The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying
The pandemic has exposed the bitter terms of our racial contract, which deems certain lives of greater value than others.
SIX WEEKS AGO, AHMAUD ARBERY went out and never came home. Gregory and Travis McMichael, who saw Arbery running through their neighborhood just outside of Brunswick, Georgia, and who told authorities they thought he was a burglary suspect, armed themselves, pursued Arbery, and then shot him dead.
The local prosecutor, George E. Barnhill, concluded that no crime had been committed. Arbery had tried to wrest a shotgun from Travis McMichael before being shot, Barnhill wrote in a letter to the police chief. The two men who had seen a stranger running, and decided to pick up their firearms and chase him, had therefore acted in self-defense when they confronted and shot him, Barnhill concluded. On Tuesday, as video of the shooting emerged on social media, a different Georgia prosecutor announced that the case would be puts to a grand jury; the two men were arrested and charged with murder yesterday evening after video of the incident sparked national outrage across the political spectrum.
To see the sequence of events that led to Arbery’s death as benign requires a cascade of assumptions. One must assume that two men arming themselves and chasing down a stranger running through their neighborhood is a normal occurrence. One must assume that the two armed white men had a right to self-defense, and that the black man suddenly confronted by armed strangers did not. One must assume that state laws are meant to justify an encounter in which two people can decide of their own volition to chase, confront, and kill a person they’ve never met.
But Barnhill’s leniency is selective—as The Appeal’s Josie Duffy Rice notes, Barnhill attempted to prosecute Olivia Pearson, a black woman, for helping another black voter use an electronic voting machine. A crime does not occur when white men stalk and kill a black stranger. A crime does occur when black people vote.
The underlying assumptions of white innocence and black guilt are all part of what the philosopher Charles Mills calls the “racial contract.” If the social contract is the implicit agreement among members of a society to follow the rules—for example, acting lawfully, adhering to the results of elections, and contesting the agreed-upon rules by nonviolent means—then the racial contract is a codicil rendered in invisible ink, one stating that the rules as written do not apply to nonwhite people in the same way. The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal; the racial contract limits this to white men with property. The law says murder is illegal; the racial contract says it’s fine for white people to chase and murder black people if they have decided that those black people scare them. “The terms of the Racial Contract,” Mills wrote, “mean that nonwhite subpersonhood is enshrined simultaneously with white personhood.”
The racial contract is not partisan—it guides staunch conservatives and sensitive liberals alike—but it works most effectively when it remains imperceptible to its beneficiaries. As long as it is invisible, members of society can proceed as though the provisions of the social contract apply equally to everyone. But when an injustice pushes the racial contract into the open, it forces people to choose whether to embrace, contest, or deny its existence. Video evidence of unjustified shootings of black people is so jarring in part because it exposes the terms of the racial contract so vividly. But as the process in the Arbery case shows, the racial contract most often operates unnoticed, relying on Americans to have an implicit understanding of who is bound by the rules, and who is exempt from them. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: The pandemic has introduced a new clause to the racial contract. The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy, by a president who disdains them. This is the COVID contract.
The Great Divorce: the People of Colorado v. the State
When I was a boy, my dad took me and my twin sister and brothers to see the demolition of the Omaha-Grant Smoke Stack in Globeville. At the time it was among the tallest smokestacks in the world. It stood 350 feet high, with brick walls 12 feet thick. It was said to contain enough bricks to build 600 six-room bungalows.
Globeville, a working class neighborhood in northeast Denver, sits at or near the zenith of the places industry, developers, and the political elite have done their best to destroy. Parts of the area are still a Superfund site because of the lead and arsenic left behind from the smeltering days. It was once home to a largely Polish-American population. Latinos are now the majority.
When I was in graduate school, Globeville again made the front page, losing a court case in which it had sought relief from the foul odors caused by a rendering plant built in its midst — slaughterhouses had replaced smeltering for gold, silver and copper. The judge told the citizens of Globeville to suck it up, they didn’t have a right to clean air.
Nothing has changed over the decades. Just to the east of Globeville is another industrial abomination of long standing, the Suncor refinery. The mother company is the second largest corporation registered in Canada.
It’s somewhat of an aside but Canadian ownership of mineral and fossil fuel companies have an ugly history in Colorado. Some people will remember the Summitville Mine disaster. A cyanide gold mine gone haywire, it became a federal Superfund site. It cost the American people $250 million for initial cleanup, with a long-term annual operating cost of $2 million for water treatment. After 27 years of operation by EPA, Colorado will start picking up these annual costs in 2021. The Canadian company that operated the gold mine refuses to pay.
The Suncor refinery, the existence of which predates World War II, should be thought of as Colorado’s own Little Shop of Horrors. Of course, it is surrounded on all sides by working-class neighborhoods, with Latinos now the dominant ethnic group. …
I Just Flew. It Was Worse Than I Thought It Would Be.
The surreal experience of flying during a pandemic, and the false promise of a return to normal.
THE CABIN WAS RESTLESS. It was a weekday afternoon in late April, and I was among dozens of people boarding an airplane that most of us had assumed would be empty. Flight attendants were scrambling to accommodate seat-change requests. Travelers—stuffed shoulder to shoulder into two-seat rows—grumbled at one another from behind masks. An ominous announcement came over the in-flight PA system: “We apologize for the alarming amount of passengers on this flight.” Each of us was a potential vector of deadly disease.
I arrived at my assigned row, and found a stocky, gray-haired man in the seat next to mine. When I moved to sit down, he stopped me. “Sit there,” he said gruffly, pointing to the aisle behind us. “Social distance.”
Not eager for a confrontation, I decided to comply. Within seconds, though, a flight attendant materialized and ordered me back to my assigned seat. My recalcitrant would-be seatmate, vigorously objecting to this development, responded by blocking my entrance to the row with his leg.
A standoff ensued, with the irate passenger protesting that there were plenty of empty rows where I could sit (there weren’t) and the long-suffering flight attendant all but threatening to kick him off the plane (she didn’t). Finally, he relented and I squeezed awkwardly into my seat as the man muttered profanities under his breath.
Why did I think flying would be easy right now? …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.