Vaccines, Antidotes, Cures

Abstract

By now you must have grown tired of the easy poetics articulating racism and Covid-19 as “twin diseases” or dual pandemics; or perhaps as “mutual infections” or symbiotic viruses. Such talk has been rampant over the last year, suggesting a desire to link concurrent phenomena in the language of mutuality, of ongoing social illness or catalytic metastasis. It is also the case that in times when mundane reality faces the pressure of social contradiction as well as the hot breath of literal violence, metaphor becomes a way of containing the incommensurable and of expressing the inexpressible and the incomplete. Understandably this particular set of metaphors works in more direct ways. For example, they operate to delink these phenomena of racism and the pandemic from a state-sponsored narrative of pure happenstance or randomness, which renders them as opportunistic infections instead of chronic illnesses. Historians, however, are likely to flinch at this casual blending of phenomena given their awareness of a history in which race and cultural differences are ever framed in terms of infections, disease and contagion. A notable example of this would be how Chinese immigrants were linked to the “miasmic theory” of disease or germ transmission in the nineteenth century and so everything from smallpox to “Mongolian leprosy” to cholera and typhus became reasons to restrict immigration from Asian countries as the country would in 1924. Of course, that particular reading of race and disease has not left us, indeed it was barely dormant before being violently relaunched by the antiChina, anti-immigrant virus of Trumpism. It is this latter reawakening of the deployment of the two phenomena that should alert those of us in/around Black Studies that it is more than a predictable and exhausted collusion of symbols and metaphors. They are enduring elements in the arsenal of moral panic and racial power. This poetic parallel is worth some attention, though, not for what it assumes but for what it can do. Such easy synthesis can do more than just allow narratives to authorize themselves around tropes of illness, foreignness and of cultural influence framed as moral contagion—as mentioned above, these associations are historically quite familiar. Yet even if we now blend racism and disease in putatively anti-racist ways, such as to point out what has long been chronic about white supremacism and, for example, how it and healthcare are no strange bedfellows, the ease with which we do so depends on the former legacy of rendering race and infection equivalent. But that’s a minor quibble. Far more troublesome is how powerful the poetic parallel can be in mobilizing a depleted and ravaged body to generate enthusiastic if not cathartic response. In other words, far more dangerous is the promise of a cure. Let me be extremely clear before being suspected of Coronavirus denialism or of being an anti-vaxxer. It’s the other side of the parallel I’m thinking about here—the part about the disease of racism and the