The Virus Does Not Discriminate! It is Just the Best Student of American Legacies…

Santiago Slabodsky holds the Florence and Robert Kaufman Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and directs the Jewish Studies program in the Department of Religion at Hofstra University.

Wendland-Cook is proud to feature the next in a series of responses to our current public health, political, ecological, and economic crisis of COVID-19. Joerg Rieger, Founder and Director of the Wendland-Cook Program started off the series with his article, “The Ugly Truth of a Pandemic and the Logic of Downturn.” Read Joerg’s blog here: www.religionandjustice.com/blog/the-ugly-truth-of-a-pandemic-and-the-logic-of-downturn

In pandemic time the sun has not yet set in upper New York City. But every day at 7:00pm, the city forbidden to sleep lives up to her name and comes back to life. I leave my computer and come closer to a small window overlooking the Bronx. I am one among those with steady employment who can witness the hell of the streets from his desk. I should join my neighbors applauding the “essential workers.” After all, for a few minutes, the noise seems to bring back the vibrancy of the city. It seems to be a win for both sides: the sheltered-in and the workers at the frontlines. The liberal media tells us “We’re all on this together.” But I cannot join the applause.

I keep thinking of my neighbors just across the street. In the Bronx, a largely working-class borough, over 85% of the population belongs to racialized communities. Their pre-pandemic income was less than half of the rest of the city. To date, in this borough alone, 50,000 people have been infected and 5,000 lost their lives; thousands of families and hundreds of communities have been destroyed. Across the US, the over-representation of racialized communities in pandemic statistics is remarkable. In Chicago, for example, Afro-Americans alone account for 60% of Covid-19 victims while representing just 30% of the population. Most major urban concentrations in the US could be interpreted as tales of two cities. But I wonder if they are. One side of the city breathes because the other cannot. Applause does not stop abandonment. Applause does not protect communities. It does not bring workers back to life. And it certainly does not restore workers’ humanity.

For some, the pandemic has created a new world. For many others, it exacerbated exploitation in the very same world. For the latter, it has openly exposed the consequences of a long-standing order, expressed in yet another extreme reiteration. For the last five hundred years we have lived in a global system of dominance where labor, racism, and sexism have been key axes. This period of unprecedented systemic accumulation could only be sustained by putting in question or directly negating the humanity of the majority of the world’s population. The US is perhaps one of the most paradigmatic examples of this process. Now, in the midst of the coronavirus, the parallel exploitation necessary for satisfying consumption continues throughout the world and in every center of world power. This condition is not new for communities under the duress of interlocked axes of labor, racism, and sexism. They have known it all along and created both contextual and transnational resistances elaborating provocative re-existences. The pandemic, however, left the system naked; now, more than ever before, they are “collateral damage” in the so-called “invisible war.”

For a virus that does not discriminate, it has done a fantastic job adapting to the longstanding legacies of American (and of course global) inequality. While it is true that mainstream media recognize the unequal weight of the crisis, their prescriptive frameworks most often fall into rhetorics of common good as if we were “all in this together.” When the problem is inequality and the solution presumes universality, we must interrogate who is speaking for the collective. While the virus has left the system naked, liberal prescriptions try to mask it again. It is not surprising, therefore, that The New York Times finds “The Common Good in a Pandemic” and calls a Harvard ethicist to discuss the tension between two of the most common liberal messages (“social distancing” and “we’re all in this together”) as if they were irreducibly different. In this way, historical possibilities are narrowed to liberal options presented as the only alternative to rising right-wing white consciousness. But they are part of the very same discourse. Only those who can afford to practice social distance have the audacity to acknowledge inequality but offer a prescription that have their perspective as the universal possibility. Today rhetoric of the common good may be gentler than the alt-right, but they serve only to mask an indefensible system.

Where there is oppression, however, there are resistances and re-existences. The pandemic debates were abruptly broken by the BLM uprisings after the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery. For some, the uprising erupted despite coronavirus, but here I would argue it happened because of it. The longstanding patterns of domination connected police brutality, labor exploitation, sexism, and negation of humanity led Cornel West to assert we are “witnessing America as a failed social experiment.” Loyalties to liberal and national conceptions of the common good are contested to their core. BLM is imagining a radical change of solidarities at the local, national, international, and transnational levels. And they join many other movements across the world who have emerged in parallel. Coronavirus has not changed the world, but the emerging networks might. The construction of this new world demands more than applause.