COVID-19 is a disaster. So is mass Black Death.
For centuries, we have watched the slaughter of Black bodies, while most of the world stands unblinking as though encaptivated and properly entertained, and others have merely closed their eyes. The introduction of modern technology has not made it any more visible per se — ask the dozens of those who were gathered while massas raped their women, beat their men, and sold their children. Ask the dozens who picked up the remnants of flyers from public lynchings, or those who came to let down their relatives from the tree branches they were hung from. Ask those who do their daily counts looking into cells that contain hordes of darker hues. We have never been shielded from Black death. We would be remiss to believe that it has somehow spread more because of the footage from our cell phone cameras — it is our legacy as a country to make a spectacle of murder.
Those who see others who look like them on the screen under knees or in chokeholds or filled with bullet holes know to be Black and American is to be intimately aware of daily violence, not because you see it for others but because you see it for yourself. You see the stares, the turning away, the tightening grip on purses or women or children, the coincidental cross of the street as you walk by. You hear the hushed tones, the seemingly innocuous questions, the words like angry or afraid or offended leave mouths talking to each other or into receivers that 911 tend to. You feel the pat down from officers who stop you because we always fit the description, have felt the handcuffs or being thrown down to the ground just because it can be done. You have mourned over the lives of your friends, brothers, sisters, cousins, wives, husbands, children, aunts, uncles, grandmothers, grandfathers, grandchildren — your kin. We have never been shielded from Black death.
And so, when we see the statistics show that COVID-19 is infecting Black folks at disproportionate rates, we are not surprised. When we see the protests for a reopening of America that invokes notions of freedom and rights, knowing that those who will be most impacted once reopened have no real relationship with those terms, we are not taken aback. When we still get up to work and provide every day without the luxury of staying home, we are not in awe. When we walk past the empty rooms or drive by the fresh mound of dirt in the cemetery because someone we love has died from COVID-19, we are not in disbelief — we do what we have always done, been doing for centuries — we absorb the loss and keep going, because even grief and mourning is seemingly a delicacy we cannot afford. It is the double consciousness that W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) refers to — the contradiction of being both an American and Black, when America refuses to recognize the personhood of the latter, although America is not America without the latter. The double consciousness that shows up for the Black American, recognizing that the same society that refuses to accept them, the one that looks at them with disdain would not exist without them — it is the consciousness that although Black folks are America, they are not American.
Mass Black death is a disaster. Just like there is nothing normal about a disaster, just like it is caused by a hazard that meets human action, there is nothing normal about mass Black death. We try to reason why the U.S. has not sufficiently responded to COVID-19 in a way that would mitigate the amount of death, but it is a similar question to why the U.S. has not sufficiently responded to mass Black death in a way that would save lives; the answers are the same — America was built and is sustained on backs and bodies — Black and Brown ones. Americans would not be able to stay home if Black folks were not. Those working in low-wage positions, at our fast food restaurants, at our drug stores or supermarkets, those delivering food or groceries or mail or packages, those taking care of the elderly in their homes or within assisted living/nursing facilities, those who are still driving our public buses and trains, and beyond — are not those who are protesting out in the street to return back to outside because they never left — they are Black. And this country is willing to do and will do what it has always done — sacrifice them. For its comfort. For its stability. For its continuity of operations.
Mass Black death isn’t happenstance — it is intentional, structural, and deeply rooted. It is the result of white supremacy that is embedded with violence — is violence. There is no way to assert dominance over a race of people without violence, or the threat of violence, repeatedly, swiftly, and certainly. And it is this violence that Black folks are aware of and live with every day with or without a new justicefor hashtag. Which is not to say that we never turn on our cameras, but we must understand that America is not ignorant to what its violence looks like. White Americans will largely not be moved by seeing Black bodies killed across their screen — nor should we expect them to. It is not a new phenomenon. Seeing the devastation of death is not a sufficient motivator. And so, we must demand justice. Accountability. That goes beyond an individual to the interlocking systems of oppression that they comprise. Seek abolition, to dismantle the systems in the first place. We must generate new disaster response methods and frameworks that are not rooted in whiteness. We must radically hope that while it is our legacy, mass Black death does not have to be our future.
