership. In either of these traditional models, the crowd plays a role subordinated to leaders, who either steer the crowd’s actions according to decisions made elsewhere or hope to capitalize on a situation created by the sheer force and spectacle of spontaneous mass mobilization. Occupy Wall Street presented a contrary phenomenon. Even as Occupy defied the most familiar and deeply entrenched left-wing models of mass action, it drew from a deep historical well of dissident practices, above all, from anarchist politics and thought. Yet similar social experiments of consensus in the antiglobalization movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s were not represented outside of activist spheres because of security

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concerns. In his 2009 book, Direct Action: An Ethnography, Graeber writes, “Everyone is so worried about the dangers of legal repression that one can never talk about the concrete specifics of what happened at any particular meeting.” This concealment is particularly vexing because the meetings that built toward a mass action were, in some respects, more important than the actions. “Actions,” he wrote, “involve confrontations with hostile forces, [whereas] meetings are pure zones of social experiment, spaces in which activists can treat one another as they feel people ought to treat each other, and to begin to create something of the social world they wish to bring out.” Occupy, on the other hand, brought these concealed practices out into the open, making them visible to an unprecedented degree. In a sense, Occupy was like one long planning meeting, where the meeting became the primary mode of action. In this regard, Occupy Wall Street achieved something significant. For a few weeks, before police across America shut down the camps, Occupy broke out of the guarded activist realm and conducted a social experiment before the eyes of the world. Occupy did this, more or less, at the same moment that similar experiments became visible in other parts of the world—in 2011, among the Indignados in Spain, in Syntagma Square in Athens, in Italy, and in many parts of the Arab world. These rebellions were networked and learned from one another, and they, in turn, bore affinities to practices and ideas emerging from well over a decade of new modes of protest: antiglobalization and altermondialisation, including ATTAC, which began in France and spread to nearly forty countries; the World Social Forum, and the international resistance to the Iraq War in 2003. If the anarchist belief that freedom is contagious has any value, then such moments are the greatest propaganda of the deed.

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The idea of consensus has been at the heart of the activist culture that has evolved in many parts of the world since the 1990s. This spirit of consensus is not merely about reaching compromises, nor is it a return to a liberal idea of a modus vivendi between competing interests, as in the “bipartisanship” that Barack Obama haplessly espoused in the first years of his presidency. Nor, finally, does it rest on a claim to the kind of rationalist and universal consensus that continues to guide the political idealism of liberals, such as Jürgen Habermas. Rather, in keeping with the idea of democracy as creative and innovative, consensus, ideally, aims at synthesis, the merging of divergent standpoints but a merging that occurs within the experimental and experiential context of prefigurative politics, wherein the invention of further alternatives is a value that keeps consensus mobile. In his 2009 book on direct action, Graeber described a facilitation and consensus training session held in 2000. One participant named Jessica related that, in meetings, she sometimes had initial objections to a proposal, but, in the course of discussion, she accepted that just about everyone else thought it was a really good idea. I found there’s actually something kind of pleasurable in being able to just let go of that, realizing that what I think isn’t even necessarily all that important, because I really respect these people, and trust them. It can actually feel good. But, of course, it only feels good because I know it was my decision, that I could have blocked the proposal if I’d really wanted to. I chose not to take myself too seriously.

Drawing from Jessica’s observation, the group agrees to the formula: “Consensus disempowers egoism.”

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These self-aware interlocutors recognize that the spirit of consensus challenges a certain model of subjectivity, which one might readily equate with the modern idea of sovereign, selfpossessed individuality. The moment we speak of disempowering egoism, are we flirting with the old notion that, in mass situations, the individual gets absorbed into a kind of collective groupthink or transported into a collective hysteria? Such moments are the specters haunting the nightmares of right-wing opponents of popular politics; left-wing thinkers, by contrast, have often celebrated such moments as authentic expressions of group solidarity and the power of the people. The experience of weakened boundaries between self and other was clearly at play in the transporting emotional effects of the people’s mic. Yet this weakening did not mean loss of the self. After all, the emotion was linked to speech, and though it was an effect produced by the amplified speech of a chorus, it was not a chorus incanting slogans nor a simple call and response but, rather, a group voice relaying singular messages from individual speakers, messages that, once repeated, moved into a flowing exchange of ideas, opinions, and articulated feeling. Jessica, the woman who spoke of the pleasures of relinquishing her opinion to the force of the group, emphasized that this pleasure was inseparable from her belief that acceptance was her decision. The new community prefigured in Occupy is, after all, voluntary. In other words, the model of consensus-oriented process at the heart of Occupy Wall Street shares two equally compelling values—the acute, living sense of a community of equals and the desire for individual autonomy. Nine years have passed since Occupy Wall Street. Measured by its own most urgent goals, it cannot be said to have succeeded. Its demand for strong regulation of the financial sector and large-scale legal and tax reforms did not produce meaningful

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results. Indeed, new regulations on finance were timid at birth and largely rolled back under Donald Trump; Trump’s tax reform in 2017 intensified the concentration of wealth in the top 1  percent of Americans. Vestiges of the spontaneous organizational forms of Occupy lived on in some localized versions, such as Occupy Sandy, created after Hurricane Sandy as a mix of community activism and philanthropy, but the prefigurative emancipatory politics of Occupy Wall Street seems to have fizzled out. Yet Occupy broke through decades of silence about growing economic inequality in neoliberal America. It shattered a taboo that equated discussion of inequality with the stoking of the fires of class warfare by drawing a line—admittedly crudely—between the 99  percent and the 1  percent. That slogan has entered the vocabulary of American politics. What it lacks in statistical precision, it retains in symbolic power. It has facilitated the leftward swing of the Democratic party’s base and the remarkable successes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both of whom have been buoyed by a young generation whose comingof-age has been stamped by the renewal of political activism and socially critical discourse. Beyond these widely noted effects, Occupy Wall Street helped establish something of a new global idiom of protest. Just as Occupy drew inspiration from protests in Greece, Spain, and the Arab nations, Zuccotti Park sparked occupations in many cities across America and in 80 countries; a coordinated solidarity march in 900 cities worldwide on October 15, 2011, signaled the extraordinary global reach of Occupy. And, indeed, in subsequent years, the idiom of Occupy has reemerged in many contexts, including the high-profile examples of the Gezi Park occupation in Istanbul, the anti–World Cup movement in Brazil, and the prodemocracy movement in Hong Kong.

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Occupy’s model should not be swept aside, despite its fragility, nor should Occupy’s mix of utopian aspiration and actually practiced direct democracy be forgotten. Occupy knew that for its experiment to work, the crowd needed to remain real and gathered. Face-to-face encounter is crucial, as a greatly weakened Occupy movement learned after the police destroyed its camps throughout America. Yet it is equally important that effervescence be transformed into hard and painstaking political work, though, of course, Occupy aspired to be a politics that escapes the usual meaning of that term. Activists were right to hold onto their occupied ground, despite calls to pivot to constructive initiatives with a broader reach. They knew the significance of space and place. They knew that the internet and social media could not furnish a virtual agora. Occupy Wall Street shows that the constituent moment of democracy can and should include more than merely bodies gathered in public space; that the collective voice is not discovered but invented; that the spectacle of mass gathering and bodies in motion should give way to talking and listening; or, better, that these things are in a chiastic relation; and that, if the crowd is to speak in a democratic voice, then that voice must be both singular and plural. Those are the fundamental lessons of Occupy Wall Street. The movement’s great achievement was to briefly create a community that prefigured a robust democratic culture, linked its struggle to global struggles, and placed that experiment before the eyes of the world, where the contagion of freedom might do its work.

THE PANDEMIC’S BRIEF DISASTER UTOPIA DANIEL F. LORENZ AND CORDULA DITTMER

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n the spring of 2020, in many parts of Europe and beyond, the experience of the pandemic was often characterized not by the spread of infection (as in the case of northern Italy, for example) but by the interruption of everyday life caused by the lockdown. For many, the surreal situation may have been difficult to grasp. Yet it offered room for very different interpretations and perceptions, depending on social, economic, and cultural capacities and conditions. The drastic lockdown measures—widely imposed throughout Europe starting from mid-March 2020—were considered by most Europeans to be appropriate and necessary.1 Even so, these measures have been described (in public debates by experts and in quick-response studies  to assess the measures)2 as both a radical step and catastrophic experience, with hitherto unforeseeable secondary consequences. Such consequences included more general fears about the proportionality of the means used, especially with regard to the  curtailment of basic rights;3 fears of high psychological consequences, particularly for “vulnerable groups,” such as the elderly or mentally ill;4 an increase in domestic violence;5 rise in suicides; and unforeseeable consequences for  children and young people.6 Some German respondents—in surveys, for instance—even expressed “fear of death” and severe experiences of

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retraumatization, caused by the restrictions on individual freedom of movement.7 Yet besides these fears and negative consequences, the period of the pandemic was also described and felt by many people as a utopian situation. In this chapter, we begin to analyze these positive descriptions and experiences. First, for a more detailed understanding, we will refer to the literature on the emergence of new communities in disasters and on that of “disaster utopia.” Then we will briefly present literature on these phenomena and their significance that is relevant to our argument. Next we will outline different manifestations of the phenomena, specifically within the lockdown phase of the pandemic. Finally, these manifestations are discussed with regard to much-discussed findings of disaster research.

Finding Community in the Pandemic Since its beginnings, social science research into disasters has shown that disasters are not events with exclusively negative consequences, such as deaths, injuries, human suffering, and material losses. In fact, research has shown that positive and utopian experiences can also arise in and after disasters. An aspect of disasters described in the literature is the unexpected emergence of new social communities (even across class and racial boundaries), the “breakdown of racial and minority group barriers, and the acceptance of minority group members into new social roles.”8 This contrasts with stories of violence and antisocial behavior, which are widely reported postdisaster in the media, although such incidents are quite rare. In fact, in most cases during a disaster, people show solidarity with one another. They often develop a special sense of community,

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in the face of shared affliction by “the dangers and privations imposed by the disaster agent.”9 During the Louisville flood of 1937, Robert I. Kutak observed a “democracy of distress,” in which previously unknown commonalities between affected persons suddenly became apparent.10 In the context of the 1991 Oakland fire storm, Susanna Hoffman speaks of a “sense of unity.”11  Other terms used in this context are extraordinary community, communitas, community of sufferers, accidental community, or postdisaster solidarity.12 At the local level in the lockdown, new social communities emerged. Such communities include, for example, younger people helping older people with their shopping13 so that they would not expose themselves unnecessarily to the risk of infection. Despite physical borders, the exchange via digital media enabled new and other forms of community building. These took place within the immediate family and circles of friends but also through virtual exchange forums, streamed cultural events, or concerts.14 Entire neighborhoods created new  communities of solidarity as people met on balconies every evening to sing, make music, or applaud medical staff.15 These forms of special social cohesion under extremely adverse conditions represent important social science findings in disaster research. They illustrate that disasters—understood here in the sense of the disintegration of everyday social structures—do not simply destroy communities. Instead, as genuine social processes, disasters also have diverse productive social effects. Disasters, therefore, are always a reconfiguration of social order. But this reconfiguration can be experienced by affected actors in very different ways. In some ways, the pandemic experience was similar to what scientific discourse calls communitas, with its postdisaster solidarity. But the context of the pandemic is distinct in a few important ways.

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For example, the actors described in the aforementioned instances are not primarily people affected by the virus or even survivors confronted with common survival problems. Instead, they are people who were “only” affected by the lockdown measures, that is, at most secondarily. Moreover, the local communities that arise out of disasters from natural hazards, in most cases, necessitate immediate physical proximity on the ground, though may later survive virtually. In contrast, the communities formed out of the pandemic were restricted to minimal physical proximity or were entirely virtual from the outset. Although new forms of community were also created, interactions and community building often took place in more or less socially established forms: in neighborhoods, based on previous existing common interests, and on the basis of belonging to certain socioeconomic groups. Accordingly, it can be assumed that the communities created by the pandemic only included certain groups of people and were already based on some kind of preestablished social networks and resources. As such, these pandemic communities were selective and, to some extent, exclusionary: the sick, those who had lost relatives or friends, and marginalized groups were often not among them. Such selectivity is by no means intended to diminish these interactions and newly formed communities. But noting it does seem significant for the classification.

The Disruption of Everyday Practices as Source of Disaster Utopian Moments As disaster research has illustrated, the emergence of new communities in disaster—through the dissolution of routinized social

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order—is often also linked to utopian experiences. “Catastrophe comes from the Greek kata, or down, and streiphen, or turning over,” Rebecca Solnit writes in A Paradise Built in Hell. “It means an upset of what is expected and was originally used to mean a plot twist. To emerge into the unexpected is not always terrible, though these words have evolved to imply ill fortune.” Solnit goes on to explain that “disasters provide an extraordinary window into social desire and possibility, and what manifests there matters elsewhere, in ordinary times and in other extraordinary times.”16 The catastrophic experience can also be viewed in terms of the liminality of nondisaster rites of passage. Victor  W. Turner described this liminality as early as 1964, that is, the state of ambiguity and disorientation (“to ‘be in another place’ ”), in which the rules—and thus also the limitations—of everyday life are suspended.17  This otherwise unfamiliar freedom, without external control and social structuring, can and will be filled by the people affected by the disaster with their own rules and ideas. Such filling is a step they need to take in order to cope with it. “If paradise now arises in hell,” explains Solnit, “it’s because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.”18 This phenomenon is called a “disaster utopia” by Charles  E. Fritz, the pioneer of U.S. disaster research. A disaster utopia, explains Fritz, “provides an unstructured social situation that enables persons and groups to perceive the possibility of introducing desired innovations into the social system. . . . People see the opportunity of realizing certain wishes which remain latent and unrealizable under the old system. . . . They see the possibility of wiping out old inequities and injustices.”19 Surprisingly, the disruption of social order through the lockdown in the early phase of the pandemic evoked descriptions and

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feelings very similar to those in the aforementioned classical disaster-sociological analyses, including the destruction of the physical environment through natural hazards or infrastructure failures, such as blackouts. Suddenly, everyday life no longer functioned as usual, and routines had to be questioned. The situation gave way to creative freedom: “The flow of everyday life is disrupted, so that our habits, routines, and coping skills must now deal with it within the bounds of their inherent flexibility: The Covid-19 emergency has highlighted a number of consequences related to our human actions, and the disruption thereof.” The lockdown phase was described as deceleration of the world: “There is a strange ‘taste’ of the silence, of new ‘free’ time, and sense of distances and space: Everything now looked almost surreal and distant.”20 “This is the resonance mode: It is only in this mode that something new and unexpected can arise.”21 In terms of family and partnership, a “return to the essentials” was welcomed. So too was “finally” having space for the completion of postponed matters or simply having “time to read.”22 There were also hopes for  long-term positive effects on the environment and the impact of climate change.23 Thus, the situation was also interpreted as a “test for society and the system,” a “challenge for humanity,” in which there is also an opportunity for a major rethink. This was hopefully also linked to a  social transformation, which would have an impact beyond the crisis.24 Thus, in terms of utopian experience, as well as the emergence of new communities, parallels to catastrophic events became apparent in the lockdown. These similarities included the disruption of the rules and routines of everyday life; thrilling, sometimes even joyful experiences; and also the hope that a better world may emerge from the disaster.

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Here, too, these utopian experiences and hopes were certainly by no means possible for everyone. Discovering unknown freedoms in the lockdown required also being free of great loss, fear, or other negative experiences during that period. Utopia, in other words, required a certain minimum of physical and social security, as well as mental well-being is essential.

Dissolution of the Utopian Moments The utopian moments described here thus proved to be presuppositional and socially exclusive. For those who were able to experience them, however, they seem at the same time to be tied to a certain period of the pandemic’s development. But as lockdown measures were successively lifted during the summer, the dystopian moments—such as the huge loss of jobs and income, increase in physical abuse, or large deficits in education—became visible. Moreover, the utopian moments for those who experienced them also increasingly faded away. What returned to the public consciousness was the perpetual catastrophic consequences of the pandemic, as well as everyday life, with its rules, structures, and limitations. Disputes  about the appropriate infection protection measures; struggles for compensation payments; outbidding in the competition to reopen; discussions regarding new lockdowns: all these and more have engulfed the utopian experiences and hopes.25 Similar effects, in other disasters, were observed by Fritz decades ago: “The community of sufferers . . . wanes and begins to disintegrate, as people return to normal pursuits and the process of social differentiation begins to manifest itself.”26  At the same time, it also became evident that the lockdown by no means

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eliminated social inequalities. Instead, the utopian experience was, in most cases, revealed to be only made possible by privileges, social status, and socioeconomic resources. At times, the lockdown even exacerbated inequalities.27 More than a million people have already died. Infections are still on the rise. Unemployment figures have risen considerably. At present, it remains completely unclear what human losses will be tied to the pandemic and what economic slumps will follow.

Beyond Disaster Utopian Moments in the Current Pandemic Out of this discussion, various questions arise about how, in the pandemic, moments of disaster utopia relate to the broader dystopia. Yet there is also the question, more generally, about the place and significance of utopias in disasters. The pandemic raises questions that need to be examined empirically in the future. It remains to be analyzed, for example, how these developments will change the disaster utopian moments in hindsight. Will there be a romanticized nostalgia of this first phase of the pandemic, as in other disasters, or will these experiences be taken over by completely dreadful memories and narratives? In addition, there are conceptual questions. How did the pandemic’s more detailed localization of the disaster utopian moments compare to other disasters? These might include, for example, those disasters caused by natural hazards, where political measures to contain and limit damage have a different significance in the public’s perception. As has been the case in other disasters, the pandemic has included the phenomenon of disaster utopian moments. But as a

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global event, it also has the potential to provide entirely new and instructive insights into this area of social science disaster research.

NOTES 1. Damien Bol et al., “The Effect of Covid-19 Lockdowns on Political Support: Some Good News for Democracy?“  European Journal of Political Research, May 19, 2020. 2. Katja Schulze et al., “Die SARS-CoV-2-Pandemie aus Sicht der Bevölkerung. Ergebnisse einer Bevölkerungsbefragung“ (working paper, Katastrophenforschungsstelle, Freie Universität Berlin, 2020). 3. Leïla Choukroune, “When the State of Exception Becomes the Norm, Democracy Is on a Tightrope.” The Conversation, April 27, 2020. https:// theconversation .com /when-the -state -of-exception-becomes -the -norm -democracy-is-on-a-tightrope-135369 4. Anna Carthaus, “Coronavirus and Mental Health: ‘We Are Not Made for Social Isolation,’ ” Deutsche Welle, April 1, 2020. https://p.dw.com/p /3aGDl. 5. UNFPA, with contributions from Avenir Health, Johns Hopkins University, and Victoria University (Australia), “Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Family Planning and Ending Gender-Based Violence, Female Genital Mutilation, and Child Marriage,” United Nations Population Fund, April 27, 2020. https://www.unfpa.org /sites/default/files/resource -pdf/COVID-19_impact_brief_for_UNFPA_24_April_2020_1.pdf. 6. Julia Vergin, “Coronavirus Crisis: Children Suffer Most from Being Locked Down.” Deutsche Welle, April 29, 2020. https://p.dw.com/p/3bVuu 7. Schulze et al., “Die SARS-CoV-2-Pandemie aus Sicht der Bevölkerung.” 8. Charles  E. Fritz, Disaster and Mental Health: Therapeutic Principles Drawn from Disaster Studies (Newark: University of Delaware, 1996), 33. 9. Fritz, “Disaster and Mental Health, 29. 10. Robert  I. Kutak, “The Sociology of Crises: The Louisville Flood of 1937,” Social Forces 17, no. 1 (1938): 72. 11. Susanna M. Hoffman, “The Worst of Times, the Best of Times: Toward a Model of Cultural Response to Disaster,” in The Angry Earth: Disasters in Anthropological Perspective, ed. Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna M. Hoffman (London: Routledge, 1999), 134–55. 12. Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Penguin, 2009); Steve Matthewman,

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16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

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Disasters, Risks, and Revelation: Making Sense of Our Times (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Charles E. Fritz, “Disaster,” in Contemporary Social Problems: An Introduction to the Sociology of Deviant Behavior and Social Disorganization, ed. Robert K. Merton and Robert A. Nisbet (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1961), 651–94; Liisa  H. Malkki, “News and Culture: Transitory Phenomena and the Fieldwork Tradition,” in Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, ed. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Oakland: University of California Press, 1997), 86–101; and Anthony Oliver-Smith, “The Brotherhood of Pain: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives on Post-disaster Solidarity,” in The Angry Earth: Disasters in Anthropological Perspective, ed. Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna  M. Hoffman (London: Routledge, 1999), 156–72. Lauren Lee, “This Student Created a Network of ‘Shopping Angels’ to Help the Elderly Get Groceries During the Coronavirus Pandemic,” CNN, March 30, 2020, https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/17/us/coronavirus-student -volunteers-grocery-shop-elderly-iyw-trnd/index.html. Clare Ansberry, “Zoom Reconnects Family and Friends in the Coronavirus Pandemic—but Will It Last?,” Wall Street Journal. July  21, 2020, https://www.wsj.com /articles /zoom-reconnects -family-and-friends -in -the-coronavirus-pandemicbut-will-it-last-11595379600; and Anastassia Boutsko, “Coronavirus: Igor Levit Fights Isolation with Streaming Concerts,” Deutsche Welle, March 26, 2020. https://p.dw.com/p/3a5yg. Stephanie Höppner, “Coronavirus Solidarity in Germany Is on the Wane but Not Gone,” Deutsche Welle, July 1, 2020. https://p.dw.com/p/3ebNm; and Matt Fidler, “Balcony Spirit: Hope in Face of Coronavirus—in Pictures,” The Guardian. March  19, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com / world /gallery /2020 /mar / 19 / balconies - sites - hope - coronavirus - in -pictures. Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, 6, 10. Victor W. Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” in Symposium on New Approaches to the Study of Religion: Proceedings of the 1964 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Association, ed. June Helm (Seattle: 1964), 4–20. Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, 10. Fritz, “Disaster,” 685. Deborah Giustini, “Theorising— Crises? What Crises? Conceptualising Breakdowns in Practice Theory,” European Sociologist, June  2, 2020, https://www.europeansociologist .org /issue -45-pandemic -impossi bilities-vol-1/theorising-crises-what-crises-conceptualising-breakdowns.

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21. Ute Schönfelder, “ ‘We Can Quit the Rat Race’: The Sociologist Prof. Dr Hartmut Rosa Analyses the Impact of the Corona Lockdown on Individuals and the Society,” Friedrich Schiller University–Jena, April  3, 2020. https://www.uni-jena.de/en/200403_Rosa_Interview. 22. Schulze et al., “Die SARS-CoV-2-Pandemie aus Sicht der Bevölkerung.” 23. Roger Harrabin, “Climate Change: Could the Coronavirus Crisis Spur a Green Recovery?,” BBC News, May 6, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news /science-environment-52488134. 24. Interview with Martin Voss, “If We Choose to, We Can Lay the Groundwork to Shape the Future,” Freie Universität Berlin, March  31, 2020, https://www. fu - berlin . de /en /featured - stories /research /2020 /200326 -corona-interview-voss/index.html. 25. Jenny Hill, “Coronavirus: Germany Divided as States Lift Lockdown,” BBC News, June  2, 2020, https://www.bbc .com /news/world-europe -52879321. 26. Fritz, “Disaster and Mental Health,” 30. 27. Isaac T. Tabner, “Five Ways Coronavirus Lockdowns Increase Inequality,” The Conversation, April  8, 2020, https://theconversation.com/five -ways-coronavirus-lockdowns-increase-inequality-135767.

BUILDING A SOCIETY THAT VALUES CARE KATHRYN CAI

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t the hospice where her aging mother was receiving care, Liz O’Donnell had a revelation. A marketing executive at the time, O’Donnell had an exchange with another woman—a hospice nurse named Peg—that changed the way she thought about care. “Listen, I get it,” Peg said to O’Donnell. “You’re the sole breadwinner. I’m a single mother of two teenage girls. I get it.” That scene appears in Working Daughter: A Guide to Caring for Your Aging Parents While Making a Living, the book O’Donnell wrote to explain the unique challenges of caregiving today, particularly for women. Although Peg disappears into the background of O’Donnell’s own caregiving story, Peg’s brief but transformational interjection speaks to the countless other care workers who support families—and the lack of protections these carers experience. A single mother working as a hospice nurse, Peg very likely has limited resources to take care of her own family even as she cares for other families. And so the reality of limited resources faced by family caregivers like O’Donnell also extends to the caregivers who support these families. This scarcity of resources determines who can even be recognized and included in the already marginalized narrative of

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caretaking. Only by expanding that narrative—and fully recognizing the crucial labor that care workers perform—can we hope to support all of those who give care and, thus, strengthen our collective well-being. The COVID-19 pandemic reveals how the fragility of our health-care system—as well as the utter lack of policy protections to account for adequate health care, family care, and sustainable livelihoods—endangers us all. Though acutely visible now, the lack of support for caregiving is an ongoing and increasingly shared struggle, as demonstrated by the raft of new books that tackle the subject. Some of these books fit squarely—if usefully—into the genre of self-help for family caregivers: O’Donnell’s Working Daughter, for instance, or Donna Thomson and Zachary White’s The Unexpected Journey of Caring: The Transformation from Loved One to Caretaker. Others address the crucial role that paid caregivers are increasingly playing and the broader need for structural care in communities of color. These include Ai-jen Poo’s The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America and Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot. Taken together, these books reveal the burdens placed on individual caregivers when structural supports are lacking and suggest how we might build a world in which caregiving is valued and protected work. In the midst of our current crisis, this work becomes both more important and more difficult than ever as families are left to find ways to manage on their own and care workers are afforded little protection to safeguard their own health. These extreme circumstances can help us to recognize more clearly than ever how care work enables society as we know it to function. Our ability to

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go to work, for example, might rely on our capacity to entrust those we love to the care of others. Our collective capacity to weather crises depends on protecting the people who do this work, but our policies do not reflect this crucial interdependence. It is time to open our eyes to the care work that already surrounds and supports us every day and to call for social policies that will fundamentally enlarge our individual and collective capacities to care for ourselves and our loved ones. These policies could include, for instance, universal family care. After all, this capacity to care—to afford childcare, to take time away from work when our loved ones are ill, and to provide an end of life filled with love—is one we all desire. Q Q Q

Feminists of color have long called for a radical expansion of care in our society. This can be seen in movements led by women of color that have demanded an end to the systemic harms their communities face. We can understand these demands as a call to care about their communities in material ways, supported by large-scale shifts in culture and policy. It is time for us to take up these calls to build caring structures. But we can do this only if we understand how the thriving of communities that are not our own is, nevertheless, integral to our own well-being. In the case of care work, this expansion would entail, first, recognizing the care work that the Pegs of the world do, and not just the work of the O’Donnells. Second, such an expansion would require material support for all caretakers— both the Pegs and the O’Donnells—in the form of fair wages, job protections, health care, and insurance coverage.

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The call to value and protect care work is a feminist project. Family caregivers (like O’Donnell) are overwhelmingly women. Similarly, the overwhelming majority of people who provide paid care (like Peg) are also women: indeed, women make up 85–90 percent of this sector, which includes home care, other forms of residential care, and nursing-home care. The majority of these carers are women of color, and one in four of them is an immigrant. The work that both family caregivers and paid carers do is intertwined. And this interdependence shapes the health and well-being of individuals and families across generations, as children, parents, and elders all feel the effects of either strained or ample resources. The feminist project of making caregiving more sustainable therefore benefits us all. The dire condition of elder care during the COVID-19 pandemic perfectly illustrates this fundamental relationship between both sets of women caregivers. The crisis has exposed the vulnerability of our elders, alongside that of the relatives and professionals who take care of them. Elders have been exposed to COVID-19 in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, and those still living independently may not have caretakers to assist with procuring essential items or staving off loneliness. Family members who care for elderly relatives are left with little outside support. Meanwhile, nursinghome workers and home health aides are often paid meager wages and are uninsured. While all of these people often come from very different racial and class backgrounds, the acute dangers of the pandemic show us their shared precarity. In the case of care work, building care into our policies and institutions means adequate compensation and protections for paid care workers through initiatives like the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.1 It also means policies like universal family care, which would fund family care at all stages of life, not just elder care.2

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This crisis also makes clear that we must shift our priorities and enact caring policies in all facets of our everyday lives. This crisis can teach us, if we’re willing to learn, that building equitable policies in health, housing, education, and environmental sustainability could create the resilience to collectively nourish us in the long term. Q Q Q

With the U.S. population aging, COVID-19 has only revealed an increasingly urgent need for support. The number of U.S. residents aged sixty-five and older is only growing, and these elders express a clear preference for aging and dying at home.3 A 2019 study found that between 2003 and 2017, “natural deaths” that occurred at home came to surpass those in hospitals by a small percentage.4 This shift has also drawn attention to the demands that families must meet to provide care. While many families want to take care of their aging loved ones at home, they are faced with enormous emotional and practical challenges. Many family caregivers are not trained to provide constant physical and emotional support, and family caregivers commonly express their lack of preparation for the range and intensity of the tasks they must perform.5 A growing body of practical guides for family caregivers addresses everything from structuring a daily routine to advocacy techniques for promoting families’ interests. These titles, written in the style of self-help manuals, reflect the reality that most caretakers must find a way to adapt themselves to the enormous task of providing daily care for loved ones. In Working Daughter, O’Donnell shares her growing rage as her duties pile up while she fails to receive the necessary emotional

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support from her family and friends and accommodations from her workplace. Eventually, however, O’Donnell begins to see “the upside”: the self-worth, closer relationships, and sense of meaning that can come with caregiving. This is called the “caregiver’s gain” in social science and physiological research. This upside is a particular encapsulation of the meaning that can emerge from caregiving relationships, which are important parts of the human experience. We should not instrumentalize this meaning, however, as personal consolations for the inadequacy of social policies to support caregivers. O’Donnell’s section entitled “Keep Choosing” is about continuously embracing the role of caregiver. The suggestion to “begin with the end in mind”—adapted from Steven Covey’s business self-help book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People—prompts the reader to visualize the rewards of caretaking. “Speak your truth” gives the reader permission to “complain, wail, sob, or whine” but then instructs them to “move on.” While the desire for such concrete steps is understandable, O’Donnell’s focus on the individual does nothing to change the larger structures that make caregiving an unsupported individualized burden in the first place. The stress on personal transformation can also take a more relational and philosophical approach. Thomson and White’s The Unexpected Journey of Caring describes the ongoing act of caring for a loved one as a shared journey—a project of building a world together. For them, “looking into the eyes of a loved one and touching her hand is the beginning of resolve to harness love as the fuel for building a new kind of future together.” Thomson and White engage more deeply with the fundamental value of relationships that take shape through caregiving. But again, their

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focus on the private caregiving relationship assumes a family caregiver and does not address broader social structures. While these volumes vary in tone, it is clear that the individualized focus comes by way of necessity, since family caregivers are provided neither social recognition nor material support. O’Donnell does mention the potential changes to tax and work policies that could support caregivers. But she notes that “until those things happen, caregivers must advocate for themselves and prepare for their roles.” The need for such individualized answers is understandable, given the current conditions of care work. But focusing solely on adjustments that individual family caregivers can make obscures the larger shifts that must take place in order for care work to receive the support and recognition that would benefit us all— both caregivers and those cared for. Q Q Q

While the labor activist Ai-jen Poo articulates the incredible strain on families who provide care, she does not blindly reinforce these families’ responsibility to meet and accommodate this strain. Instead, Poo concludes that “family members cannot possibly be relied upon to meet all the needs of the largest generation of older Americans ever.” She argues that “breaking the isolation that has come to define the family caregiver experience, once and for all,” will require protecting and recognizing the other caregivers who are becoming increasingly involved in family care. Many families already rely on paid care, whether in the form of nursing homes or home health aides. The number of people in this profession increased from 2.9 to 4.5 million between 2008 and 2018. The sector is expended to grow by another 1.3 million

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people from 2018 to 2028, adding more jobs than any other sector in the U.S. economy.6 While the work of care is extremely exacting, many of these workers are paid very little for their work: 15 percent of direct care workers in the United States live in poverty, and 44 percent live in low-income households.7 We must continue to ask ourselves whose rights and needs are recognized in calls for structural change. As the activist and cultural critic Mikki Kendall argues, mainstream feminism continues to privilege the interests and voices of a small subset of women who are mostly white and well off. Kendall’s Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot calls on the mainstream feminist movement to examine its own exclusions, which are often rooted in racist and classist biases about the kinds of issues that are important or worthy of attention. Kendall builds on the legacies of feminists of color to articulate how housing, hunger, and gun violence are important feminist issues that affect women in particular ways. These issues also shape the lives of the women whom we call on to care for family members. The lack of investment in their well-being impedes our capacity to build a more caring world in which everyone has the ability to lead healthy and sustainable lives. Such a world requires wages that provide for more than just the bare minimum of daily sustenance, job protections, and the ability to live in safe neighborhoods free from the toxicity of violence and environmental pollutants. We must recognize that care is central to making our lives not just livable but joyful and sustainable. Creating a sustainable approach to care will require that we center a commitment to mutual thriving—recognizing our shared stake in building more equitable and resilient social structures that enable care. The current state of elder care illustrates the burdens that we are asked to take on individually when there are no structural

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provisions for care. The stories that are emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic should alert us to the urgent need to build a different world: one in which we see the myriad types of work that go into maintaining daily life as valuable and dignified labor, worthy of our respect and protection.

NOTES 1. Alexia Fernández Campbell, “Kamala Harris Just Introduced a Bill to Give Housekeepers Overtime Pay and Meal Breaks,” Vox, July 15, 2019, https:// www .vox . com /2019 /7 /15 /20694610 / kamala - harris - domestic -workers-bill-of-rights-act. 2. Ai-jen Poo and Benjamin  W. Veghte, “The Big, Feminist Policy Idea America’s Families Have Been Waiting For,” New York Times, June 23, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/opinion/universal-family -care-caregiving.html; “Universal Family Care: Big, Bold, Doable,” Caring Across Generations, June 27, 2019, https://caringacross.org /universal -family-care-big-bold-doable/. 3. Andrew W. Roberts, Stella U. Ogunwole, Laura Blakeslee, and Megan A. Rabe, “The Population 65  Years and Older in the United States: 2016,” United States Census Bureau (October  2018); Mark Mather, Linda  A. Jacobsen, and Kelvin  M. Pollard, “Population Bulletin: Aging in the United States,” Population Reference Bureau 70, no. 2 (2015). 4. Sarah H. Cross and Haider J. Warraich, “Changes in the Place of Death in the United States,” New England Journal of Medicine 381 (2019). 5. Ángela María Ortega-Galán et al., “The Experiences of Family Caregivers at the End of Life: Suffering, Compassion Satisfaction, and Support of Health Care Professionals,” Journal of Hospice and Palliative Nursing 21, no. 5 (2019). 6. Kezia Scales, “It’s Time to Care: A Detailed Profile of America’s Direct Care Workforce,” PHI (2020), https://phinational.org /resource/its-time -to-care-a-detailed-profile-of-americas-direct-care-workforce/. 7. Scales, “It’s Time to Care.”

REBUILDING SOLIDARITY IN A BROKEN WORLD ERIC KLINENBERG

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ew York City, where I live, was one of the most dangerous places on Earth during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. At the peak of the outbreak’s first wave, hospitals were overwhelmed. There were shortages of basic health supplies, including surgical gowns, masks, and ventilators. Nurses wore garbage bags to protect themselves. A convention center, a church, a tennis complex, and patches of Central Park were converted into emergency medical facilities. So many people died that hospital morgues could not handle the bodies, and refrigerated trucks were called in to store those that remained. By midApril  2020, New York City alone had already registered more COVID-19 cases, and nearly as many deaths, as the entire United Kingdom and more deaths than Germany, Iran, Japan, and South Korea, combined. Like most disasters, the coronavirus outbreak hit the city’s poorest people and places much harder than it hit middle-class and affluent communities. The number of cases and fatalities in the heavily immigrant, working-class neighborhoods in central Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn dwarfed those in Manhattan’s toniest districts. The reasons were hardly mysterious. Most working-class New Yorkers had no choice but to keep working.

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They live in smaller residential units and are more likely to share their homes with extended family members or roommates. They also shop in smaller, more crowded commercial outlets and congregate in tighter gathering places, where viruses spread easily. They cannot spend weeks in their apartments, nor stock up on food and medical supplies. Prosperous New Yorkers, however, had resources to shelter at home, jobs that allowed them to work remotely, health care that helped them manage dangerous “underlying conditions,” and second homes in the country where they could escape. The affluent shared a city with the poor and working class, but they effectively lived in another world. New York’s early and devastating outbreak transformed urban life. Orders to stay at home and maintain social distance have blocked conventional forms of democratic engagement. The traditional public sphere—libraries, plazas, university campuses, union halls, and the like—shuttered. Instead of streets and sidewalks, bookstores and dance clubs, we had Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, and Zoom. But from the early days of the pandemic, one could also see hopeful signs of movement toward more democracy, more solidarity, and a greater recognition of how we all benefit from building common ground. Something extraordinary happened in the midst of this catastrophe. Thousands of medical workers from around the country volunteered to assist in New York City’s urgent-care units, at considerable risk to their own health. Teenagers, stuck at home, began teaching elderly relatives and neighbors how to use communication technologies that ease the pain of isolation. Healthy young adults delivered meals and medications to people too old or sick to go outside. Cleaners, cashiers, grocers, police officers, and delivery workers turned out daily to fulfill responsibilities that we deemed essential. For months, each workday ended with a celebration of the city’s civic culture and irrepressible will to be together.

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At seven p.m., New Yorkers in every neighborhood opened their windows and banged pots and pans, a brash but joyful expression of gratitude to health-care workers. It’s impossible to measure the pain and suffering we endured during 2020, and we know that more hard times are on the way. But 2020 also awakened a spirit of social solidarity that we desperately need. Reckoning with the health crisis and its aftermath will force us to reconsider who we are and what we value. In the long run, it could help us rediscover the better version of ourselves. Rekindling social solidarity will require changing the way we conceive of and organize the neighborhood, the workplace, the city, and the nation.

Neighborhood We can begin where we live because our neighbors and neighborhoods shape us in ways that are invisible, especially when we spend so much time on our screens. If the people who live nearby are amiable, we feel safe and secure in parks and playgrounds; we socialize on our sidewalks and stoops. We develop a sense of shared responsibility, and look after one another. We knock on our older neighbor’s door during heat waves, drop off food during a pandemic. If the people who live near us are menacing, however, we grow cautious and distrustful. When the sociologist Elijah Anderson did fieldwork in poor, segregated neighborhoods in Philadelphia, he found that high levels of crime led old people and families with children to hunker down, even at life stages where neighborly support can help. Children, we know, are deeply affected by local conditions. Living near high-achieving peers and having easy access to

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libraries, community centers, good schools, and athletic fields pave the way to successful cognitive, emotional, and physical development. Living close to violence delays child development or worse. Parents, even the most loving and supportive, can only do so much on their own. Today, though, poor people in segregated neighborhoods are not alone in their dissatisfaction with the social life and mutual support systems in their communities. Across the country, in cities and suburbs, residents of solidly middle class and even affluent neighborhoods complain that people don’t engage with or take care of one another like they once did. Some of this is nostalgia, a longing for idealized communities that were never as tight as we imagine. But the best research on neighborhoods tells us that there is a fundamental truth behind this feeling: contemporary Americans are much less likely to spend time with neighbors. No matter how many friends we have on Facebook or how often we meet colleagues for drinks after work, there’s a hole at the center of our experience. Americans have so much to gain from building solidarity in the neighborhood, but doing this requires some critical thinking about what’s wrong with the way we’ve been treating one another, and about how our fantasies of independence compromise our well-being. Today, too many Americans feel ashamed to admit that they need anyone. They’d rather be miserable, stressed, and sick than let anyone think they can’t take care of themselves.

Work During the twentieth century, labor unions and the social contract that they won through successful organizing were the key

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to expanding the American middle class and the many privileges that came with it: Eight-hour workdays. Weekends off. Paid vacations. Subsidized housing. Pensions. Health insurance. As they crafted the New Deal, policy makers recognized that the United States would not recover from the Depression unless government supported workers and not just capital. The Wagner Act of 1935 established that the federal government would promote the interests of labor. A suite of legal labor protections followed, as did historic growth in the U.S. economy, increased longevity, and dramatic improvement in most Americans’ quality of life. For decades, “solidarity” was American labor’s guiding principle and rallying cry. It was, at root, an expression of workers’ material interest in organizing to gain power and leverage in a nation that had always privileged capital and disdained regulatory oversight. It was also based on workers’ collective experiences beyond the shop floor, in the union halls, local pubs, sports leagues, and “workingman’s neighborhoods” that shaped civic life and politics. On their own, as the songwriter Ralph Chaplin famously put it, in “Solidarity Forever,” individual workers are vulnerable. Together, they are invincible: “The union makes us strong.” By the late 1950s, this confidence proved unwarranted. Large industrial firms discovered that they could boost profits by building factories in developing countries where workers would accept lower wages and fewer benefits than those negotiated by American unions. Millions of people and thousands of communities, especially in the Rust Belt, were devastated by deindustrialization. The pact among capital, labor, and the state came undone, and in place of solidarity came a renewed faith in meritocracy and free markets, the same invisible hand that led the United States into the first Gilded Age and the Great Depression. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, America generated extraordinary new wealth, but it was hardly shared.

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The top 1 percent of Americans accumulated massive fortunes as executive pay surged. Elite professionals flourished. The middleclass population plummeted. Blue-collar communities saw conditions deteriorate dramatically. In white, working-class areas, life expectancy declined for the first time in history because of what the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton called “deaths of despair” from addiction and suicide. Black and Latinx communities were left out of the prosperity that, through the magic of regressive policies, trickled up. In 2017, Congress passed one of the steepest tax cuts in American history, with the lion’s share of the benefits going to the very same people who already own the lion’s share of the wealth. Republicans in the nation’s capital are not the only source of the problem. Consider liberal, enlightened Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurs build lush corporate campuses, with athletic facilities, biking paths, yoga studios, outdoor lounges, coffee bars, and gourmet cafeterias offering free food and amenities to their workers—except those who do menial jobs. At Google, cafeteria workers are not welcome to eat at the tables they serve, janitors cannot play in the game rooms they clean, drivers cannot ride the Google bus. Less educated people, primarily people of color, are Silicon Valley’s second-class citizens. They get low wages. They’re ineligible for high-end health-care and retirement plans, and excluded from free childcare. It’s impossible to build solidarity amid extreme inequality. Just as, during the Depression, the New Deal reset the relationship between capital and labor and evened out the distribution of American wealth, so too must the rebuilding of America after COVID-19. Solidarity will once again be essential. How do we restore it at work? We must rebuild solidarity across ethnic, racial, religious, political, and class lines. We survived the pandemic by shifting

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the workplace from the office to the den or kitchen table, from the conference room and water cooler to Zoom. After the crisis, many corporations will want to keep us there—home, alone, with our own private infrastructures, not together in the shared physical spaces where relationships grow. Rebuilding solidarity requires us to resist this. In the coronavirus, we’ve learned to recognize the value of labor—and laborers—that many of us took for granted. Janitors. Clerks. Doormen. Delivery workers. Food servers. Farm workers. We’re not only more aware of our interdependence, we’re also more attuned to our shared vulnerability and strengths. Our challenge is to honor and sustain that knowledge, so that it’s reflected in public policies around taxation and social protection, as well as in our interactions. We could also adopt new models for building solidarity between workplaces and communities, so that labor unions organize to improve not only wages and working conditions but also the lives of the people they serve. In recent years, teachers’ unions across the country have made surprising gains through campaigns to “bargain for the common good.” In Los Angeles and Chicago, for instance, teachers’ unions have partnered with community organizations to demand more resources for students in “high-needs” schools and impoverished neighborhoods. These initiatives helped teachers find new allies in their communities, new sources of collective strength. We’re better off working together.

City In the ways that matter most, the pandemic has been a divisive and unequal experience for urban residents. In New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Milwaukee, Blacks and Black neighborhoods

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have had significantly higher incidences of the virus than whites and white neighborhoods, and higher mortality rates, too. What these and most other American cities have in common is that they are organized around segregation—by race and by class, often both at once. Segregation is an engine for sustaining inequality of all kinds. In recent years, as the United States has grown more unequal, both class segregation and the gap between conditions in poor and wealthy neighborhoods within American cities have increased. In the COVID-19 crisis, though, segregation did not fully separate city residents from one another. Infectious diseases do not respect race and class boundaries, and dangerous conditions in one neighborhood endanger others nearby. Extremely unequal and spatially divided cities are unhealthy for everyone. That’s why so many affluent urban Americans decided to flee. After the pandemic, urban Americans will find themselves in a new state of uncertainty. Commercial corridors will be devastated. Restaurants, retailers, and long-running community organizations will be closed. Public institutions—universities, libraries, parks, playgrounds, even hospitals—will need massive bailouts to reopen. Public transit systems will face enormous deficits. Tens of millions of city dwellers will need jobs. Here, again, we can expect Silicon Valley to suggest a remedy. More online shopping. More home deliveries. Virtual libraries instead of neighborhood branches. Digital happy hour instead of drinks at the bar. That would be a disaster. We long for our gathering places, regardless of the shape they take. If, at first, we may struggle to readjust to physical proximity, never before have we so appreciated the value of shared spaces. It’s hard to imagine how we can revive our cities and our economy without investing in new infrastructure. Social infrastructure, widely and fairly distributed, must be part of that plan.

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What’s Next When the pandemic ends—and it will end—we must reorient our politics and make substantial new investments in public goods and public services. We need not become less communal. Instead, we will be better able to see how our fates are linked. The cheap burger I get from a restaurant that denies paid sick leave to its cashiers and kitchen staff makes me more vulnerable to illness, as does the neighbor who refuses to wear a mask in a pandemic because our public school failed to teach him science or criticalthinking skills. The economy—and the social order it helps support—will collapse if the government doesn’t guarantee income for the millions of workers vulnerable to unemployment. Young adults will struggle if government doesn’t significantly reduce or, better, cancel their student debt. There has never been a better moment for recognizing the depth and scale of our interdependence, the extent to which our fates are linked. There has never been a better time for reviving the New Deal project that rescued America from the modern historical event most similar to the current crisis, the Great Depression. But what we need now is necessarily different because building solidarity in a society as open and diverse as the contemporary United States requires genuine inclusion, of women and people of color, of white working-class communities ravaged by suicide and addiction, of manual laborers and farm workers who are every bit as “essential” in ordinary times as they are in a crisis. It also requires revitalizing the ecosystems that sustain all life on this planet, which is why the next New Deal must be green.

PART IX Further Reading

PANDEMIC SYLLABUS DAVID S. BARNES, MERLIN CHOWKWANYUN, AND KAVITA SIVARAMAKRISHNAN

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isease has never been merely a biological phenomenon. Instead, all diseases—including COVID-19—are deeply social phenomena: in their origins, in their spread, in their impacts, and in the responses they engender among populations. Disease can also run into and catalyze larger historical currents, as the anger coming to a boil in the past weeks has shown us. Yet more often than not, such a social, holistic view is rarely found in the public discourse around a disease. Instead, ever since the “bacteriological revolution,” almost a century and a half ago, we have found ourselves prisoners of a rigid set of formulaic scripts, which constrain our ability to understand, respond to, and prevent disease. We have silenced the voices of those who sought better health for all through social justice and universal economic opportunity. We have entrusted exclusive authority over health to the specialized knowledge, laboratories, and institutions of scientific medicine. And we have not reflected on the underlying assumptions embedded in the terms and institutions we use to mediate disease. Such narrowness has had real consequences. But the current moment has renewed and forced reflection. At some point in early 2020, COVID-19 ceased being a distant rumor or something

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that those in Western countries could banish as just a SARS-like “Eastern thing” (itself a byproduct of selective memory, given SARS’s impact on Toronto). Rather, COVID-19 suddenly became an all-consuming fact of life around the world, with anxious people casting about frantically for protection, advice, or reassurance. These people turned, of course, to doctors, hospitals, and public-health authorities. But to a surprising and frankly disorienting extent, they also turned to historians. Scholars accustomed to being politely ignored or used mostly to provide narrative background music now found themselves earnestly beseeched for words of wisdom that would help us make sense of this profound upheaval. Geographic variation in 1918 flu death rates, the successes and failures of vaccination campaigns, and the lessons to be extracted from HIV/AIDS, among other episodes, suddenly became objects of public fascination. We are three historians of public health who focus on different time periods and geographic areas. We have constructed this syllabus to provide a range of voices and perspectives that give context not just to COVID-19 but also to the medical, scientific, cultural, political, and economic structures that shape this and other pandemics. They are structures that, beyond biology alone, are often what make pandemics selectively—and unequally—deadly. We designed this syllabus as a challenge to status quo thinking on disease. We did so with the knowledge that it would be perfectly possible to create a dozen such credible and entirely different reading lists. This particular syllabus is anchored by four goals. Our first goal is to scrutinize narratives of technoscientific salvation. Common public celebratory stories of illness—plague, yellow fever, cholera, influenza, smallpox, and, yes, COVID-19— have been produced within power structures that often serve entrenched interests, in particular notions of universal, technological interventions and Western biomedicine as “saviors” that

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can ignore the politics of context. By circumscribing “public health” as a narrow domain that occurs outside larger societal currents, this status quo script has limited our ability to think bigger in our responses to all manner of health threats, everything from “ordinary” chronic diseases to terrifying pandemics like COVID-19. Shedding light on an equally troubling narrative—a selfcelebratory triumphalism that often colors accounts of publichealth victories—is our second goal. This syllabus certainly catalogues some big wins of the public-health enterprise when it comes to infectious-disease control. But it also shows that “public health” is deeply rooted in xenophobic and racist ideology, which blamed disease outbreaks on contamination by foreigners or racialized outsiders; in theological beliefs, which punished moral transgression with divine retribution in the form of illness and death; and in a Victorian perspective, which views the world through the class-inflected lens of medical mandarins. Public health was rooted in a colonizing enterprise and tied to the deeply unequal operations of global capital. These priorities were affirmed, validated, and sustained through public-health research institutions, tropical-medicine laboratories, and interventions in colonized societies that segregated and contained locals; limited medical cures and therapies to saving lives in the military; offered sanitary cordons to a ruling elite; and focused on trying to keep “productive” labor in plantations and factories healthy to serve the interests of imperial trade. Put another way, public health has been the contingent story both of progress and of exclusion and stigma. And its victories have often only been partial, built on the backs of the marginalized and leaving many people behind. Exclusion and inclusion point to a third goal: worldliness. Much of the English-language writing on COVID-19 has been provincial. One mark of that is obvious: such writings’ accelerated

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appearance once COVID-19 reached American shores. We have tried hard here to avoid a “West and the Rest” approach while not ignoring the outsize importance of the United States and Western Europe in shaping—for better or for worse—the public-health agenda. Ultimately, COVID-19 underscores that a health injury to one country is a health injury to all. A reading list should reflect that. The syllabus’s last purpose is rooted in who we are. As faculty in the Health and Societies major at the University of Pennsylvania and in the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, we teach students who aspire to all kinds of careers and approach health from a number of disciplinary angles. We’ve included bits of our own work here so that you can get a sense of the different ways we approach things, warts and all. Our syllabus is underpinned by a strong belief that the long view effectively equips readers to leave with a sober understanding of public health’s many limitations but also a sense of positive and liberatory alternatives. Besides bringing to greater awareness what much of society—including even some publichealth professionals—would rather forget, history also, in the words of the historian Christopher Hamlin, allows one “to go back to the beginning, to recover possibility in the past,” and “to open our eyes to the possibilities we confront in the present.”1 Last but not least, we acknowledge that a great deal of public-health history writing still needs to uncover and pay attention to themes and issues of intersectionality of power relating to race, ethnicity, class, and gender. May these readings serve as an initial step to open up further debate on both everyday and systemic injustices relating to disease risks and access to health as these have been exposed and exacerbated by COVID-19. The overwhelming majority of readings here are thus by historians and about the past, though the syllabus is dotted with

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cross-disciplinary selections, too. Our hope is that this list— like any good course—is merely a starting point, one that spurs readers to embark on their own lines of inquiry. To that end, we want to acknowledge and embrace other efforts toward that goal, like the  #CoronavirusSyllabus  spearheaded by Alondra Nelson, which spans a wider disciplinary scope and covers a larger gamut of questions, and thank Dr. Nelson for her support of this effort.2 We proceed in three parts. The first three weeks provide the reader with a vocabulary and heuristics for parsing pandemics and the underlying social determinants and inequities that determine their decidedly nonrandom course. The next six weeks examine public health and infectious-disease control in a number of cross-national contexts and time periods, highlighting indisputable triumphs—and noting the asterisks that must be placed next to them. The final two weeks come full circle, moving away from case studies and into two sets of readings that consider uncertain paths forward, both for public health generally and COVID-19 specifically.

Week One: The Rhetoric of Contagion and Demics “Disease” is an elusive entity. It is not simply a less than optimum physiological state. The reality is obviously a good deal more complex; disease is at once a biological event, a generation-specific repertoire of verbal constructs reflecting medicine’s intellectual and institutional history, an occasion of and potential legitimation for public policy, an aspect of social role and individual—intrapsychic—identity, a sanction for cultural values, and a structuring element in

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doctor and patient interactions. In some ways disease does not exist until we have agreed that it does, by perceiving, naming, and responding to it. — Charles E. Rosenberg (1992)

Bob Crawford and Ben Sawyer, “The Outbreak Narrative with Priscilla Wald,”  The Road to Now  (podcast), April  6, 2020, https://www.osirispod . com / podcasts / the - road - to - now / the - road - to - now -167 - the - outbreak -narrative-w-priscilla-wald/. Charles E. Rosenberg, “Explaining Epidemics” and “Framing Disease: Illness, Society, and History,” in Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Week Two: Inequality and the Patterning of Disease Bruce  G. Link and Jo Phelan, “Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Disease,” in “Forty Years of Medical Sociology: The State of the Art and Directions for the Future,” edited by Mary L. Fennell, extra issue, Journal of Health and Social Behavior (1995). James Colgrove, “The McKeown Thesis: A Historical Controversy and Its Enduring Influence,” American Journal of Public Health 92, no. 5 (2002). Simon Szreter, “Rethinking McKeown: The Relationship Between Public Health and Social Change,” American Journal of Public Health 92, no. 5 (2002). Allan Mitchell, “An Inexact Science: The Statistics of Tuberculosis in Late Nineteenth-Century France,” Social History of Medicine 3, no. 3 (1990). David S. Barnes, “The Rise or Fall of Tuberculosis in Belle-Epoque France: A Reply to Allan Mitchell,” Social History of Medicine 5, no. 2 (1992).

Week Three: The Impact of “Germ Theory” in Cross-National Context Nancy Tomes, “The Making of a Germ Panic, Then and Now,” American Journal of Public Health 90, no. 2 (2000).

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Mary P. Sutphen, “Not What but Where: Bubonic Plague and the Reception of Germ Theories in Hong Kong and Calcutta, 1894–1897,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 52, no. 1 (1997). Michael Worboys, introduction to  Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Maynard W. Swanson, “The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900–1909,” Journal of African History 18, no. 3 (1977). Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “Plague Politics and Epidemic Politics in India, 1896–1914,” in Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence, edited by Terence Ranger and Paul Slack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Week Four: Prior Governmental Responses to Epidemics Technical solutions for disease control have a variety of complex social implications. —Evelyn Hammonds (1999)

Isaac Chotiner, “How Governments Respond to Pandemics Like the Coronavirus,” interview with Richard  J. Evans on 1892 cholera epidemic in Hamburg,  New Yorker, March  18, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/news/q -and-a/how-governments-respond-to-pandemics-like-the-coronavirus. Howard Markel, Harvey B. Lipman, J. Alexander Navarro, et al., “Nonpharmaceutical Interventions Implemented by US Cities During the 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic,” JAMA 298, no. 6 (2007). Steven Burg, “Wisconsin and the Great Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 84, no. 1 (2000), https://content.wisconsinhistory .org /digital/collection/wmh/id/43606. Mridula Ramanna, “Coping with the Influenza Pandemic: The Bombay Experience,” in The Spanish Influenza Epidemic of 1918: New Perspectives, edited by Howard Phillips and David Killingray (London: Routledge, 2003). Katherine A. Mason, “Reflecting on SARS, 17 Years and Two Flu-Like Epidemics Later,”  Somatosphere, March  16, 2020, http://somatosphere.net/2020 /sars-covid19-coronavirus-epidemics-reflections.html/.

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Week Five: Eradication (I)—Victory Over Pathogens Donald Henderson, “Smallpox Eradication: A Cold War Victory,”  World Health Forum 19 (1998), https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/55594. Smallpox oral histories, Global Health Chronicles, created by the David  J. Sencer CDC Museum at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, https://www.globalhealth chronicles .org /items / browse?type=17&collection=1&sort_field= Dublin+ Core%2CTitle. Sanjoy Bhattacharya, “Reflections on the Eradication of Smallpox,” Lancet 375, no. 9726 (2010).

Week Six: Eradication (II)—the Underside of Triumph Sanjoy Bhattacharya and Rajib Dasgupta, “Smallpox and Polio Eradication in India: Comparative Histories and Lessons for Contemporary Policy,” Ciência e Saúde Coletiva 16, no.  2 (2011), https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php ?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1413–81232011000200007&lng=en&tlng=en. Paul Greenough, “Intimidation, Coercion, and Resistance in the Final Stages of the South Asian Smallpox Eradication Campaign, 1973–1975,” Social Science and Medicine 41, no. 5 (1995). Christian W. McMillen and Niels Brimnes, “Medical Modernization and Medical Nationalism: Resistance to Mass Tuberculosis Vaccination in Postcolonial India, 1948–1955,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52, no. 1 (2010). Anne-Emanuelle Birn, “Small(pox) Success?,”  Ciência e Saúde Coletiva 16, no. 2 (2011).

Week Seven: Racism, Xenophobia, and the Rhetoric of Blame Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793:

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And a Refutation of Some Censures, Thrown Upon Them in Some Late Publications (1794), https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/ bookviewer?PID=nlm:nlm uid-2559020R-bk#page/4/mode/2up. Rana Asali Hogarth, “The Myth of Innate Racial Differences Between White and Black People’s Bodies: Lessons From the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” American Journal of Public Health 109, no. 10 (2019), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6727282/. Alan  M. Kraut, “Immigration, Ethnicity, and the Pandemic,”  Public Health Reports 125, suppl. 3 (2010), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles /PMC2862341/. Natalia Molina, “Borders, Laborers, and Racialized Medicalization Mexican Immigration and US Public Health Practices in the 20th Century,” American Journal of Public Health 101, no. 6 (2011), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov /pmc/articles/PMC3093266/. Samuel Roberts, “ ‘Where our Melanotic Citizens Predominate’: Locating African Americans and Finding the ‘Lung Block’ in Tuberculosis Research in Baltimore, Maryland, 1880–1920,” in CrossRoutes, the Meanings of “Race” for the 21st Century, edited by Paola Boi and Sabine Broeck (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 2003). Nayan Shah, “Cleansing Motherhood: Hygiene and the Culture of Domesticity in San Francisco’s Chinatown, 1875–1900,” in Gender, Sexuality, and Colonial Modernities, edited by Antoinette Burton (London: Routledge, 1999).

Week Eight: The Lessons of HIV/AIDS (I)—from Stigmatization and Death Sentence to Chronic Disease Undoubtedly, the lack of action, from the general public on down to the president, was and is directly tied to the conception of AIDS as a disease of white gay men, black and Latino/a drug users, and other marginal people engaged in “immoral behavior.” — Cathy Cohen (1999)

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National Institutes of Health, episode of the Medicine for the Layman series on AIDS, featuring an interview with Anthony Fauci (1984), https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=pzK3dg59TuY. John Iliffe, “Origins” and “Containment,” in The African AIDS Epidemic: A History (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005). Steven Epstein, “The Construction of Lay Expertise: AIDS Activism and the Forging of Credibility in the Reform of Clinical Trials,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 20, no. 4 (1995). ACT UP Oral History Project, coordinated by Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman. http://www.actuporalhistory.org /index1.html. Paul Farmer, “From Haiti to Rwanda: AIDS and Accusations,” in Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader, edited by Haun Saussy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). David Ho, interview for “The Age of AIDS,” Frontline, PBS (transcript drawn from four interviews conducted in New York and China in April and June  2005 and March  2006), https://www.pbs.org /wgbh/pages/frontline /aids/interviews/ho.html.

Week Nine: The Lessons of HIV/AIDS (II)—Progress on Whose Backs? Who Got Left Behind? Emily Bass, “How to Survive a Footnote: AIDS Activism in the ‘After’ Years,” n+1, no. 23 (2015). https://nplusonemag.com/issue-23/annals-of-activism/how -to-survive-a-footnote/. Randall M. Packard and Paul Epstein, “Epidemiologists, Social Scientists, and the Structure of Medical Research on AIDS in Africa,”  Social Science and Medicine 33, no. 7 (1991). Julie Livingston, “AIDS as Chronic Illness: Epidemiological Transition and Health Care in South-Eastern Botswana,” African Journal of AIDS Research 3 no. 1 (2009). Robert E. Fullilove, “Did Mass Incarceration Cause the HIV/AIDS Epidemic in the US?,” TEDMED Day CUMC video, July 6, 2013. https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=W316-girLzw. Gretchen Gavett, “Timeline: 30 Years of HIV/AIDS in Black America,” Frontline, PBS, July 10, 2012, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/timeline -30-years-of-aids-in-black-america/.

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Week Ten:“Public Health”—Where from and Where Next? Public health belongs to social justice quite as much as to civil engineering or epidemiology. It is inescapably, not incidentally, a matter of political philosophy in the grandest and broadest sense. — Christopher Hamlin (1998)

Christopher Hamlin, “Could You Starve to Death in England in 1839? The Chadwick-Farr Controversy and the Loss of the ‘Social’ in Public Health,” American Journal of Public Health 85, no. 6 (1995). Anne-Emmanuelle-Birn, “Gates’s Grandest Challenge: Transcending Technology as Public Health Ideology,” Lancet 366, no. 9484 (2005). David  S. Barnes, “Historical Perspectives on the Etiology of Tuberculosis,” Microbes and Infection 2, no. 4 (2000). Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, “The Return of Epidemics and the Politics of Global-Local Health,” American Journal of Public Health 101, no. 6 (2011), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3093284/. Evelyn Hammonds and Susan Reverby, “Toward a Historically Informed Analysis of Racial Health Disparities Since 1619,” American Journal of Public Health 109, no.  10 (2019), https://ajph.aphapublications.org /doi/10.2105 /AJPH.2019.305262.

Week Eleven: COVID-19 and the Path Forward Alex de Waal, “New Pathogen, Old Politics,”  Boston Review, April  3, 2020, http:// bostonreview.net /science -nature /alex- de -waal -new-pathogen - old -politics. Andrew Liu, “ ‘Chinese Virus,’ World Market,” n+1, March 20, 2020, https:// nplusonemag . com / online - only / online - only / chinese - v irus - world -market /. Aruna Roy and Saba Kohli Davé, “Analysing Kerala’s Response to the COVID19 Pandemic: When People and Governments Come Together,” Economic and Political Weekly, May 2, 2020.

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Merlin Chowkwanyun and Adolph L. Reed Jr. “Racial Health Disparities and Covid-19: Caution and Context,” New England Journal of Medicine, May 6, 2020, https://www.nejm.org /doi/full/10.1056/ NEJMp2012910. Thomas Levenson, “The Term  Wuhan Virus  Treats COVID-19 as a Chinese Scourge—and Ignores an Ugly History,”  The Atlantic, March  11, 2020, https://www.theatlantic . com /ideas /archive /2020 /03 /stop -trying -make -wuhan-virus-happen/607786/.

NOTES 1. Christopher Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800–1854 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 340–41. 2. Olivia B. Waxman, “Professors Are Crowdsourcing a #CoronavirusSyllabus. Here’s the History They Think Should Be Used to Teach This Moment,” Time, March 27, 2020, https://time.com/5808838/coronavirus -syllabus-history/

CONTRIBUTORS

EDITORS is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History and director of the Cities Collaborative at New York University. He is author or editor of eight books, including The Origins of the Urban Crisis (1996) and Neoliberal Cities (2020). CAITLIN ZALOOM is professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University. She is the author of Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost (2020) and an editor of the Public Books volumes Antidemocracy in America: Truth, Power, and the Republic at Risk (2019) and Think in Public: A Public Books Reader (2019). She is editor in chief of Public Books. THOMAS J. SUGRUE

CONTRIBUTORS is assistant professor of political theory and gender at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include democratic theory, especially deliberative democracy, multiculturalism,  theories of public sphere and dialogue, and inequality and inclusion.

AFSOUN AFSAHI

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is an associate professor of science, technology, and society and a faculty member in sociology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is the author of The Technological State in Indonesia: The Co-Constitution of High Technology and Authoritarian Politics (2012) and the editor of The Sociotechnical Constitution of Resilience: A New Perspective on Governing Risk and Disaster (2018). Aside from being a scholar, Amir is a documentary filmmaker. His latest film is Healing Fukushima. WARWICK ANDERSON, MD, PhD, is Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance, and Ethics in the department of history and the Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney, and an honorary professor in the School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne. He has written extensively on the histories of disease ecology and social medicine and, recently, on COVID-19. GIANPAOLO BAIOCCHI is professor at New York University’s Gallatin School. and director of NYU’s Urban Democracy. A sociologist and ethnographer, he is interested in questions of politics and culture, critical social theory, civic life, and participatory democracy. His most recent book is Popular Democracy: The Paradox of Participation  (2016), which he coauthored with Ernesto Ganuza. SIMON BALTO is an associate professor of history and African American studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the author of Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (2019). DAVID S. BARNES is an associate professor of the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle Against Filth and Germs (2006) and The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (1995). SULFIKAR AMIR

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is assistant professor of political science at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and coeditor of Democratic Theory. GAUTAM BHAN is the senior lead of academics and research at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru. He works on urban poverty, inequality, housing, and social protection, with a focus on cities of the global south. He is author of In the Public’s Interest: Evictions, Citizenship, and Inequality in Contemporary Delhi (2016) and is coeditor of the Routledge Companion to Planning in the Global South (2019). KEISHA N. BLAIN is associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, president of the African American Intellectual History Society, and an editor for the Washington Post’s “Made by History” section. She is the author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle of Freedom (2018) and Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America (2021). YARIMAR BONILLA is director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College and professor in the department of Africana and Puerto Rican/Latino Studies at Hunter College and in the PhD program in anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (2015) and coeditor of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (2019). WARREN BRECKMAN is the Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of  Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy  (2013);  European Romanticism  (2007); and  Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (1999) and coeditor of The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought (two volumes, 2019). EMILY BEAUSOLEIL

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is a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow and Public Goods Policy Strategist at the Partnership for Working Families. In 2019 she received her PhD in English from the University of California, Los Angeles, where her doctoral work examined narratives of care work in transpacific circuits of capital. H. JACOB CARLSON is an urban and political sociologist, focused on democracy, housing, and changing cities. His current research examines the various causes and consequences of gentrification and displacement and the relationships between the two. Carlson is currently a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University’s Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences and Population Studies and Training Center. MIGUEL CENTENO is the vice dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and professor of sociology at Princeton University. His many books include War and Society, coauthored with Elaine Enriquez (2016), and Global Capitalism: A Sociological Perspective, coauthored with Joseph Cohen (2010). He is currently working on book on the sociology of discipline. MICHELLE CERA is a doctoral candidate in sociology at New York University. Her research examines the intersection of politics, social media, and community. Most recently, she has been involved in several projects on the social life of the pandemic. ÉRIC CHARMES is a research director at EVS-RIVES, University of Lyon, ENTPE. A specialist in urban studies and urbanism, he has worked extensively on street uses, public spaces, gated communities, and residential territorialization. Today, he focuses on the peripheries of large metropolises. MARCIA CHATELAIN is professor of history and African American studies at Georgetown University and the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning book,  Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America (2020) and South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration (2015). KATHRYN CAI

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is the Donald Gemson Assistant Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Health. He is author of the forthcoming book All Health Politics Is Local: Battles for Community Health in the MidCentury United States. He is the principal investigator for ToxicDocs.org, a National Science Foundation–funded repository of millions of once-secret documents on industrial poisons. ERICK CORRÊA is doctoral student in social sciences at Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP) in São Paulo, Brazil. He has edited 68: como incendiar um país (’68: how to set a country on fire; 2018) and Insurgência Viral: autodefesa sanitária e despotismo ocidental (Viral insurgency: health self-defense and Western despotism; 2020). MARINE AL DAHDAH is a sociologist and a CNRS fellow at Center for the Study of Social Movements. Her research focuses on health policies in Asia and Africa and, more particularly, on digital health in India, Ghana, and Kenya. RIKKI J. DEAN is postdoctoral fellow in democratic innovations at the Institute for Political Sciences, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany. MUSTAFA DIKEÇ is professor of urban studies at the Paris School of Urban Planning and visiting researcher at Malmö University. His books include Badlands of the Republic (2007); Space, Politics, and Aesthetics (2015); and Urban Rage (2017). He is one of the editors of  International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. CORDULA DITTMER is a senior research assistant at the Disaster Research Unit (DRU), Freie University of Berlin, Germany; an affiliate of Academy of Disaster Research (AKFS); and lecturer at the Berlin Fire and Rescue Academy. She has conducted extensive field research on disasters in Uttarakhand, India; northern Greece; and Germany. MERLIN CHOWKWANYUN

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is associate professor of politics at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra, Australia. She is author of Mending Democracy: Democratic Repair in Disconnected Times (2020). MATHIEU FERRY is a doctoral candidate at the Observatoire Sociologique du Changement (Sciences Po), and he is affiliated with the Laboratoire de Sociologie Quantitative (GENESCREST). His dissertation centers on the social stratification of food practices in India. ALFONSO FIERRO is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation retraces the history of urban utopianism in modern literature and avant-garde architecture in postrevolutionary Mexico (1920–50). JULIA FOULKES is professor of history at the New School and is the author of several books, including A Place for Us: West Side Story and New York (2016); To the City: Urban Photographs of the New Deal (2011); and Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey (2002). As a 2021–22 fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, she is at work on a book about the rise of New York as a capital of culture in the twentieth century. JEAN-PAUL GAGNON is a social and political philosopher and associate professor of democracy studies at the University of Canberra. His four books include Young People, Citizenship and Political Participation: Combatting Civil Deficit? (2017). He is founding coeditor of the journal Democratic Theory. SOPHIE GONICK is an assistant professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University. She is the author of Dispossession and Dissent: Immigrants and the Struggle for Housing in Madrid (2021). Her work has been featured in leading urban SELEN  A. ERCAN

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studies and geography journals, including Antipode and IJURR: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. She is the urbanism section editor of Public Books. ISABELLE GUÉRIN is senior research fellow at IRD- CESSMA, associate at the French Institute of Pondicherry, and former member of the School of Social Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. She specializes in the political and moral economics of money, debt, and finance. Her current work focuses on the financialization of domestic economies. GILLES GUIHEUX is a professor at Université de Paris, a researcher at CESSMA, and a senior member of the IUF. He has focused on the conditions for the emergence of the private sector in Taiwan and in mainland China and on the construction of the social figures of the entrepreneur and the consumer. He recently published La République populaire de Chine (2018). MARGARET MORGANROTH GULLETTE is the author, most recently, of the prize-winning Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People (2017) and is a resident scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. She is finishing a book, American Eldercide: How It Happened, How to Prevent It Next Time. ANDY HOROWITZ is associate professor of history and the Paul and Debra Gibbons Professor in the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University. He won the Bancroft Prize for his book Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 (2020) and is coeditor, with Jacob Remes, of Critical Disaster Studies: New Perspectives on Vulnerability, Resilience, and Risk (2021). RENYOU HOU is an anthropologist and a postdoctoral fellow at CEPED (Université de Paris IRD). His research focuses on the transformations of the institution of marriage in contemporary rural China. ERIC KLINENBERG is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at

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New York University. His most recent book is Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (2018). He has written extensively on cities, climate change, culture, media, disasters, and health. ANDREW LAKOFF is professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, where he also directs the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life. He is the author of Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry (2006); Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency (2017); and, with Stephen  J. Collier, The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security (2021). MANON LAURENT is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Université de Paris and in political science at Concordia University in Montreal. Her work explores state-society relations in urban China. Her thesis focuses on how the commodification of educational resources and the integration of China into a global normative space transform parents into political actors. SOPHIE LEWIS is a writer and occasional translator living in Philadelphia. She is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (2019) and many essays. She is also a member of the Out of the Woods collective, which published Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis (2020). JUN LI is on the faculty in the French Language Department at the University of Qingdao (Shandong) and a doctoral candidate at CESSMA at the Université de Paris. Her dissertation focuses on the return to China of Chinese students graduating in France. EVAN LIEBERMAN is the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa at MIT. He is the author of two scholarly books, Race and Regionalism in the Politics of Taxation (2003) and Boundaries of Contagion: How Ethnic Politics Have Shaped Government Responses to AIDS (2009). Lieberman is the

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founding director of the MIT Global Diversity Lab and directs the MIT-Africa Program. JULIE LIVINGSTON is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. Her most recent publications include Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable Told from Southern Africa (2019) and Collateral Afterworlds (coedited with Zoe Wool), a special issue of Social Text. Livingston is a member of the NYU Prison Education Program Research Collective researching carceral debt. DANIEL F. LORENZ is a senior researcher at the Disaster Research Unit (DRU) at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He has conducted research in Germany, India, Japan, South Korea, Sierra Leone, Portugal, and Greece, among other places. NATALIA MOLINA is a professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a 2020 MacArthur Fellow. She is the author of two award-winning books, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (2014) and Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (2006). Her next book, Placemaking at the Nayarit : How a Mexican Restaurant in Los Angeles Nourished Its Community, is slated for release in 2022. RACHEL NOLAN is an assistant professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. A historian of modern Latin America, she is currently completing a book on the history of international adoption from Guatemala. JOANNE RANDA NUCHO, an anthropologist and filmmaker, is the author of Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power (2016) and assistant professor of anthropology at Pomona College. Her films have screened in various venues, including the London International Documentary Film Festival in 2008.

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is professor of modern and contemporary philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. He is the author of  Organisation of the Organisationless  (2014) and  Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization (2021). MARGARET O’MARA is the Howard and Frances Keller Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington, where she teaches and writes about the political and economic history of the modern United States. Her most recent book is The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (2019). SHERIHAN RADI has more than ten years of working experience with international organizations and projects under the umbrella of the United Nations (UN) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and is currently affiliated with the Brandenburg University of Technology, CottbusSenftenberg (Germany). QUENTIN RAVELLI is a sociologist with the CNRS in Paris, France. He is the author of books and essays about economic crises, the pharmaceutical industry, and popular social movements. He also directed Bricks, a prize-winning documentary film about the struggle against debt in Spain. JACOB A. C. REMES is a clinical associate professor of history in New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where he directs the Initiative for Critical Disaster Studies. He is the author of Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era (2016) and the coeditor, with Andy Horowitz, of Critical Disaster Studies (2021). MAX ROUSSEAU is a CNRS research fellow in political science and assistant professor at the INAU in Rabat, Morocco. He is particularly interested in marginalized territories in northern as well as southern countries. RODRIGO NUNES

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is professor of urban planning, social welfare, and geography and the Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles. Roy’s current research is concerned with “racial banishment,” the expulsion of working-class communities of color from cities through racialized policing and other forms of stateorganized violence. ANNE-VALÉRIE RUINET studied at EM Lyon, Sciences Po Paris, and holds a master’s degree in Chinese studies from INALCO. She is general delegate of the foundation of an engineering school. After several years in Beijing, where she was responsible for the development of Sciences Po in China, she studies China’s strategy for attracting talents in higher education in connection with the emergence of the country’s scientific power. DAVID SCHMIDT is an author, podcaster, multilingual translator, and homebrewer who splits his time between Mexico City and San Diego, California. JOAN WALLACH SCOTT is professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Columbia University Press published the thirtieth anniversary edition of Gender and the Politics of History in 2018. Her most recent books are Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom (2019) and On the Judgment of History (2020). KAVITA SIVARAMAKRISHNAN is a public-health historian of South Asia with a focus on the politics of health, medicine, and science in the global South. She is an associate professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and the author of  As the World Ages: Rethinking a Demographic Crisis (2018). JEFFREY AARON SNYDER is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Studies at Carleton College. He is the author of ANANYA ROY

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the book Making Black History: The Color Line, Culture, and Race in the Age of Jim Crow (2018). He is a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines such as Boston Review, the New Republic, and the Washington Post. KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR is professor of African American studies at Princeton University and the author of several books, including Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (2019), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history, and From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016). Taylor is also a contributing writer at the New Yorker. ADAM TOOZE is Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University, where he also directs the European Institute. An economic and political historian, he is author of many books, most recently, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018) and Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World’s Economy (2021). SOLEDAD ÁLVAREZ VELASCO is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Houston. She holds a PhD in human geography from King’s College London. She is the author of Chiapa’s Southern Border: The Human Wall of Violence (2016) and Between Violence and Invisibility (2012), an analysis of Ecuadorian unaccompanied children and adolescents in the migratory process to the United States. GOVINDAN VENKATASUBRAMANIAN is a sociologist in the Department of Social Sciences at the French Institute of Pondicherry (India). Over the last twenty-five years, he has been working on a large range of issues in the fields of rural geography, rural-urban linkages, migration, livelihood, labor, finance, and environment while paying specific attention to gender and caste inequalities. NEHA VORA is associate professor of anthropology at Lafayette College. She is the author of Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian

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Diaspora (2013) and Teach for Arabia: American Universities, Liberalism, and Transnational Qatar (2018) and coauthor of Beyond Exception: New Interpretations of the Arabian Peninsula (2020). PRISCILLA WALD, R. Florence Brinkley Chair of English at Duke University, is the author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative  (2008) and  Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (1995). She is working on a monograph tentatively entitled “Human Being After Genocide.” XIAOWEI WANG is a writer, designer, and coder. Wang’s first book, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside, was published in 2020. In their role as creative director at  Logic Magazine, their work encompasses community-based and public art and tech projects. They are working toward a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. GUOBIN YANG is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is associate dean of graduate studies at the Annenberg School, director of the Center on Digital Culture and Society, and deputy director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. He is the author of three books, The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (2009); The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (2016); and The Wuhan Lockdown (2021). YE GUO is a doctoral candidate at the Université de Paris. Her research explores the social and historical aspects of translation and publishing, particularly in the humanities and social sciences.

SOURCE CREDITS

PART I: DIAGNOSING THE CRISES Horowitz, Andy. “Pre-Existing Conditions: Pandemics as History.” Items (SSRC), July 9, 2020, https://items.ssrc.org/covid-19-and-the-social-sciences/disaster -studies/pre-existing-conditions-pandemics-as-history/. Charmes, Éric, and Max Rousseau. “The Globalisation of Lockdowns: Planetary Urbanisation Revealed.” Books & Ideas, June 1, 2020, https:// booksandideas .net/The-Globalisation-of-Lockdowns.html. Tooze, Adam. “Global Inequality and the Corona Shock.” Public Books, November 27, 2020, https://www.publicbooks.org/global-inequality-and-the -corona-shock /. Scott, Joan Wallach. “The Job of Critical Thinking Now.” Public Seminar, May 7, 2020, https://publicseminar.org /essays/the-job-of-critical-thinking -now/.

PART II: ESSENTIAL WORK Lakoff, Andrew. “ ‘The Supply Chain Must Continue’: Becoming Essential in the Pandemic Emergency.” Items (SSRC), November 5, 2020, https://items . ssrc . org /covid -19 - and - the - social - sciences /disaster- studies /the - supply -chain-must-continue-becoming-essential-in-the-pandemic-emergency/. Molina, Natalia. “The Enduring Disposability of Latinx Workers.” Public Books, November  20, 2020, https://www.publicbooks.org /the-enduring -disposability-of-latinx-workers/. Chatelain, Marcia. “Fast Food, Precarious Workers.” Public Books, November 23, 2020, https://www.publicbooks.org /fast-food-precarious-workers/.

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Cera, Michelle. “Mothers, Mental Health, and the Pandemic.” Original to this volume. Guiheux, Gilles, Renyou Hou, Manon Laurent, Jun Li, Anne-Valérie Ruinet, and Ye Guo. “Working in China in the COVID-19 Era.” Translated from the French by Tiam Goudarzi, with the support of the CESSMA, Université de Paris. Books & Ideas, May 25, 2020, https:// booksandideas.net/ Working -in-China-in-the-Covid-19-Era.html. Al Dahdah, Marine, Mathieu Ferry, Isabelle Guérin, and Govindan Venkatasubramanian. “The Covid-19 Crisis in India: A Nascent Humanitarian Tragedy.” Books & Ideas, April  13, 2020, https:// booksandideas.net/The -Covid-19-Crisis-in-India.html. Vora, Neha. “Pandemic Security and Insecurity in the Gulf.” Immanent Frame (SSRC), July  16, 2020, https://tif.ssrc.org /2020/07/16/pandemic-security -and-insecurity-in-the-gulf/. Amir, Sulfikar. “Hidden Vulnerability and Inequality: The COVID-19 Pandemic in Singapore.” Items (SSRC), October 22, 2020, https://items.ssrc.org /covid-19 -and-the -social-sciences /disaster-studies / hidden-vulnerability -and-inequality-the-covid-19-pandemic-in-singapore/. Radi, Sherihan. “The Future After the Covid-19 Pandemic: Remote Work in South Africa.” Kujenga Amani (SSRC), October  29, 2020, https://kujenga -amani.ssrc.org/2020/10/29/the-future-after-the-covid-19-pandemic-remote -work-in-south-africa /.

PART III: POLICING AND PROTEST Blain, Keisha  N. “Civil Rights International: The Fight Against Racism Has Always Been Global.” Foreign Affairs, September/October  2020, https:// www.foreignaffairs .com /articles /united -states /2020– 08–11 /racism - civil -rights-international. Dikeç, Mustafa. “Rage and Uprising.” Public Books, November 18, 2020, https:// www.publicbooks.org /rage-and-uprising /. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. “Defund the Police and Refund the Communities.” Public Books, November 17, 2020, https://www.publicbooks.org /defund-the -police-and-refund-the-communities/. Balto, Simon. “How to Defund the Police.” Public Books, November 20, 2020, https://www.publicbooks.org /how-to-defund-the-police/. Snyder, Jeffrey Aaron. “Can I Get a Witness?” Public Seminar, November 19, 2020, https://publicseminar.org /essays/can-i-get-a-witness/. Nolan, Rachel. “As American as Child Separation.” Public Books, February 19, 2021, https://www.publicbooks.org /as-american-as-child-separation/.

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Schmidt, David. “ ‘My Son’s Dreams Were Cut Short’: Protests Against Police Brutality Go Viral in Mexico, the US, and Beyond.” Brooklyn Rail, Field Notes section, July–August 2020, https://brooklynrail.org/2020/07/field-notes /My-sons-dreams-were-cut-short-protests-against-police-brutality-go-viral -in-Mexico-the-US -and-beyond.

PART IV: VIRAL BIOPOLITICS Livingston, Julie. “To Heal the Body, Heal the Body Politic.” Public Books, November 19, 2020, https://www.publicbooks.org/to-heal-the-body-heal-the -body-politic/. Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. “American Eldercide.” Dissent, January  5, 2021, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/american-eldercide. Wang, Xiaowei. “The World Is a Factory Farm.” Public Books, November 26, 2020, https://www.publicbooks.org /the-world-is-a-factory-farm/. Wald, Priscilla. “Listen to the Birds.” Public Books, July 3, 2020, https://www .publicbooks.org /listen-to-the-birds/. Lieberman, Evan. “Risk for ‘Us,’ or for ‘Them’? The Comparative Politics of Diversity and Responses to AIDS and COVID-19.” Items (SSRC), May 14, 2020, https://items.ssrc.org/covid-19-and-the-social-sciences/democracy-and -pandemics/risk-for-us-or-for-them-the-comparative-politics-of-diversity -and-responses-to-aids-and-covid-19/. Anderson, Warwick. “Think Like a Virus.” Public Books, January 7, 2021, https:// www.publicbooks.org /think-like-a-virus/.

PART V: PANDEMIC LIVES Foulkes, Julia. “For the Love of Strangers: Meditations from the Epicenter.” Public Seminar, April  9, 2020, https://publicseminar.org /essays/for-the -love-of-strangers-covid-19-new-york /. Álvarez Velasco, Soledad. “Where Is She?” Brooklyn Rail, Field Notes section, June 2020, https:// brooklynrail.org /2020/06/field-notes/ Where-Is-She-velasco. Lewis, Sophie. “Grief Circling.” Dissent, Summer 2020, https://www.dissent magazine.org /article/grief-circling. Yang, Goubin. “In China, Pandemic Diaries Unite and Divide a Nation.” Items (SSRC), September 24, 2020, https://items.ssrc.org /covid-19-and-the-social -sciences/mediated-crisis/in-china-pandemic-diaries -unite -and-divide -a -nation/.

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PART VI: PRIVATE CRISES IN PUBLIC SPACES Gonick, Sophie. “The Violence of Urban Vacancy.” Public Books, November 24, 2020, https://www.publicbooks.org /the-violence-of-urban-vacancy/. O’Mara, Margaret. “The Limits of Telecommuting.” Public Books, November 18, 2020, https://www.publicbooks.org /the-limits-of-telecommuting /. Fierro, Alfonso. “A Quiet Disaster: Mexico City, Mexico.” Public Books, November 12, 2020, https://www.publicbooks.org /a-quiet-disaster-mexico -city-mexico/. Corrêa, Erick. “Health Self-Defense in a São Paulo Favela.” Translated from the Portuguese by Janet Koenig. Brooklyn Rail, Field Notes section, October 2020, https:// brooklynrail.org /2020/10/field-notes/Health-Self-Defense -in-So-Paulo-Favela. Roy, Ananya. “Emergency Urbanism.” Public Books, November  24, 2020, https://www.publicbooks.org /emergency-urbanism/. Baiocchi, Gianpaolo, and H. Jacob Carlson. “A Crisis Too Big to Waste: What Comes After Private Housing Fails?” Original to this volume.

PART VII: THE FAILURE OF THE STATE Ravelli, Quentin. “Covid Blindness.” Public Books, November 25, 2020, https:// www.publicbooks.org /covid-blindness/. Gagnon, Jean-Paul, Rikki  J. Dean, Afsoun Afsahi, Emily Beausoleil, and Selen  A. Ercan. “Five Lessons for Democracy from the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Public Seminar, October 29, 2020, https://publicseminar.org /essays /five-lessons-for-democracy-from-the-covid-19-pandemic/. Centeno, Miguel. “Can Democracies Handle Systemic Risks?” Items (SSRC), May  7, 2020, https://items.ssrc.org/covid-19-and-the-social-sciences/demo cracy-and-pandemics/can-democracies-handle-systemic-risks/. Bhan, Gautam. “The Vulnerable Foundations of India’s Urbanism.” Public Books, November  19, 2020, https://www.publicbooks.org /the-vulnerable -foundations-of-indias-urbanism/. Nucho, Joanne Randa. “Pandemics in the Post-Grid Imaginary.” Immanent Frame (SSRC), June  4, 2020, https://tif.ssrc.org /2020/06/04/pandemics-in -the-post-grid-imaginary/. Bonilla, Yarimar. “Pandemic Déjà Vu.” Public Books, November  17, 2020, https://www.publicbooks.org /pandemic-deja-vu/. Remes, Jacob  A.  C. “COVID-19 in a Border Nation.” Items (SSRC), June  23, 2020, https://items.ssrc.org/covid-19-and-the-social-sciences/disaster-studies /covid-19-in-a-border-nation/.

Source Credits

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PART VIII: ALTERNATIVE FUTURES Nunes, Rodrigo. “Are We in Denial About Denial?” Public Books, November 25, 2020, https://www.publicbooks.org /are-we-in-denial-about-denial/. Breckman, Warren. “Can the Crowd Speak?” Public Books, November 23, 2020, https://www.publicbooks.org /can-the-crowd-speak /. Lorenz, Daniel F., and Cordula Dittmer. “(Disaster) Utopian Moments in the Pandemic: A European Perspective.” Items (SSRC), October  15, 2020, https://items . ssrc .org /covid -19 -and -the -social -sciences /disaster-studies /disaster-utopian-moments-in-the-pandemic-a-european-perspective/. Cai, Kathryn. “Building a Society That Values Care.” Public Books, May  29, 2020, https://www.publicbooks.org / building-a-society-that-values-care/. Klinenberg, Eric. “Rebuilding Solidarity in a Broken World.” Public Books, November, 27, 2020, https://www.publicbooks.org /rebuilding-solidarity-in -a-broken-world/.

PART IX: FURTHER READINGS Barnes, David S., Merlin Chowkwanyun, and Kavita Sivaramakrishnan. “Pandemic Syllabus.” Public Books, July 13, 2020, https://www.publicbooks.org /pandemic-syllabus/.

INDEX

activism. See protest Adams, John Quincy (journalist), 161–62 Adorno, Theodor, 458 AFL-CIO, 329. See also labor Africa, 31, 159, 163–66, 267 African Americans: and business, 81–89; and employment, 174, 180, 323, 328, 424; and government trust, 19–20, 47, 203, 410; and housing, 353–71; and infection rates, 7, 30, 168, 180, 183, 262, 267–70, 333, 353, 380, 410, 498; and intellectuals, 57, 163– 66, 201–3; and protest, 8– 9, 55–58, 84, 159– 68, 171– 97, 201–7, 217–25. See also Black Lives Matter (BLM); police/ policing: and brutality; protest: and racial discrimination; race African swine fever (ASF), 245–46, 251 agriculture, 34, 62–63, 74–76, 119–22, 154, 231–32, 245–63, 281–82 AIDS. See HIV/AIDS

Alexander, Michelle, 205 Ali, Yusra, 161 Alibaba Cloud, 250–51 All African People’s Conference (Accra), 165 Altgeld Gardens Homes, 85–86, 88 Althusser, Louis, 457 Amazon corporation, 41, 48, 56, 250–52, 328, 331–34 Amnesty International, 138, 379 ancient Greece and Rome, 28, 211, 255–56, 263 Anderson, Elijah, 493 Angelou, Maya, 165 Ant Financial, 252 antimask sentiment. See protest: and pandemic policies Appian, 251 Apple Corporation, 330–31 Arab Spring, 357, 452 Ardern, Jacinda, 235 Ashe, Arthur, 167 Asia, 19, 30–31, 43–46, 135–44, 159, 163, 255, 434 Australia, 29, 224 Austria, 367

536

Q

Index

authoritarianism, 1, 7–8, 10–11, 14, 101, 109, 253, 347, 383–90, 395–97. See also violence: state/police avian flu, 249, 255–63, 282 Baldwin, James, 171–72 banking, 43, 54–55, 86, 120–21. See also Great Recession of 2008 Barahona, Santos, 78 Barbosa, Miguel, 45 Barnett, Etta Moten, 164 Belafonte, Harry, 166–67 Belarus, 10 Belgium, 245 Bezos, Jeff, 41. See also Amazon corporation Bibb, Henry, 202 Biden, Joseph, 55, 242, 434 biology, 229–35, 255–63, 276–77. See also wildlife; zoonoses biosecurity, 134, 245–54, 275, 282–83, 383 Black Death. See bubonic plague Blackhawk, Maggie, 214 Black internationalism, 159–68 Black Lives Matter (BLM), 8–9, 13, 56, 81–87, 159–68, 177, 183–84, 222, 320–25, 353–54, 425, 461; origins of, 160–61 Black Panther Party (BPP), 166 Black power, 159, 164–66, 381 Blevins, Thurman, 172 Block, Dennis, 358 Bloomberg, Michael, 323 Bollyky, Thomas, 432 Bolsonaro, Jair, 11, 349, 452–55 Boston, MA, 209–10 Boston Globe, 242 Boyer, Anne, 307 Bracero Program (1942–1964), 75–76

Brazil, 4, 9–11, 29, 43, 217, 267, 343–51, 385, 452–54 Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), 349 Briggs, Laura, 210–16 Brown, Davon, 354–55 Brown, John, 206 Brown, Mano, 349 Brown, Michael, 160–61, 172–73 Brown, Wendy, 53 Browne, Sylvia, 217 Bryant, Roy, 203 bubonic plague, 20, 26, 34, 55, 280, 375 Bunche, Ralph, 164 Burnet, F. Macfarlane, 277–78 Bush, George W., 19 California, 64, 76–77, 87, 166, 220, 301, 353–59, 413; and Proposition 187, 76–77 Canada, 97, 161, 270, 432, 437–40 Carby, Jermaine, 161 CARES Act (2020), 367–68. See also housing: and evictions Caribbean Sea region, 159, 163 Carlson, Eric, 243 Carrefour, 106 Carson, Rachel, 257 Case, Anne, 496 Castile, Philando, 171–72 Cele, Bheki, 153 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, U.S.), 148, 233, 240, 356–57, 367, 433–35. See also public health institutions Central Unica das Favelas (CUFA), 346, 350 Chaplin, Ralph, 495 Chauvin, Derek, 9, 174, 187, 380

Index Chicago, IL, 163, 187–97, 497 Child, Lydia Maria, 202 childcare, 152–54, 336. See also labor: and women; women child separation, 209–16, 224–25, 295–98. See also immigration; migration China, 30–34, 220, 375, 377, 395; and ancestral worship, 106–7; and economy, 41–49, 99–110, 245–54, 279–83; and pandemic blame, 283, 433–34, 457; and pandemic diaries, 309–16; and trade, 3, 27, 245–54; Wuhan, 18–19, 26, 34, 99–100, 115, 143–46, 246, 269, 279, 309–16, 434 Christianity, 267, 347–48 citizenship, 135, 140, 395, 431–40 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA, India), 115 Citizens United vs. FEC (2010), 56 civil rights, 159–68, 209–16, 220–21, 381, 394 Civil War (U.S.), 19–20, 215 Clark, Jamar, 171 class. See labor; poverty; wealth gap Clifford, James, 259 climate change. See environment/ ecology: and climate change Clinton, Hillary, 20, 209 Cold War, 63, 65–68, 165 colonialism, 159, 162–65, 356, 359, 421 Columbian Exchange, 20 Communication Workers of America, 56 communism, 109, 165 Communist Party (China), 109 Congo, 164–65 Congress (U.S.). See U.S. Congress conspiracy theories, 56, 375, 452, 457

Q

537

consumerism, 27, 81–82, 87, 119, 229–35 corruption, 14, 124, 349. See also authoritarianism; police/ policing: and brutality Costa Rica, 167 courts/court cases, 56, 203, 212, 214, 243–44, 353, 357, 363, 381 Covey, Steven, 486 COVID-19. See pandemic (COVID-19) Cronje, Kathy, 152 Cuba, 166 Cullors, Patrisse, 160, 167, 353 Damond, Justine, 171–72 Danowski, Déborah, 456 de América, Luz, 293–303 Dean, Jodi, 387 Deaton, Angus, 496 de Blasio, Bill, 323 debt, 120–21, 322, 354, 400–402 Defense Production Act (U.S.), 411 de Kruif, Paul, 276–77 democracy, 1, 10–14, 165, 231, 344–51, 369, 383–97, 434, 457–68, 492 Democratic Party (U.S.), 47, 187, 366 Democratic Theory, 383 Deng Xiaoping, 248 Department of Health and Human Services, 251 Department of Homeland Security (U.S.), 61, 63–64, 67–68, 77 Development of Our Own, 163 DeWitt, Derrick, Sr., 239 diabetes, 231–33 DiAngelo, Robin, 205–6 diaries, 309–16 diaspora, 135–41. See also immigration; migration

538

Q

Index

disinformation. See pandemic (COVID-19): and information sharing Douglass, Frederick, 202, 205 Drèze, Jean, 124 drugs, 62, 210, 306 Du Bois, W. E. B., 163, 165 Dugan, Elizabeth, 242 Duterte, Rodrigo, 375 Dyson, Michael Eric, 206 Eastern Europe, 29 Ebola virus, 152, 261, 278–80 EcoHealth, 278 ecology. See environment/ecology Ecuador, 12, 45, 293–303 education, 75–76, 136, 154–55, 185, 213–14, 388, 394, 419; and homeschooling, 154, 328; and universities, 335. See also labor: teachers Egypt, 29 Ehteraz, 133–34 elderly. See pandemic (COVID-19): and eldercide El Salvador, 78 Emanuel, Rahm, 196 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 85 environment/ecology, 3, 34, 230–35, 248, 261, 275–84; and climate change, 54, 257, 385, 458, 474; and pollution, 7, 231, 339. See also zoonoses essential workers. See labor: essential workers Ethiopia, 163–65 Europe, 20, 27–49, 97, 161, 268, 367–69, 375, 384, 388, 431–40, 469 European Union (EU), 46, 388

evolution, 277 expatriates, 31, 137–40, 218 family. See child separation; pandemic (COVID-19): and eldercide; pandemic (COVID-19): and family dynamics Fang Fang, 309, 312–16 Fanon, Frantz, 42 favelas, 343–51 Favelas G10, 345–46, 350 Fearnley, Lyle, 275, 281–84 federalism, 423, 426 Felker-Kantor, Max, 195 feminism, 483–84, 488. See also women 15M, 452 Finkelman, Paul, 203 Floyd, George, 8–9, 81–87, 161, 171–78, 187, 201, 204, 218–25, 322, 380–81, 409 food production/transport, 3, 27–28, 121–38, 232–54, 407, 411; and food scarcity, 41, 44, 93, 121–47, 232, 247, 250, 333, 396–411, 425 foreign policy (U.S.), 210, 431–40. See also immigration: and xenophobia; trade routes/ agreements; Trump, Donald: pandemic policies of Foucault, Michel, 34, 57 France, 8–9, 25, 31, 34, 49, 115–17, 122, 167, 177, 224, 377–81, 463 Frazier, Darnella, 201, 204 freedom, 35, 55, 165, 396, 425, 464, 468, 470 free market theory, 12, 88, 109–10, 232–33, 354, 366, 370, 451–52 Freud, Sigmund, 456 Fritz, Charles E., 17, 473–75 Fuentes, Carlos, 339

Index Garcetti, Eric, 78 Garrison, William Lloyd, 202 Garvey, Marcus, 162–63 Garza, Alicia, 160 gender, 151–55, 348, 425. See also women General Motors, 56 genocide, 210–11 Germany, 42, 46, 394, 469 Ghana, 164–65 Ghebreyesus, Tedros Adhanom, 377 Gilded Age, 495 Google, 251, 330, 334 Gordon, Mittie Maude Lena, 163 Graeber, David, 463, 465 Gray, Freddie, 172–73 Great Britain, 8, 11, 46, 159, 164, 224, 378, 385 Great Depression, 75, 333, 393, 495–96, 499 Great Leap Forward (1958), 103 Great Plague (1348), 375. See also bubonic plague Great Recession of 2008, 55, 140, 180, 333, 364, 367, 393, 422, 451–60 Great Society, 82 Greece, 367 Green Revolution, 248 Greenspan, Alan, 451 Griffin, John Howard, 203–4 Guasti, Petra, 384 Guatemala, 439 Guerrero, Vicente, 222–23 Gulf countries. See Persian Gulf Guo Jing, 310 Haagh, Louise, 388 Habermas, Jürgen, 465 Haddad, Farnando, 349 Hadden, Sally, 193

Q

539

Haiti, 267, 439–40 Hartman, Saidiya, 212, 357 Hartog, François, 53 Harvey, David, 323 health care, 7, 11, 54–77, 97–109, 116–18, 138, 148, 237–44, 379, 394–95, 409–15, 484, 492 Hema, 106 Hernández, Kelly Lytle, 193 H5N1 avian influenza. See avian flu Hill, Daniel, 205 Hinduism, 118, 139–41 Hiriart, Hugo, 339–41 HIV/AIDS, 152, 261, 265–72, 278, 280, 376, 423 Hoffman, Susanna, 471 Holocaust, 456 homelessness, 5, 124, 197, 323–24, 355, 363, 376 Hong Kong, 10, 29, 282, 375 Honig, Bonnie, 386 Honigsbaum, Mark, 275, 280–84 hospitals, 7, 56, 100–103, 238, 377, 410, 422, 491–92 housing: and affordability, 1, 6, 140, 145, 319–25, 330, 363–71, 386, 402; assistance, 7, 108; and evictions, 6, 181, 322–24, 353–59, 367; and landlords, 6, 319, 353, 358, 363–71; luxury, 6, 319–25, 344, 366; and overcrowding, 7, 74, 76, 119, 135–38, 146–49, 240, 282, 363; and ownership, 174, 320–23, 355, 363–71; and private property, 353–71; public, 85, 145, 366, 369, 386; and racial disparities, 2, 324, 353–71 Hughes, Langston, 219 human rights, 155, 159, 161, 165, 221, 223, 300, 324, 346, 394

540

Q

Index

Hungary, 11, 217, 384 Hurricane Maria, 419–27. See also natural disasters IBM, 331 Ice Cube, 86 immigration, 4–5, 75, 134–41, 144, 192–94, 209–16, 293–303, 363; and xenophobia, 7–9, 73–78, 139–40, 149, 300, 433–40. See also migration Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 439 imperialism. See colonialism incarceration/prisons, 213, 410 India, 8, 30, 43, 137–39, 164, 166, 267, 378, 399–407; economy of, 4–5, 41, 45, 49, 120–25, 140; and health care, 115–20; and housing, 7; and labor, 399–407; and policing, 8–9; and politics, 11, 115, 140, 164; and urbanization, 2, 124. See also lockdowns: in India Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), 214 Indigenous Americans. See Native Americans industrial manufacturing, 65–68, 85, 106, 145, 246, 495 influenza (flu), 35, 68, 278–82; and 1918 pandemic, 73, 277, 280, 376 infrastructure, 2, 43, 63–69, 116, 135, 153, 409–15, 426, 474, 498 International League of Darker Peoples, 162 Iran, 220 Iraq War, 464 Ireland, 367 Islam, 115, 118, 125, 136, 139–40, 166, 267, 291

Israel, 166, 375, 384, 437 Italy, 23, 46, 117, 379, 469 Jacobs, Harriet, 202 Japan, 18, 46, 161–62, 435 Jews, 375. See also Holocaust; Israel jihad, 140. See also Islam; terrorism Jobs, Steve, 330 Johnson, Hazel, 88 Juarez, Benito, 222 Keck, Frédéric, 255–63, 283 Kelley, Robin D. G., 205 Kempczinski, Chris, 81 Kendall, Mikki, 482, 488 Kenya, 8, 165, 375 Khan, Janaya, 161 Khosa, Collin, 381 King, Coretta Scott, 164 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 82, 164, 381 King, Rodney, 87, 204 Klinenberg, Eric, 98 Korea (South Korea), 18, 46, 117 Kroc, Ray, 82 Kuriowa, S., 162 Kushner, Jared, 422 Kutak, Robert I., 471 labor, 46–47, 401–5, 495–99; and African Americans, 47, 174, 180, 323, 328, 496; care workers, 4–6, 9, 32, 55, 63, 76, 100–110, 238, 481–89; essential workers, 61–69, 77, 99–110, 182, 332, 424, 499; and exploitation, 3–4, 12, 74, 77, 99–110, 134, 149, 182, 348, 484; and fast food, 81–89; and gig work, 6, 47, 109; informal workers, 2, 4–5, 45, 99–110, 118–19, 152–55, 400–407; laws, 125, 406; Latinx

Index workers, 4, 73–78, 496; and meatpacking industry, 74, 77, 410–11; platform workers, 105–7; remote work, 6, 91–99, 153–55, 327–36; and supply chain, 62–69, 74, 106; teachers, 62, 497; and unemployment, 5, 41–48, 99–110, 180–83, 328–33, 346, 367, 399, 476; and unions, 238–40, 329, 348, 400, 494–97; and wages, 92, 108, 136–38, 145, 174, 180, 400–403; and women, 5, 91–98, 100–102, 152, 328, 331, 483–89; working conditions, 56, 76, 84, 99, 107, 137, 410–11, 497 Lakoff, Andrew, 275, 283–84 Latin America, 7, 31, 45, 49, 209–25, 234, 293–303, 339–51, 384–85, 439 Latinx, 4, 7, 47, 73–78, 172, 194, 209–16, 262, 270, 301, 339–59, 424, 496 Lebanon, 13, 409–15 Le Bon, Gustave, 177 Lederberg, Joshua, 260–61 Lee, Bill, 182 Legionnaires’ disease, 280 Lei Feng, 101, 104 Li Keqiang, 106 liberalism, 211, 354, 384, 393, 460, 496. See also neoliberalism libertarianism, 55 Lind, Dara, 433 Liu Xuqing, 102, 108 lockdowns: and abuse, 151–55, 306, 379–82, 425, 475; in China, 44, 102, 309–16; and defiance, 5, 99, 107, 116, 378–82, 400, 425; and economy, 46, 99, 118–25, 327, 346, 406, 426, 475; effectiveness of, 46, 123, 125, 138, 307, 377, 471–77; enforcement of, 9, 31, 45, 102, 134,

Q

541

138, 345, 375, 378–82, 469; in India, 2, 41, 115–21, 138, 399–407; pastimes in, 309–16; purpose of, 23, 35, 102, 118, 469 long-term-care facilities (LTCs), 237–44, 377, 410, 481–89 López, Giovanni, 218–20, 225 Lorde, Audre, 173 Los Angeles, CA, 78, 353–59, 497. See also California Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio, 347–49 Lumumba, Patrice, 164–65 luxury. See housing: luxury; wealth gap Lyles, Charleena, 172 MacDonald, Kai Wonder, 305–8 Macron, Emmanuel, 49 Malaysia, 144 Malcolm X, 166 Maoism, 101, 104, 109. See also China Marburg virus, 261 Marshall, T. H., 394 Martin, Trayvon, 87, 160, 321 Martinez, Alexander, 219, 224–25 Marx, Karl, 42, 463 Mayer, Marissa, 331 Mayfield, Julian, 165 Mboya, Tom, 165 McDade, Tony, 161 McDonald’s corporation, 13, 81–89 McEnany, Kayleigh, 61 McNeil, Brenda Salter, 205 media, 56, 83, 109, 118, 147, 218, 434, 459, 462–63; social, 85–87, 133, 139–40, 204, 221–25, 309–16, 332, 462, 471, 492 Medicare/Medicaid Services, 237–41. See also health care; welfare programs

542

Q

Index

mental health, 91–98, 107–8, 176, 196, 469, 475, 494–99 Merkel, Wolfgang, 385 MERS, 278 Mexico, 5, 10, 29, 45, 73, 209–25, 293–303, 385; and Mexico City, 339–41 Michigan, 32, 82, 412, 423–25, 497 migration, 9, 31, 41–44, 106, 109, 119–24, 138–50, 193, 210–16, 293–303, 376, 400–403, 436–37. See also immigration Milam, J. W., 203 Milanovic, Branko, 42 military power, 65, 220. See also war Miller, Edward Alan, 243 Minneapolis, MN, 171–74, 177, 201, 204, 380–81. See also Floyd, George Mnuchin, Steven, 322 Moms 4 Housing, 323–24 Monsiváis, Carlos, 340–41 Moore, Audley, 165–66 Moreno, Lenin, 302 Morrison, Toni, 178 Moten, Fred, 57 Murphy, Michelle, 260 Myers, Samuel L., Jr., 174 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 87, 166 National Center for Infectious Diseases (NCID, Singapore), 148 National Commission for the Prevention of Discrimination (CONAPRED), 223 National Council of Negro Women, 166

National Food Security Act (India), 403 nationalism, 140, 211, 314, 388–89 National Rifle Association (NRA), 62 Native Americans, 194, 209–17, 262, 353, 380, 423, 436 natural disasters, 3, 17–21, 66, 68, 143, 151, 231, 255–56, 396, 406, 431, 469–77; earthquakes, 2, 419–20; hurricanes, 2, 290, 406, 419–20, 467 Navarrete, Federico, 223 neoliberalism, 12–14, 55, 135, 248, 451, 454, 467 Netherlands, 167 New Deal, the, 495–99 New England Journal of Medicine, 410 Newsom, Gavin, 64 Newton, Huey, 166 New York City, 47, 162, 230, 289–92, 298, 301, 319–25, 376, 410, 491–99 New York Times, 54, 56, 183, 329 New Zealand, 35, 166, 224, 235 Nigeria, 163, 267 1918 influenza pandemic. See influenza (flu): and 1918 pandemic Nixon, Richard, 82 Nkrumah, Kwame, 164–65 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 124 nuclear weapons/power, 66, 148, 234 nursing homes. See long-term-care facilities (LTCs) Nutter, Michael, 204 Obama, Barack, 88, 215–16, 239, 421, 465 Obrador, Andres Manuel Lopez, 223

Index Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 467 Occupy Wall Street movement, 14, 452, 461–68 O’Donnell, Liz, 481–89 oil, 134–35 Omar, Ilhan, 369 One Health, 258, 262, 278 Organization of Afro-American Unity, 166 Orizu, Akweke Abyssinia Nwafor, 163 O’Toole, Fintan, 210 Owen, David, 389 Pakistan, 137 Palantir, 251 Palestine, 375 pandemic (1918). See influenza (flu): and 1918 pandemic pandemic (COVID-19), 1–3; and demographics, 4, 29–30, 99, 117–22, 151, 180, 328, 367, 377, 491; and eldercide, 5, 32, 117, 237–44, 377, 484–85; and family dynamics, 91–98, 102, 121–22, 151–55, 328, 484–88; and hygiene, 103–4; and immunity, 257, 426; and information sharing, 8, 11, 61, 103, 153, 376–82, 395, 426, 453–60; and mortality rates, 4, 19, 35, 117, 148, 239, 262, 269, 305–8, 376–82, 491; origins of, 3–4, 18, 21, 143, 148, 248, 268, 279; predictions of, 217, 255–63; and preexisting conditions (health), 18, 117, 232, 269, 363; and quarantine, 9, 20, 23, 35, 54, 386, 396, 437; spread of, 3–4, 19, 26–32, 116, 139–48, 180, 217, 229–35, 250, 259, 266, 276–84, 375–77, 386; and testing, 35, 116–17, 133–34, 137, 147–48, 251–53,

Q

543

269, 377–78, 426, 433; and vaccinations, 2, 11, 20, 62, 237, 243, 284; and volunteers, 103–5 panic buying, 144 Paris Peace Conference (1918), 162 Peace Movement of Ethiopia (PME), 163 Pence, Mike, 434 People’s Daily (China), 100 Persian Gulf, 133–41; and Gulf Cooperative Council, 135 personal protective equipment (PPE), 9, 74, 77, 101, 103, 185, 239, 275, 409–11, 422, 491; and cognitive PPE, 275–84 Peru, 5, 45 Philippines, 10, 217, 375 Phillips, Wendell, 205 Pieterse, Edgar, 401 Pinkham, Sophie, 306 Pixar, 330 police/policing: and brutality, 160, 171–97, 201, 217–25, 321–22, 378–79; in Chicago, 12, 189–97; international, 8–9, 137, 153, 185, 217–25, 375, 378–79; and law enforcement, 9, 168, 218, 223, 322, 354, 378–79; in Minneapolis, 174–75; and protest, 1, 8–9, 55–56, 171–75, 217–25; and reforms, 12, 179–97; and vigilantism, 9 politics: and elections, 19–20, 55, 163, 168, 176, 215, 350–51, 383, 395, 434; and failed states, 2, 86, 355, 375–450; and left-wing groups, 461–68; and rhetoric, 176, 267–72, 434, 455, 462; and right-wing groups, 11, 139, 179, 217, 223, 321–22, 349–50, 382, 453–60, 466; and voting, 395

544

Q

Index

Poo, Ai-jen, 482, 487 population, 3, 34–35, 145, 261, 282, 436 Porter, Natalie, 255–63 Portugal, 367 postal service (U.S.), 383 poverty, 13, 92, 174, 184, 197, 213, 240–43, 299–300, 343–51, 386, 409, 488 Powell, Adam Clayton, Sr., 162 Prainsack, Barbara, 387 preparedness, 54, 143, 255– 60, 275–84 presidential election, U.S., of 2020, 19–20, 55, 168, 383, 434 Pressley, Ayanna, 210, 215 privatization, 11, 13, 54, 68, 124 Project SAFE, 306 protest, 1, 8–10, 14, 55–57, 115, 461–68; and global trends, 9–11, 25, 159–68, 177, 217, 349, 354, 357, 369, 375, 380–82, 425, 464, 467; in the 1960s, 159–60, 164–66, 221; and pandemic policies, 55–57, 107, 265–72, 354–71, 369, 379, 383; and racial discrimination, 55–56, 84–88, 115, 159–215, 323, 354–71, 380–87, 461 public health institutions, 19, 43, 63–64, 116–17, 146, 260, 355–56, 385, 389, 394, 409 Puerto Rico, 2, 419–27 Qatar, 133–36 race: and segregation, 2, 7, 82, 222, 270, 493–99; and slavery, 19–20, 201–6, 210–12, 222, 359. See also African Americans; immigration: and xenophobia; Latinx; police/policing: and

brutality; protest: and racial discrimination Ramos, Arturo, 223–24 Randolph, A. Philip, 162, 164 real estate. See housing recessions, 23, 45–46, 76, 179. See also Great Depression; Great Recession of 2008 Reconstruction (U.S.), 203 refugees, 4 religion, 413. See also Christianity; Hinduism; Islam; Jews; Sikh religion Republican Party (U.S.), 47, 49, 187, 366, 496 Richardson, Alissa V., 204–5 Richmond Times, 163 Robeson, Eslanda Goode, 164 Robeson, Paul, 164 Roggensack, Patience, 74, 77 Roman Empire. See ancient Greece and Rome Rosenberg, Charles E., 278 Rosenthal, Tracy Jeanne, 358 Rousseff, Dilma, 349 rural space, 24–26, 33, 153, 399. See also agriculture Russia, 220–21, 245 Safe House (South Africa), 151–55 Salaam, Kalamu ya, 21 Sanders, Bernie, 55, 467 SARS-CoV, 26, 29, 35, 100, 102, 144–48, 242, 256–63, 275–81, 299, 431 Sarton, May, 241 Scandinavia, 29, 31, 97, 196 Scott, Travis, 81 Seale, Bobby, 166 sex trafficking, 306

Index Sheridan, Guillermo, 339 Sherman, William, 65 Sherrod, Pearl, 162–63 Sikh religion, 124 Silicon Valley, 330, 334, 496, 498 Simone, AbdouMaliq, 401 Singapore, 4, 30–31, 34, 143–50 Sitharaman, Nirmala, 123 slavery. See race: and slavery; violence: hate crimes Small Business Administration, 83 smartphone apps, 133–35. See also technology Smiley, Tavis, 86 Smith, Neil, 355, 406–7 Snowden, Frank, 281 social distancing, 7, 31, 35, 56, 118, 153, 239, 289–92, 345, 363, 396, 431, 498 social media. See media: social social safety programs. See welfare programs solidarity, 13, 160, 163–68, 177, 350–51, 387, 461–77, 491–99 Solnit, Rebecca, 473 Sontag, Susan, 303 South Africa, 7–10, 29, 43, 151–55, 166–67, 267, 381 Spain, 8, 29, 46, 367, 376–79 Spillers, Hortense, 57 Springer, Maida, 165 state violence. See police/policing: and brutality; violence: state/ police stay-at-home orders. See lockdowns stimulus payments, 47–49, 182–83, 388, 404. See also welfare programs Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 203 Straughan, Paulin, 149

Q

545

suburbs, 6, 33, 86, 339, 365 Suning, 106 Supreme Court (U.S.), 56. See also courts/court cases Taiwan, 46, 394 taxation, 11–13, 42, 319–21, 355, 365–66, 466–67 Taylor, Breonna, 87, 161, 172 Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, 410 technology, 63–66, 133–53, 201–4, 224–30, 247, 250–53, 280, 327–36, 492. See also biosecurity; labor: remote work; media: social; Zoom telecommunting. See labor: remote work terrorism, 19, 66, 68, 211, 220. See also violence: state/police Thailand, 18 Theseira, Walter Edgar, 149 Thomas, Timothy, 172–73 Thomson, Donna, 482, 486 Till, Emmett, 203 Tobias, Melissa, 217 Toffler, Alvin, 327–28, 335 Tometi, Opal, 160–61, 167 Torres, Chumel, 223 Toscano, Alberto, 459 tourism, 32, 134, 136–37, 146, 218. See also travel trade routes/agreements, 3, 23, 29, 134, 140, 229–35, 245– 54, 376, 452 transmission. See pandemic (COVID-19): spread of transportation, 32, 63, 68, 103, 138, 143, 399 Traoré, Adama, 224 Traoré, Assa, 9, 379

546

Q

Index

travel, 3, 26–28, 32–33, 138, 229, 376, 388, 431–40; ban, 431–40. See also migration; tourism; transportation Trump, Donald, 11, 19, 180–81, 421, 467; and immigration, 209, 214–16, 433–40; pandemic policies of, 19, 61–62, 69, 176, 181, 239, 243, 268–69, 271, 411, 431–40, 453; supporters of, 55–56, 86, 179–80, 321, 434, 453 Truth, Sojourner, 212 tuberculosis, 440 Turchin, Peter, 28 Turner, Victor W., 473 United Arab Emirates, 135–40 United Kingdom. See Great Britain United Nations (U.N.), 154, 161 Universal Association of Ethiopian Women, 165 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 324 urbanization/urbanism, 6–7, 13, 23–30, 250–54, 319–25, 353–59, 399–407; definition of, 24. See also urban space Urban League, 87 urban space, 13, 33, 245, 253–54, 289, 319–25, 339–59, 399–407, 409–15. See also urbanization/urbanism Uruguay, 29 U.S. Congress, 210, 241, 244, 421, 451, 496 USNS Comfort, 422 Vietnam, 221, 256–57 Vietnam War, 221 violence, 8–9, 115, 212, 242–43; domestic abuse, 151–55; hate crimes, 202–4, 220, 425, 434;

state/police, 10, 160–61, 171–86, 201–25, 353–59, 375–82, 421–27. See also police/policing: and brutality; race: and slavery Virchow, Rudolf, 279 Wagner Act (1935), 495 Walker, Madam C. J., 162 Wallace, Rob, 249 Walmart, 88, 106 war, 65, 210, 260–62, 303, 376, 396 Washington Post, 56, 174, 329, 344 wealth gap, 12–13, 29–33, 41–43, 48, 174, 180, 182, 231, 426, 467, 492–99; and international data, 42 welfare programs, 4, 43, 46–48, 54, 123, 135, 183, 212–15, 367, 387–415, 423 Wells Fargo, 86 Wenliang Li, 310, 313 West, Cornel, 205–6 West, Kanye, 86 White, E. B., 290 White, Zachary, 482, 486 white supremacy, 82–84, 160–73, 185, 201–6, 222, 321 wildlife, 255–63. See also zoonoses Wilson, Orlando, 191, 195 Wilson, Woodrow, 161–62 Wise, Tim, 205 women, 5–6, 32, 91–101, 151–65, 244, 293–303, 328–331, 346, 357, 375, 425, 483–84 Wonder, Stevie, 167 Workers’ Party (PT, Brazil), 348–49 World Bank, 41 World Cup, 349 World Health Organization (WHO), 18, 249, 266, 282, 377, 433 World Trade Organization (WTO), 245–49

Index World War I, 376. See also influenza (flu): and 1918 pandemic World War II, 65, 75, 85 World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), 62 Wuhan, China. See China: Wuhan xenophobia. See China: pandemic blame; immigration: and xenophobia

Q

547

Yellow Vest movement (France), 25 Yorudo Choho, 162 Zakharova, Maria, 221 Zika, 278–80 Zimmerman, George, 321 Zoom, 6, 93, 97, 307–8, 333–34, 492, 497 zoonoses, 3, 25, 249–50, 255–63, 281–82