Protesting Vulnerability: Race and Pandemic Politics

• In Event: Policing, Politics, and Participation

Abstract

In her pioneering book, The Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, Gilmore (2007) notes, “Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” The centrality of race and racism within American politics predisposes Black communities to premature death by conditioning what steps can be taken to prevent and/or ameliorate threats to their livelihood. Indeed uprisings have erupted in cities across the US in response to the murders of George Floyd in Minnesota, Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, and countless others. Much of the public debate surrounding those uprisings center on distinguishing between “rioting” and “resisting” as an indication of whose voices and grievances are most legitimate (Button 1978; Kilgo 2020; Waldman 2015; Douthat 2020). Representations of race remain central to those debates, and COVID-19 lays bare how central these representations are for the federal government’s mishandling of the spread of the virus, which has put African American lives in peril. The sustained social unrest amid a pandemic makes clear that many people believe that the threat of potential exposure to COVID-19 from marching is a necessary risk to combat racial injustices that are both systemic and lethal. A quote from a Black Lives Matter protester captures the risk many were willing to assume “We're organizing for our lives, ... We have to live, so we're not going to live under somebody's boot” (Ebrahimji and Andrew 2020).

As the United States surpasses a milestone 400,000 deaths, the COVID-19 pandemic both reveals and deepens longstanding policy challenges tied to issues of race and identity. What was initially viewed as a health crisis rapidly escalated broader discussions of deeply entrenched barriers to equity in political representation, public education, economic stability, and governance. The COVID-19 pandemic coupled with the epidemic of racial violence in the US demand a thorough analysis of the context, policy choices, and legal constraints that shape race and citizenship in the United States. Using the protests of the summer of 2020 as a focal point, we use original public opinion data to demonstrate that the combined impact of COVID and the failure of the federal government to effectively intervene represents a form of state sanctioned violence that uniquely imperils Black lives. The same state violence that sparks these uprisings draws our attention to pandemic politics as a reflection of government (in)action.

We argue that the disparate impact of COVID-19 must be addressed within an explicit framework of how race structures myriad arenas of American public life. Beyond matters of health, COVID-19 raises the specter of race, vulnerability, and pandemic politics in shaping the overall citizenship standing of communities of color; particularly African Americans.
Traditional studies of pandemics focus on pathogens and environmental determinants (Shah 2016; Quammen 2013; Khan 2016). We argue that the centrality of race in American Politics necessitates a wider understanding of both natural and “man-made” conditions that significantly constrain the life chances and quality of life for African Americans. Our approach to pandemic politics captures the collection of political choices, resources, actors, and strategies that determine when occurrences are identified as problems worthy of a political response, while also dictating who will benefit and/or be harmed by that response.

We recognize that the intersections of race and COVID-19 have attracted the attention of numerous scholars. We believe that there is a strong intellectual need for scholars to address these questions from myriad angles. What distinguishes our volume, however, is our explicit commitment to public facing scholarship that is grounded in academic rigor. Our project moves beyond the headlines to cultivate a deeper understanding of the relationship between race, vulnerability, and pandemic politics in articulating the practical consequences of political action and inaction.

Authors

• Khalilah L. Brown-Dean, QUINNIPIAC UNIVERSITY

• Ray Block, Penn State University