By Rebecca Solnit*
In theory, all of us are vulnerable to coronavirus, but in practice how well we fare has to do with what you could call preexisting conditions that are not only medical but economic, social, political and racial — and the pandemic, which is also an economic catastrophe, has made these differences glaringly clear.
Age was the first factor most of us in the West heard about in the unequal impact of this virus. It seemed to affect older people the most and children hardly at all, with a lot of younger adults having mild cases. This was misread as young people having nothing to worry about. Then, March was full of stories of desperately ill and dying young people as cautionary tales warning that no one was guaranteed an exemption from this.
Perhaps the widespread attempts in recent years to try to think intersectionally — to understand how multiple factors affect each person’s identity and experience — has equipped us to understand how unequally affected we are by a disease and the measures taken to limit it. For example, the shutdowns that are meant to prevent its spread have wildly varying economic impacts. Some suddenly lost jobs. Some whose work was deemed necessary had to continue in the face of the danger of contagion — medical workers, firefighters, transport workers and food workers, from those on farms to supermarket stockers and cashiers. Some white-collar workers could work safely from home or were already based at home. Some of us are financially devastated; some are unchanged.
In many countries and most US states people were told to stay at home. What sheltering in place means for the impoverished, overcrowded majority in some parts of the world is hard to fathom. What does a family of eight do in two rooms with a dirt floor, little food on hand and no running water? Those who are in prison and other forms of detention find that lack of freedom means lack of freedom to take the necessary measures.
Some of us did not have homes — and some cities made an unprecedented effort to find safe housing for homeless residents, some did not. San Francisco continued to try to place homeless people in shared spaces where the disease had opportunities to spread, leading to 70 residents of one impromptu shelter testing positive for the virus. Oakland endeavored to place unhoused people in hotel rooms where they would be at far less risk.
As schools were closed, the digital divide meant that more affluent families with computers, iPads and good Internet connections had a very different home educational (and informational, social and entertainment) situation than families without these amenities. This newly intensified parenting meant very different things for two parents with one child and a single parent of three, for parents who were supposed to continue working fulltime inside or outside the home and those who were suddenly out of work.
Universities that suddenly evicted their students and told them to “go home” seemed to proceed on the premise that every student had a loving pair of parents in a commodious home eager to receive them. Of course, some don’t have parents, others come from abusive households, or impoverished ones with no room for a sudden arrival, or no stable home, or ones in which parents are already overwhelmed or ill.
Some who live alone have been reporting devastating loneliness; people who live with others have reported everything from exasperation to fear, including fear of roommates, partners and adolescent offspring who refused to follow the recommended protocols for avoiding contagion. Warnings are emerging about a likely wave of mental health problems from these new situations. Domestic violence has risen dramatically in many places.
Gender assumed many roles in this pandemic. If women live with male spouses, children, or both, they are already likely to be saddled with what sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild calls “the second shift” — the housework, food preparation and childcare, all of which intensify when life takes place almost entirely at home.
We were encouraged to start making masks at home — sewing has no inherent gender, but I have yet to see a man making masks and I’ve seen many women producing everything from a few funky masks to hundreds to distribute to strangers. Masks in the US are widely understood as self-protection, while the Asian practice of people wearing masks while potentially contagious is intended to protect others. I also saw on social media someone complain that white men were refusing to wear masks with floral patterns because they were interested in protecting, first, their masculinity, and saw others note that for black men floral and festive patterns were desirable ways of defusing the racist perception of them as threatening. Other black men are afraid to wear masks at all, for fear it will heighten the racist perception of them as menacing or criminal.
It has also become clear that health disparities due to racism increased the chances of becoming severely ill or dying. From New Orleans to Chicago, black people were at disproportionate risk of death. Higher levels of diabetes and hypertension can be linked to the stress of racism; asthma and respiratory problems are tied to the polluted air of many urban and industrial areas; and lack of long-term access to good medical care and food sources (due to poverty and discrimination) play their part.
In the US, another kind of racism blamed the virus on Chinese-Americans, Chinese immigrants or — with the usual sloppiness of racists — those who looked Asian, in some sort of ugly fantasy of collective guilt. One’s ethnicity has nothing to do with whether or not one has been to China recently, and there is no biological difference in vulnerability or contagiousness. Undocumented residents were unable to access some resources and understandably reluctant to seek out others.
Nearly everyone on Earth is, or will be, affected by this pandemic but each of us is affected differently. Some of us are financially devastated, some are gravely or fatally ill or have already died; some face racism outside the home or violence within it. The pandemic is a spotlight that illuminates underlying problems — economic inequality, racism, patriarchy. Taking care of each other begins with understanding the differences. And when the virus has slowed or stopped, all these problems will still need to be addressed. They are the chronic illnesses that weaken us as a society, morally, imaginatively, and otherwise.
* This article, by columnist Rebecca Solnit, was first published in the Guardian.
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