Colorblind approaches to pandemics and attempting to innovate our way out are a call for returning back to the fatal squo while empowering biopolitical surveillance.

Talk of a colorblind coronavirus that doesn’t see race means little when racialized medicine diminishes or utterly neglects the needs of nonwhite, racialized patients. “Invisible virus” is similarly specious language. Last time I checked, the pathologization of racialized people makes this supposedly invisible virus, hypervisible. We can’t treat a disease through “universal” guidelines that render invisible the experiences of those disproportionately harmed by the comorbidity of COVID-19 and structural violence. You cannot “shelter in place” without shelter. What to some is a refuge, may also be the site of emotional and sexual violence.

Practicing good hand hygiene means little without access to soap, water and/or sanitizer. Physical distancing guidelines don’t protect you from being harassed, detained, arrested, and/or incarcerated. When you are, as Frantz Fanon writes, “overdetermined from the outside,” face coverings offer little protection or immunity from police terror. In an attempt to “flatten the curve” we cannot flatten difference and differential impact. We know that there is no single curve. Some will experience relief much sooner than others. Sadly, some will experience no relief at all. Without accuracy in language, we can’t claim to be measuring what we intend to measure or diagnosing the right problem. Using the wrong name is worse than using no name at all.

5) We can treat this disease with abolition

There are many who fear that the “world will never be the same” once the coronavirus pandemic is over. But what about those who worry that things won’t be all that different? What about those who recognize that the “normal” so many long to return is still fatal AF? What about those who see with great clarity that the causes and consequences of the current pandemic will grant the state license to unleash new forms of terror through surveillance, incarceration, increased brutality, and extermination? Consider the growing number of deputized white people already primed to the warning, “If you see something, say something.” What happens if the thing you see is not a “thing” at all, but a human being? We are embarking on a new stage of biopolitics where coronavirus vigilantes are already targeting and regulating dissenting bodies, most of whom are black and brown. With sufficient amounts of coercion and consent, these new forms of racialized violence will become hegemonic. We are already seeing an expansion and re-entrenchment of state power. In this new era, will we ask whether mandating the use of face coverings is anti-black? Will we question whether critiquing “contact tracing” for potentially inaugurating new technologies of racialized surveillance will result in retaliation? Will we challenge the expansion of state surveillance under the guise of public health and safety measures? Will we call out the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank for using “debt relief” as a form of COVID-washing and remind both agencies who actually owes who? Will we go head up with law enforcement for constructing the crime they claim to police? Will we understand that what the state deems “crime,” many poor and racialized persons call “survival”?