The alt is to endorse black feminist ethics of care as a mode of resistance to racial capitalism.

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic and state violence converged in the U.S. in 2020 highlighting the uneven distribution of illness and death. In this article, we mobilize three bodies of literature–political ecologies of health and the body, Black geographies and racial capitalism, and Black feminist work on care—to understand the disproportionate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian people, and to imagine different, more just futures. We argue that these literatures center relationships, ena- bling an analysis that incorporates viruses and cellular pro- cesses, histories of racism, power differences, and political economy. We conclude by taking inspiration from the up- risings and Black feminism to envision a more caring future that nurtures relationships. KEYWORDS black feminisms, care, COVID-19, health, political ecology, racial capitalism, the body 1 | INTRODUCTION The COVID-19 pandemic has made long-standing racial, gender, ability, and other inequities clear while also exac- erbating them. As these immense disparities came into view in the spring of 2020, another form of risk reappeared: the extrajudicial murder of Black and brown people by police. If COVID-19 made plain the ways that systemic racial injustices bear down on individual bodies, the murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 highlighted the intensity with which the lives of entire groups of people, in this case Black people, truly matter less. Across the US, and around the world, protests erupted: protests for the mattering of black lives, protests for the freedom to breathe, protests against the “ontological negation” and “ontological terror” (2018) that a global pandemic, police brutality, “parasitic Geography Compass. 2022;16:e12609. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/gec3 © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 1 of 15 https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12609 2 of 15 NEELY and LOPEZ governance” (Wang, 2018), and life under racial capitalism produce. As Frantz Fanon is often credited with saying, “we revolt simply because, for a variety of reasons, we can no longer breathe” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 111).1 A coronavirus sur- vivor himself, Floyd's last words, “I can't breathe,” became the mantra of the protests in the pandemic. In this article, we examine the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, its disproportionate impact on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian (BBIA)2 people, and what a more just future focused on relationships and care might look like. The mass uprising also sparked global conversations about institutional racism and its impact on health. In the US, more than 1200 public health officials signed a letter declaring racism a public health issue and supporting the protests amidst the pandemic as a surge of cities across the country adopted the framework, officially. Globally, the UN passed a number of resolutions that condemn anti-Black violence and stress that racism and xenophobia have no place in the pandemic response. These officials acknowledged what so many activists had long known: that Black people (and Brown, Indigenous, and Asian people) should have the right to “breathe free” (Sharpe, 2016). Across the globe, solidarity protests erupted—many further spurred by local acts of police violence. In Nigeria, tens of thousands took to the streets to protest the brutality of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) against youth; tens of thousands took to the streets in cities across France to protest the 2016 police murder of Adama Traoré; and in Colombia, protestors took to the streets for Anderson Arboleda, to name just a few. As the protests continued in this pandemic, mutual aid societies and other collective caring models picked up strength (Fuentenebro, 2020). These efforts included pop-up food banks, vacant home reclamation and occupation, crowdsourced hardship funds, free online medical-consultation, mass donations of PPE, mask-making at home, and more. Zoom-based teach-ins, and seminars on starting mutual aid networks and movement building were suddenly available to anyone who had an internet connection. These endeavors mark a concerted effort to move away from the masculinist sensibility of care-as-protection toward a more grounded form of redistribution-as-care, all while recognizing individual bodies as social bodies (Lopez & Neely, 2021; Scheper-Hughes & Lock, 1987). This model offers a path toward what the Black Panther Party called self-determination (Nelson, 2011); a world where everyone can survive and thrive, a world that Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, trans and disabled people fight for and build themselves (Bledsoe et al., 2019). If we have learned anything from this moment, it is that there is a political will to care (Jankó, 2020; Méndez et al., 2020)—to sit with the uncomfortability of thinking about and trying to address both the legacies and current iteration of racial capitalism and the impact they have on the health and lives of the most vulnerable members of society. Whether or not things will change in the long run remains to be seen. To think through both the COVID-19 pandemic and anti-Black violence and what they tell us about health, inequality, and care we bring together the literatures of political ecologies of health and the body (PEH), Black ge- ographies and racial capitalism, and Black feminist approaches to care. We argue that these three bodies of litera- ture place different kinds of relationships at their analytical center, and together they offer an important model for understanding health in the context of inequality brought on by racial capitalism. In the next section, we explore political ecologies of health, which center more-than-human relationships at multiple scales from inside of bodies to large-scale political economies. Next, we detail the literature on racial capitalism, which forces us to recognize and reckon with the co-constitution of racism and capitalism in that political economy. The following section unpacks the literature on care, especially work by Black feminists. Writing from the same place as scholars of racial capital- ism, Black feminist work on care pushes against neoliberal frameworks of individualism and autonomy, recognizing interrelatedness both as material fact and as ground through which to imagine worlds otherwise. We conclude by bringing these literatures together to make sense of this ongoing pandemic in the context of global anti-Blackness, focusing on questions of racism and anti-black violence, in particular, and their impact on both society and the body. So doing, we argue that while a PEH infused with racial capitalism helps to explain the uneven and unjust impacts of the pandemic, a Black feminist ethic of care helps to imagine a different, more just future. 17498198, 2022, 2, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.12609 by University Of Michigan Library, Wiley Online Library on [10/07/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License NEELY and LOPEZ 3 of 15 2 | POLITICAL ECOLOGIES OF HEALTH AND THE BODY [W]hat I've seen over the years of my research and lifetime is that the stressors that impact people of color are chronic and repeated through their whole life course....And that increases a general health vulnerability — which is what weathering is – Arlene Geronimus. (Sandoiu, 2021) Recent work in political ecologies of health (PEH) takes up the question of race and its differential impacts on the health of BBIA people. This comes out of the combination of political ecology's concern with how capitalism and ecology—the social and the biological—work together to produce environmental problems and uneven illness (Jackson & Neely, 2015; King, 2010; Mansfield, 2008; Nichols & Casino, 2020) and environmental justice's focus on the impact of (racial) capitalism and the environment on human health (Harrison, 2008; Heynen, 2003; Holif- ield, 2001; Pulido, 1996, 2000, 2006). As Madison Barbour and Julie Guthman (2018) write, environmental justice focuses on “structural and political vulnerabilities that make certain populations more likely to be exposed to environ- mental health hazards” (p. 334) like pollution and other damage (Heynen, 2003; Holifield, 2001; Pulido, 2000, 2006). As these scholars demonstrate, and as health geographers interested in “neighborhood effects” have long shown (e.g., Finch et al., 2010; Weden et al., 2011), contaminated environments are disproportionately inhabited by poor and non-white people, and they come to matter as they make people sick. With its focus on human-environment relationships, broadly defined, PEH centers human health in ways that move beyond environmental justice literature, to include work on vector- and water-borne illness (Carter, 2008; Ferring & Hausermann, 2019; Nading, 2014), nutrition (Guthman, 2011; Heynen, 2009, 2010; Neely, 2021b), infectious disease (Craddock, 2015; King, 2017; Neely, 2015), ambiguous or uncertain environmental contact (Haus- ermann, 2015, 2020; Neely, 2021a, 2021b; Senanayake, 2019), and environmental toxins and contaminants (Guth- man & Mansfield, 2013, 2015; Nading, 2017; Sultana, 2012). A particularly important aspect of political ecologies of health is a focus on the body, what Allison and Jessica Hayes-Conroy have termed a political ecology of the body. The Hayes-Conroys (2013, 2015) offer a “visceral” body with a focus on the affective and emotive to attend to structural forces and bodily experience beyond the material. One of us, Abigail Neely (2015), integrates the scale of the body by attending to the “internal ecologies” of rural African people as she rethinks taken-for-granted understandings of disease in a broader context of global health programs and local environments. And Julie Gutman and Becky Mans- field (2015) build on environmental justice literature, but center the body, arguing that bodily ecologies cannot be separated from environmental flows. Bringing this work together, Cari Nichols and Vincent Del Casino (2020) argue that “the body is not a ‘boundary’ or ‘blurred,’ but rather ontologically co-constituted through power-laden relations with more-than-human actors (e.g., microbes, nutrients, air) and also affective, non-representable forces” (p. 2). Tak- en together and echoing the insights of environmental justice, this work recognizes the ways in which capitalism (Guthman, 2011), race (Mansfield & Guthman, 2015), gender (Sultana, 2012, 2021), and experience (Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy, 2015) ensure uneven exposure and unequal health impacts that almost always fall along predictable axes of oppression, as we have seen with the COVID-19 pandemic. We find two emerging strands of PEH particularly generative for thinking with the literature on racial capitalism and Black feminisms to understand COVID-19 in the context of anti-Blackness: PEH that attends to race and racial capitalism and PEH that attends to intergenerational health consequences. In a recent Progress Report on geographies of race and ethnicity, Laura Pulido (2017) argues for a more significant linking of literatures of environmental justice and racial capitalism. So doing, she argues that racial capitalism restructures the environment in ways that not only build from, but create racial difference, and further that these processes reshape bodies. She writes, “[Racial] capital- ism is reproducing itself by restructuring humans on a cellular level” as “racially devalued bodies” become pollution “sinks” (Pulido, 2017, p. 529). Because people of color are deemed expendable, industry can pollute in the places in which they live, building profits out of their inhumanity. One of us, Neely (2021b), argues that racial capitalism in apartheid South Africa, which started from the position that Africans were inherently inferior, shaped everything from labor and employment patterns to nutritional science to health and infectious diseases and to the policies and 17498198, 2022, 2, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.12609 by University Of Michigan Library, Wiley Online Library on [10/07/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 4 of 15 NEELY and LOPEZ programs to address them (see also, Wylie, 2001). The result is ongoing large racial disparities in morbidity and mor- tality and limited possibilities to address them. Barbour and Guthman (2018) take up the questions of racial capitalism in their examination of pregnant farmworker exposure to pesticides in a context where farmworker knowledge is devalued as bodies are harmed for profit. They write, “it is not only immigration policy and the precarious legal status of farmworkers that makes for their vulnerability to pesticide exposure, but the racist logics embedded in capitalism itself that renders certain bodies vulnerable and disposable” (Barbour & Guthman, 2018, p. 335). Drawing on Pulido and thinking through the epigenetic impacts of pesticides, they argue that industrial agriculture may offer an example of “how racial capitalism transforms bodies at the cellular level” (Barbour & Guthman, 2018, p. 337). Mansfield and Guthman also address questions of race and racism in their work on epigenetics. In critically in- terrogating the science, they argue that epigenetics offers a new way to pathologize difference—in the relationships between genes and the environment—which reifies existing racial inequality (Guthman & Mansfield, 2013, 2015; Mansfield & Guthman, 2015). In this work, they also examine the intergenerational imaginations and impacts of epi- genetics through the long-term and multi-generational effects of environmental exposure. According to the science of epigenetics, the exposures of grandparents can effect grandchildren's genetic makeup even if those children never have the exposures their ancestors did, thus rendering the body temporally elastic. Mansfield and Guthman see epigenetics as a way to understand how histories of inequality manifest in bodies and shape differential health out- comes and health futures. They write, “Researchers are discovering biological pathways through which social stresses such as racial discrimination and joblessness are somatized....can be cumulative... [and] can be embodied. These observations are leading to new theorizations about biology and race such that biological difference—not reduced to genomics—can be an effect of social relations” (Guthman & Mansfield, 2013, p. 11). This approach is important because it recognizes the biological impact of the “histories that produce inequality in resource access and wealth in the construction of racial difference” (Lafferty, 2012). And this is important for understanding the uneven impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and how it relates to anti-Blackness through what are commonly known as pre-existing conditions like asthma, heart disease, and diabetes. The next section offers an in-depth examination of how racial disparities come to be in the first place through an analysis of the literature on racial capitalism, and why they matter to both individual bodies and society, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. 3 | BLACK GEOGRAPHIES AND RACIAL CAPITALISM What do we do with the profoundly disturbing impossibility of black geographies that unfold into prisons, north stars, apartheids, and swaths of premature death? (McKittrick, 2016, p. 98) Since the start of the millennium there has been an increasing interest in questions of racial capitalism in the social sciences and humanities, including in geography. Racial capitalism is a term coined by Cedric Robinson (2000) in his monumental book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Much of the recent scholarship on racial capitalism draws on this foundational work and is rooted in literature from and about the Black experience in North America and the Caribbean. Racial capitalism highlights and insists upon the recognition that capitalism has, since its evolution out of feudalism, been grounded in and dependent on racial differentiation (Robinson, 2000). Or, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2015) says, “Capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it.” As such, racial capitalism is not simply a descriptor of the ways in which race and capitalism intersect, but rather, an insistence that capitalism has always been predicated on racial difference; that capitalism and racism are co-constituted (Robinson, 2000). A number of scholars, including geographers, write about racial capitalism today. In particular, Black geographies attends “to the ways in which current forms of capitalism renew themselves through racialized violence” (Bledsoe et al., 2019, p. 4). For example, focusing on California, Gilmore (2007) details how racial capitalism's need for unfree labor for profit has led to the mass incarceration of Black people who then serve as prison laborers. Noah Zatz (2020) builds on this to argue that the work requirements embedded in debt payments, probation, and parole extend the 17498198, 2022, 2, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.12609 by University Of Michigan Library, Wiley Online Library on [10/07/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License NEELY and LOPEZ 5 of 15 logics of “carceral work mandates,” allowing employers to use state violence to discipline workers. In both cases, these unfree and less-than-free workers are disproportionately Black men whose labor has always been key for the extraction of profit under racial capitalism. Adam Bledsoe and Willie Wright (2019) push this further to under- stand global capitalism, arguing that anti-Blackness is necessary for its perpetuation. The production of surplus value through the exploitation of the global majority has been a crucial and cruel reality for many of the essential jobs that have in theory kept everyone healthy, but have in reality kept the capitalist class and mostly wealthy people healthy, fed, housed, and safe as they work from home during the pandemic. By contrast, low wage workers in grocery stores, meat packing plants, hospitals, restaurants, farms, and factories have taken on much of the risk of illness. In the pan- demic, capitalism continues thanks to racialized and gendered exploitation. While not necessarily employing the term racial capitalism directly, there are other generative strands of thought in Black Studies and postcolonial studies that help illuminate the idea of racial capitalism. For example, postcolonial scholars elaborate on abandonment as an operationalization of racial capitalism that both dispossesses and enacts violence along a spectrum up to and including ethnic cleansing (Bhattacharyya, 2018). Achille Mbembe (2017) dubs this “black reason,” in an effort to capture the entwining of economic, epistemological, and psychic violence in Africa. And of course, Frantz Fanon (2005) writes about the ways in which the intersecting processes of race and class are linked, affecting individual's psychology, and helping to define what it means to be human. In his analysis of what is today called racial capitalism, Fanon allows, in the words of Camilla Hawthorne and Kaily Heitz (2018), Black life to be non-reducible. In geography, racial capitalism has emerged as an important analytical thread within the emerging subfield of Black geographies (Bledsoe, 2020). Black geographies developed in response to a discipline that has willfully ex- cluded the lives and experiences—the epistemologies and ontologies—of Black people and Black spatial processes (Bledsoe, 2021). As Katherine McKittrick (2006) writes, Black geographies are “subaltern or alternative geographic patterns that work alongside and beyond traditional geographies and a site of terrain of struggle” (p. 7). Black geogra- phies as we think of the field today has antecedents stretching back to the middle of the last century (Pulido, 2017). In a recent Progress article, Bledsoe (2021) traces these antecedents to the work of Harold Rose and Bill Bunge, arguing that the focus on question of what we call racial capitalism today emerged in the 1990s with the work of Bobby Wilson, Clyde Woods, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. These scholars offer understandings of urban geography as predicated on segregation and racial capitalism (Wilson, 2019), the overriding plantation logics of the south and the life-making processes of Black people (Lewis, 2020; Woods, 1998), and the prison-industrial complex's need for cheap labor within an economic system stratified by a racial hierarchy (Gilmore, 2007). Pulido (2017) notes that more and more scholars, especially political ecologists, have become interested in questions of racial capitalism over the past decade. She writes, “[T]he ideas are not necessarily new. What is new is the term, the intellectual moment, and the political urgency. The time is ripe for a deep engagement with racial capitalism” (Pulido, 2017, p. 526). Recog- nizing the importance of a focus on racial capitalism, McKittrick (2014) calls for an understanding of Black life that exceeds an economic logic that sees Black people as property, which Hawthorne (2019) sees as possible through an attention to the minutiae of everyday life. In drawing on racial capitalism, we center the differential experiences, illness, and death of BBIA people due to COVID-19 within longer histories of capital expropriation and exploitation. Theorists of racial capitalism have long argued that from its inception, capitalist accumulation has been dependent upon the vulnerability and disposability of racialized bodies (Mbembe, 2017; Pulido, 2017), building as it did through the expansion of empire. Racial capitalism at once renders subjects vulnerable to “hyper exploitation and expropriation in the economic domain and vulerab[le] to premature death in the political and social domains” (Wang, 2018, p. 122). Taking the lessons of racial capitalism to health and the body, Gilmore (2019) argues that the fiction of race has an impact on the human body. She says, “As racial capitalism takes it out of people's hides, the contradiction of skin becomes clearer.” McKittrick (2016) ex- tends this focus on the body to argue that racial capitalism refuses black humanity. Put another way, Bledsoe and Wright (2019) argue that the assumed absence of value in Black life makes global capitalism possible, and further that race is a condition of existence “that leads to premature death” (Bledsoe, 2020, p. 474). Taken together, geographers 17498198, 2022, 2, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.12609 by University Of Michigan Library, Wiley Online Library on [10/07/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 6 of 15 NEELY and LOPEZ studying racial capitalism understand it as a system predicated on a racial hierarchy that deems Black people dispos- able. It is this logic, in conversation with the literature on PEH that helps us understand the differential impacts of the pandemic—biomedically, socially, and economically. Central to work in geography and allied disciplines on racial capitalism is a focus on the relationship between capitalism and racial hierarchies that exists from the start. As Gilmore explains, “[R]acial capitalism, which is to say all capitalism, is not a thing, it's a relation” (Card, 2020). Fighting racial capitalism and the unequal world order it constitutes—enacting worlds otherwise—requires a reorganization of relationships. The Black radical tradition from which the idea of racial capitalism emerged, and Black feminism in particular, offers a different vision of relationships, which we explore more fully in the next section. As Jodi Melamed (2015) writes and as the protests in the summer of 2020 enacted, “[T]he Black radical tradition is antiracist, anticapitalist, and collective-making because it is a name for struggles that arrange social forces for Black survival over and against capital accumulation” (p. 80). Recogniz- ing racial capitalism as a particular kind of structuring relation and focusing on the minutiae of the everyday in the broader national and global context of anti-Blackness allows us to begin to understand the uneven impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic as emerging from an ethos of antirelationality. As we turn to next, by focusing on responses to the pandemic that center care and by exploring Black feminist work on care, we begin to see possible alternatives. 4 | BLACK FEMINIST CARE Care is a practice for tending to what has already been lost and what might be lost, a political tool for the maintenance of the self and the collective, that is always oppositional to the logic of the state...[and] thus a practice of being deeply attuned to historical and ongoing violence, and to living in the midst of it, a strategy for examining black life and the structures that seek to constrain life. (Nash, 2018, p. 79) Care labor is everyone's labor—it is what not only sustains each individual through physical and emotional support, it is also the work of building social relations, community, and modes of relationality (Woodly et al., 2021). Women, BBIA people, and immigrants make up a disproportionate number of care laborers, many of whom live at or near poverty levels. Many face heightened precarity due to poor labor regulations (Burnham & Theodore, 2012; England & Alcorn, 2018) and increased exposure to injury and disability (Hopkins, 2017). This precarity is perpetuated by an assumption that one should sacrifice for the people in their care and that love for others and for the work is compen- sation in and of itself (Yu, 2018). During the pandemic, many care laborers have faced an outsized risk of exposure to COVID-19 even as they have no or little access to health care (Kaur-Gill, 2020; Méndez et al., 2020; Nasol & Francisco-Menchavez, 2021). Migrant care workers—both documented and undocumented—across the globe are particularly vulnerable (Sbicca et al., 2020; Silvey & Parreñas, 2020). The exploitation of care laborers stems from the differentiation of racial capitalism at multiple, entangled scales, and maps onto colonial relations of racialized hierar- chies of power (Noxolo et al., 2012; Raghuram, 2012). The rise of racial capitalism also brought with it new gendered relations of power through an idealized distinc- tion between so-called men's productive and women's social reproductive labors—a split that was never a reality for poor and racialized families (Glenn, 2012). Indeed, scholars have argued that capital accumulation was only pos- sible through the invisibilized labor of women and enslaved people, in terms of both the biological reproduction of the labor force and in the everyday labor of social reproduction (scholars have called this an ongoing form of primitive accumulation) (Federici, 2014; Mies, 2014; Weinbaum, 2019). The latter half of the 20th century saw a hardening of capitalist logics, globally. During this period, structural adjustment programs, which were rolled out in response to the global debt crisis of the 1980s, destroyed the last vestiges of the commons and further devolved social reproduction to individuals and their families (Federici, 2014). In turn, much of the labor of social reproduc- tion—the “the fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life” (Katz, 2011, p. 711)—shifted more deeply onto 17498198, 2022, 2, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.12609 by University Of Michigan Library, Wiley Online Library on [10/07/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License NEELY and LOPEZ 7 of 15 under-paid, over-worked, and highly exploited care laborers as more and more women entered the workforce. Yet much of the mainstream scholarship on care and care ethics is Euro- or Western-centric (Green & Lawson, 2011; Raghuram, 2016), lacking an intersectional analysis (Hankivsky, 2014; Raghuram, 2019), and ignoring the long history of Black feminists attention to care. Black feminist care analysis has always been intersectional and accounted for racial capitalism. These scholars and activists recognize racial capitalism as the structure against which an ethic of care must be mobilized in order to exceed the care-less-ness of what Patricia Hill Collins (2002) calls the “matrix of domination.”3 Often grounded in othermothering and revolutionary mothering, Black feminist care ethics is rooted in the practices of women caring for children intergenerationally and across the community—a practice that stretches back to West Africa and to slavery. Othermothering is the revolutionary act of challenging western conceptions of family and care, enfolding it into social and political activism (Butler, 2019; James, 1993; McDonald, 1997). Black feminist care ethics begins from culture work, or “the entire way a community organizes to nurture itself and future generations” (Reagon, 1996, pp. 168, 170; see also; Barry & Grady, 2019). As an expression of culture work, othermothering is “the bridge work that requires confronting the very real barriers that oppression places in our way and also finding love and power by facing the bar- riers that divide us from each other across geopolitical divides” (Gumbs et al., 2016, pp. 5, 6). As such, it refuses the insistence on the gender binary, offering, instead, potentiality (Spillers, 2003) by defying neoliberal temporalities and individualization that are grounded in hetero-normative, patriarchal, white supremacist capitalism (Crawley, 2020). As Sosa-Provencio (2016) writes, “...caring is necessarily political, transformative, and rooted in the collective uplift of those struggling to overcome these forces of oppression in their daily lives” (p. 306). Care ethics is a politics of relationality and as such it is necessarily multi-scalar, moving beyond neoliberal capital- ism's insistence on the atomized individual and family and a vision of care-as-protection. The global protests against anti-Black violence in the summer of 2020 and increasing interest in police abolition were a direct recrimination of the pervasiveness of the masculinist formation of care-as-protection. “Care,” in this frame, is violence. Abolition movements are a call to shift this framing toward building communities of care and support, toward a Black feminist vision of care (Okechukwu, 2021). Black feminists offer an approach to care that always recognizes the influence of racial capitalism. With this framing, care ethics pushes for an attention to “mutual vulnerability,” transformation, and mutual responsibility (Nash, 2018). For a feminist care ethics to fulfill its promise as a transformative ethos, it must center race, racism, and racial capitalism as the ground from which care and relationships emerge. As Christina Sharpe (2016) puts it, this care is bound up in “wake work,” where “care in the wake [is] a problem for thinking of and for Black non/being in the world...[it] is a work that insists and performs that thinking needs care (‘all thought is Black thought’) and that thinking and care need to stay in the wake” (p. 5). This wake work necessarily entails “multispecies assemblages” of care that move beyond the “the racial and colonial logics of the abstract universal anthropos” upon which the current ecological crisis is pinned (Davis et al., 2019, p. 3). This notion of the “Anthropocene,” scholars argue, flattens humanity to a singular monolith and fails to account for the uneven impacts of the climate crisis, and we would add, global pandemics. It also fails to consider whose labor and lives were, and still are, enrolled in these processes under violence, oppression, exploitation, and expropriation (Davis et al., 2019; see also H.; Davis & Todd, 2017; Karera, 2019; Pulido, 2018). Indeed, as Françoise Vergés argues (2017, p. 74), the Anthropocene and the politics of climate change rest on “the politics of nonraciality beneath which...lurk more sinister shadows of the racial everyday and persistent institutional and structural racisms—and racial capital- ism.” As with PEH, this attention to non-human entanglements, especially in the context of racial capitalism, helps us understand why certain people (marginalized care givers who disproportionately have preexisting conditions) get sicker from COVID-19. When combined, the literature on PEH and racial capitalism helps to explain the pandemic in the context of anti-Blackness, while, as we turn to next, Black feminist work on care offers us a possible new way forward.