On the biopolitics of breathing: race,protests,and state violence under the global threat of COVID-19

Pandemics are by definition public health threats so significant that they demand a coordinated global response that fundamentally alters the human, social, and economic dynamics of everyday life through heavily regulated restrictions of the movement of people, products, and capital. The primary goal of such interventions is to minimize the potential for the transmission of the pathogen within and across communities. Public spaces, transit areas, and the ordinariness of everyday life are fundamentally recalibrated so that the pathways of pathogen transmission are disrupted. Yet, it is in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in which ‘struggling to breathe’ is a key symptom, that the world has witnessed widespread protests against the killing of George Floyd, who like Eric Garner was suffocated to death as part of systematic violence perpetrated against African-American men by the US policing system. Protests against these violent deaths have often been accompanied by chants of ‘I can’t breathe’ which is both a repetition of the dying words of those killed and an emphasis on the literal and metaphorical difficulties that Black men encounter as targets of systemic racism (Aymer, 2016). These protests represent the very antithesis of the recalibrations required to contain the spread of the disease, and it is precisely this juxtaposition of transmission risk for a respiratory disease through protest against the suffocating effects of police violence that the full force of the brutally racialized social determinants of violence and vulnerability to the communicable disease (COVID-19) is starkly apparent. Thus, a reading of the biopolitics (Foucault, 1997) linking the social epidemiology of the pandemic to protests against the transnational crisis of racism may provide a potentially useful resource for better understanding the governing logic binding race, violence and the virus at this critical historical moment.

While the data describing the social epidemiology of COVID-19 are at best provisional, the rapid re-engineering of our temporal, spatial, economic, and social architectures under lockdown provides us with an important moment to situate the scourge of state violence within a global and local public health response mobilized to protect lives (Hatchimonji et al., 2020). In identifying SARS-CoV-2 virus as an ‘invisible enemy’, global governments guided by the public health logic of lockdown called on the world’s citizens to limit movement and take ‘shelter-in-place’ or ‘lockdown-at-home’. In South Africa, the policing of particular areas over others clearly demonstrated that the middle-class fantasy of this sanctuary of home was not readily available to poor Black people. Against the backdrop of the widely circulating ‘viral’ videos of the suffocation of George Floyd, which catalysed protests against systematic violence against Black men by the US police system, local news showed that sovereign displays of violence against Black people under COVID-19 conditions traversed national borders. Within days of the implementation of lockdown in South Africa, Collins Khosa was fatally assaulted by the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), and by 1 June 2020, 11 other fatalities under lockdown had been attributed to the South African Police Services (SAPS) by the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) (Haffajee, 2020).

In prioritizing the policing of densely populated townships and informal settlements by both the SAPS and SANDF, the state identified nodes of risk for community infection including high population densities and prohibitive access to sanitation that are legacies of the racism guiding apartheid’s spatial planning (Harrisberg, 2020). However, police appeared emboldened by the apparent warrant to defeat the virus through force and several cases of undeniably brutal encounters ensued between the police and the citizens they are mandated to protect. There is as yet no comparative data available with which we may better understand the effects of bestowing greater powers on police under conditions of this health emergency, but media-based reports of the use of brutalizing and humiliating methods to ensure compliance begs the question about whether Black life and COVID-19 together constitute the real ‘enemy’ under lockdown. It is difficult not to draw some tentative lines of comparison between these forms of racialized violence and the similarly scaled up scenarios that beg similar questions exemplified in the amassing of people to protest police violence against Black people in precisely the pandemic conditions that demand social distancing and the emptying of public space in the United States.

Pitting the risk of infection against the drive to protest against the violence of systemic racism encapsulated in the slow suffocation of George Floyd brings into relief the calculus underpinning exactly what sort of life is deemed worth living, especially given that preliminary data show that Black people in the United States are at disproportionately more risk for both COVID-19 infection and death than their White counterparts (Yancy, 2020). Although race is not routinely reported in the demographic distributions of the disease in South Africa, there is no reason to suspect that rates of infection are not higher among poor Black people in this country context (Pillay & Barnes, 2020). While the fact that the virus is (unsurprisingly) particularly affecting the Black community (given the size of its overall share of the population) was confirmed by South Africa’s health minister (Savidess & Masweneng, 2020), one of the only publicly (readily) available COVID-19 disease reports disaggregated by race are drawn from sentinel hospital survey data released by the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD). Its latest models show no significant COVID-19-related mortality by race for 10,159 cases with in-hospital outcomes (discharges and deaths) between 5 March and 28 June 2020 (NICD, 2020a). However, at the time of writing, the NICD had recorded some 238,339 cumulative cases in South Africa (NICD, 2020b) and, with a range of early international studies (Dyer, 2020; Millett et al., 2020) suggesting that Black people may have disproportionately higher COVID-19-related risks, South Africa would do well to align itself with the global call to investigate the role of race as a proxy for vulnerability to the pandemic (Pareek et al., 2020).

We cannot continue to rely on limited hospital site modelling and newspaper reporting to explore the role of race as a potentially important moderator of COVID-19 risk infection and mortality – strong epidemiological studies are required to examine this nexus. However, the twinning of race in reporting of COVID-19 interventions with police violence compels us to draw attention to the intersecting lines of risk that converge around blackness in the context of both communicable disease and violence transnationally. If poverty and inequality are recognized as important social pathogens that shape the pathways of risk for both violence and COVID-19, then protests during pandemics cannot simply be read as reckless responses, rather these could be seen as mobilized attempts to challenge the spurious social contract guaranteeing the human rights that public health interventions are claimed to embody (Karan & Katz, 2020). This breach of contract means that not only does poverty and inequality preclude active participation in the protection of public health but the ongoing violent policing of black people also suggests that many of the protestors gathering in the streets are regarded as the very enemies of the public they are asked to protect.

These constraints on equal citizenship are precisely the building blocks of what Canham (2017) sees as one component of ‘embodied black rage’ – the release of pent up psychological anger against the violence of White supremacy, and it is perhaps significant that in a context in which governments are calling on its citizens to separate, isolate, and dissipate, that the disproportionately vulnerable to a respiratory-limiting virus are aggregating, connecting, and mobilizing (Fanon, 2008). These scenes of protest, policing, and violence against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic thus serve as a salient reminder that race continues to shape the capacity to breathe as a fundamental determinant of life itself.