The Entangled Emergencies of COVID-19

Abstract

City of Chicago officials adopted a “racial equity” approach to mitigate the disproportionate racial impact of COVID-19, yet according to interviews with racially and socioeconomically marginalized Chicagoans, this approach failed to address core vulnerabilities associated with health, housing, mental health, and welfare. This article argues that COVID-19 represents and reifies the convergence of three sets of emergencies. First, federal and local governments governed through emergency, enacting temporally bounded governmental strategies that presumed scarcity, triaged care, and naturalized structural inequality by delinking the effects of racism from its causes. This response was spectacular and anticipatory—designed to safeguard the status quo until “normalcy” could be restored. This approach exacerbated two existing endemic emergencies: (1) the slow emergencies racially marginalized populations have faced for decades due to neoliberal restructuring and fragmented care infrastructure and (2) the sacrifice of lower-income frontline workers to premature death to safeguard the economy and protect the middle class.

Keywords

emergency racial capitalism governance biopolitics COVID-19

On April 7, 2020, when news surfaced that 72 percent of deaths and 52 percent of COVID-19 cases were concentrated in Chicago’s Black communities, Mayor Lori Lightfoot declared, “Those numbers take your breath away. . . . We’re all in this crisis together, but we are not experiencing this crisis in the same way. . . . Equity and inclusion . . . are an imperative that we must embrace as a city” (Flynn 2020; Zamudio 2020). One year later, Mayor Lightfoot declared racism a public health crisis. According to Mayor Lightfoot, racism is a long-standing emergency in Chicago that was revealed in breathtaking relief during the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, Lightfoot embarked on what she called a “racial equity” approach to the pandemic. This entailed prioritizing six racially marginalized neighborhoods with extensive testing and educational outreach and targeting 15 neighborhoods for vaccine distribution.

Under both Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s administrations, the U.S. federal government expanded the welfare safety net in unprecedented ways, spending $3.4 trillion to protect U.S. citizens from the worst effects of mass unemployment and economic shock. These measures included stimulus payments, child tax credits, enhanced unemployment insurance and food stamps, housing assistance, and Medicaid.¹ As a result, poverty rates across all ages, races, and ethnicities declined from 2019 to 2020, child poverty was reduced by one-third, and the health care uninsurance rate declined to 8 percent.

Despite the mayor’s commitment to racial equity and the federal government’s expansion of social assistance, the Black and Latinx² Chicagoans I interviewed during the pandemic not only suffered higher rates of infection, hospitalization, and death from COVID-19, but they also experienced housing, food, financial, educational, and welfare precarity during the pandemic. Shantal,³ a woman I interviewed from the predominantly Black neighborhood of Austin, explained that marginalized populations experienced COVID-19 as a series of converging “demics” leading to accumulated vulnerability. She told me: “Within this pandemic, we have had so many other demics. The violence demic, the losin’ my job demic. It’s just been so many demics to add on, which causes more mental health issues.”⁴ Why did a local commitment to racial equity and an unprecedented expansion of federal welfare fail to protect Chicago’s most vulnerable residents from a series of converging “demics”?

In this article, I analyze both the causes of the uneven racial effects of COVID-19 and the government’s response to it as a convergence of multiple emergencies. I argue that the federal and local governments governed through emergency, enacting temporally bounded strategies that presumed scarcity, triaged care, and naturalized structural inequality by delinking the effects of racism from its causes. This temporary emergency response was spectacular and anticipatory; it was designed to safeguard the status quo until “normalcy” could be restored. But such an approach rendered invisible and exacerbated two longer-term endemic emergencies already taking place: (1) the slow emergencies racially marginalized populations have faced for decades due to neoliberal restructuring and the fragmentation of care infrastructure and (2) the sacrifice of lower-income frontline workers to premature death to safeguard the economy and protect the middle class. Labor sacrifice and the slow emergencies caused by infrastructural lack and racialized harm predate the COVID-19 pandemic, serving as deep causes for the pandemic’s uneven racial and class effects. Governing through emergency obscured and accelerated these other emergencies already at work. In my analysis, I pay heed to the distinct depths, temporalities, and politics of visibility at play in the entangled emergencies of COVID-19.

I focus on the case of Chicago, and I explain how a temporally urgent, spectacularized, data-driven approach described as “racially equitable” can obscure and reify ongoing structural abandonment and the devaluation of Black and Brown lives. As evidence for this analysis, I draw on interviews I conducted from August 2020 to May 2022 with 65 state actors, policymakers, housing specialists, lawyers, epidemiologists, hospital administrators, clinic staff, alderpeople,⁵ and community organizers. I also interviewed 110 Black, Latinx, and white Chicagoans who either lost work or were employed as frontline “essential workers” from three racially marginalized neighborhoods in Chicago.

Chicago officials named racism an emergency that must be met with urgent attention, and they developed a racial equity approach that prioritized the most vulnerable neighborhoods. This constitutes a move away from colorblind racism (Bonilla-Silva 2017) toward the claiming of liberal racial credentials to garner political and symbolic capital. Quantified metrics and the building of a complex epistemic infrastructure to track population disparity trends became a means of illustrating the city’s success in numbers while failing to initiate policies that would address the root causes of racism, such as citywide work protections and sick leave, immediate cash and rental assistance programs, or expansive funding to safety net hospitals. As one community organizer explained, “Vulnerable kind of doesn’t cover it, right. Some folks were on the edge before COVID. And then COVID kicked them off the side. . . . Our systems, our governments, our policies, they are not meeting the needs.”⁶

In the next section, I provide my theoretical framework of racial bio-capitalism and emergency governance. I then move through each of the emergencies that converged during COVID-19 and intensified the crisis for Black and Latinx Americans. I explain how both the federal and local governments governed through emergency, which accelerated the slow emergencies Black and Brown Americans were already facing and immediately sacrificed frontline workers.

Racial Biopower and Emergency Governance

My analysis of entangled emergencies is inspired by the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. This is perhaps ironic given Agamben’s recent COVID-19 denialism, in which he labeled public health officials Nazis and celebrated conservative libertarians’ evasion of mask and vaccine mandates (Kotsko 2022). Beyond this recent controversy, however, Foucault’s and Agamben’s analyses of racial biopower are limited in their application to the U.S. racial state (Goldberg 2002; Weheliye 2014). Foucault (1990, 2003) illustrates how state racism, inscribed in the workings of all states, simultaneously optimizes the health of the normative population while condemning to slow or quick death those who live on the margins of the body politic. The condemning to death of racialized others, who are seen as a threat to the dominant race, constitutes a caesura (or interruption) in the administration of life. Yet as Agamben (1998) explains, the governance and valuation of life is marked not by outright elimination but by paradoxical forms of exclusionary inclusion. Building on their work, my analysis foregrounds the paradoxes intrinsic to a white supremacist liberal order that names itself democratic and depends on the labor of racialized others for capitalist accumulation while treating racialized others as exceptions with regard to state recognition, rights, and resources. Both materially and symbolically, racial others constitute exceptions to the norm. They are necessary for its establishment yet threaten its stability.

Foucault (1990) argued that biopolitical technologies that foster population growth are inextricably linked to capitalist accumulation, but they also establish and reproduce racial hierarchies. Drawing on the scholarship on racial capitalism (Clarno 2017; DuBois 1998; Gilmore 2007; Robinson 2020) but adding attention to biopolitical governance, I suggest that racial bio-capitalism⁷ operates through apparatuses of security that link policing, surveillance, and disciplinary regimes with the provision of welfare and an incitement to labor (Piven and Cloward 1992; Wacquant 2009; Willse 2015). Foucault’s theories of biopower describe a welfare state that makes biopolitical investments in securing the health of the national body politic while introducing policy caesuras that regularly exclude racial others from welfare protection (Willse 2015). Extending Agamben’s concept, I use the term “exclusionary inclusion” to denote the various ways racialized others are governed and their lives devalued within a system of racial bio-capitalism. Racial others have always been essential to the symbolism of the democratic liberal order and the material pursuit of capitalist accumulation, but their inclusion within the norm is conditional and paradoxical. They are often extended provisional recognition while being forced to subsist in conditions of racialized structural neglect.

The mechanisms by which exclusionary inclusion operates for diverse racial groups in the United States shifts across history and location, especially in response to challenges from the racially marginalized. When racialized others push back against their paradoxical treatment and demand recognition or resources, the boundaries of the norm shift, and new mechanisms of exclusionary inclusion are operationalized. When exceptional state recognition or resources are extended to racially marginalized groups, the marginalized are often required to perform their identity or history in a way that forces them to violently translate their realities to achieve recognition (Decoteau 2013; Giordano 2014), undergo behavioral or capital regulation to sustain contractualized “rights,” or agree to terms that are almost impossible to achieve because they necessarily ignore the structural conditions in which people live. Such are the costs of inclusion in a racial bio-capitalist system.

One of the primary means by which exclusionary inclusion is operationalized is through invocations of emergency. My theorization of emergency as a technology of exclusionary inclusion builds on the work of political geographer Ben Anderson, who theorizes emergencies as a foundational biopolitical category that secures certain lives at the expense of others (Anderson et al. 2020). Anderson describes emergencies in two ways: (1) as modes of eventfulness that make particular diagnoses of the present possible, which forecloses alternative futures for the marginalized (Anderson 2017), and (2) as techniques of liberal rule (Anderson et al. 2020).

At the most basic level, the ability of the white middle-class majority to experience normality (that is only intermittently and sparingly disrupted by crisis) relies on the constancy with which racial others experience converging emergencies and accumulated vulnerability. Or as Anderson et al. (2017:473) explains, “the distinction between the everyday and emergency has only ever been available to some and is produced at the cost of making life into a perpetual emergency for others.” In the words of Shantal, whom I quoted earlier, people living in conditions of structural violence experience a series of converging demics: of unemployment, of imprisonment, of sickness, of death. To call these conditions emergencies highlights the political nature of their origins. State actors often discuss structural inequality as an unfortunate, ontological truth, but slow emergency conditions were caused by converging racist policies that can be countered through political will. Slow emergencies are long in the making and have been caused by a series of historical racial projects, including neoliberal economic restructuring, policies that authorized racial segregation, the failure to build robust care and labor infrastructure for the working poor, police hyper-surveillance, and punitive containment, to name a few.

A primary emergency tactic deployed under neoliberalism is what Nguyen (2009) labels “governing by exception.” According to Nguyen, global emergencies are increasingly managed by nongovernmental actors who intervene in spaces with gross infrastructural lack, providing certain populations (deemed to be exceptional) with technoscientific resources. Specifically, Nguyen analyzes the provision of antiretroviral medication to people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. The effort is not to meet basic resource needs but to provide one solution to one subgroup deemed to be in “emergency” without providing broader support. Proof of success comes from intensive accounting and data-collection efforts, and nongovernmental agencies often gain scientific merit and advancement as a reward. “Under the guise of emergency, triage is an automatic function that separates those who must live from those who might die, while only the former get counted” (Nguyen 2009:209).

I argue that governing through emergency has become a generalized response that state actors use when disasters (like the COVID-19 pandemic) arise. Rather than targeting an exceptional population category (like individuals living with HIV), governing through emergency is a temporally bounded governance strategy that seeks to bracket an instance of emergency with anticipatory policies that seek to end the crisis and restore “normalcy.” Whereas Agamben (1998) suggests a state of emergency develops permanency when the exception becomes the rule, I argue it is important to document different temporalities of control. State actors impose protracted, endemic emergencies that last for long periods of time and become ordinary and mundane and forge temporally bounded governing strategies to stem crisis conditions until the norm can be safeguarded and the emergency ended. These temporally bounded instances of emergency necessarily fail to attend to the history of inequality that inevitably causes the racially and socioeconomically marginalized to suffer the worst effects of any disaster.

In addition to temporally bounded strategies used to govern instances of emergency, federal, state, and city policies also create, over longer historical arcs, what I call “endemic emergencies” to manage the paradoxes of racial bio-capitalism. Multiple types of endemic emergencies enact distinct forms of exclusion, and three of these converged during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, surveilling, policing, and imprisoning the racially marginalized (and especially the Black population) while simultaneously subjecting them to spectacular state brutality (e.g., police murders) combines immediate death-making and slow violence. In a purportedly democratic state, entire populations are generally not exterminated, but they can be targeted with paradoxical yet consistent instances of spectacular death-making, especially when this is combined with other forms of exclusionary inclusion. This form of endemic emergency was highlighted in the protests that erupted in the summer of 2020, after the police murder of George Floyd. Second, the fragmented and corporatized approach to the provision of welfare and health care and the creation of a patchwork care infrastructure create slow emergencies whereby individuals marginalized by race and class are slowly “let die” (Foucault 2003). Third, extinguishing racially marginalized workers in the pursuit of accumulated wealth constitutes exploitative sacrificial emergencies whereby certain populations are deemed both essential and replenishable. Workers’ social reproduction is withheld or threatened to the point of exhaustion until others take their place in a system of renewable exploitation.

Racially and socioeconomically marginalized populations are subject to making die, letting die, and sacrificial logics through the endemic emergencies of racial bio-capitalism. The same populations are often targeted by all three forms of exclusionary inclusion simultaneously, resulting in the convergence of emergency conditions and an accumulation of social vulnerability. The creation and sustenance of endemic emergencies is an ongoing strategy of the U.S. racial state and constitutes the everyday operations of liberal white supremacy. Sometimes, one of these endemic emergencies intensifies into a temporally bounded, spectacular emergency to which the state must mount a specific legislative or governmental response—for example, after the murder of George Floyd. During these instances, an endemic emergency is given spectacular government attention for a limited amount of time. State actors often acknowledge the enduring quality of the crisis but respond with a temporary, exceptional solution.

Wagner-Pacifici (2010, 2017) argues that bounding events in time and space requires tremendous authority because events are “restless” by nature. Determining the beginning and end of the “emergency” of COVID-19, that is, being able to temporally bound the crisis, end the aid extended to mitigate its effects, and determine when normalcy has been restored, is a powerful governmental act. But it also detaches this particular emergency and the exceptional response to it from the ongoing emergencies that determined who was most affected. Many scholars have analyzed how those in power manipulate temporality to differentially control populations (e.g., Anderson 2016; Auyero 2012; Bourdieu 2000; Foucault 1995; Schwartz 1974). Often, there is a presumption that those in power can impose one collective or homogeneous sense of time on the oppressed (like forcing the dominated to wait, thereby disrupting their ability to anticipate their future). My account illustrates the manipulation of multiple temporal registers at the same time. The “event” of the pandemic was experienced as both exceptional and normal, terrifying and boring, and its fits and starts and differential geographic effects made people uncertain how to proceed. The inability to secure the pandemic’s temporality led to widespread ontological uncertainty, which was compounded for populations who were experiencing multiple endemic emergencies alongside the urgent, spectacular crisis of COVID-19. This was facilitated by the way federal and local state actors governed the crisis, starting with the federal expansion of the social safety net.

Federal Governing through Emergency: Expansion of the Safety Net

Why did the unprecedented expansion of the federal social safety net fail to make more of a dent in the accumulated vulnerability of the most marginalized? First, the public sector was already incredibly decimated from years of budgetary cutbacks (Faberman and Krawchenko 2021). Despite the windfall of new federal funding, local governments emphasized orchestrating a response to an immediate crisis and not attending to converging endemic emergencies. The public health department in Chicago, for example, had to outsource much of its response to other units and nonprofit organizations, as one community organizer explained:

We have to understand that . . . under the previous administration, and this current administration, investment in public health had decreased and [been] maintained dismally low . . . so all of a sudden, you have a global pandemic playing out in your city, and the department of public health is very limited in its own capacity. So what does it do? Right? The very conscious decision was made, instead of building up the public health system, you’re outsourcing to the nonprofit sector.⁸

Although the members of the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) I spoke with were very aware of the social determinants of poor health and knew that housing and food security were crucial to the COVID-19 response, they were not in a position to make decisions about funding allocations or the administration of aid due to the federalist infrastructure used to administer federal aid.

Cities that suffered some of the worst effects of deindustrialization in the 1980s and 1990s, like Chicago, made decisions to prioritize attracting corporate headquarters and elite redevelopment to the city as factories moved to the suburbs. When federal allotments to cities were cut back in the 1980s, Chicago cut funding to schools, social services, and housing and prioritized tax-free incentives for corporations and the wealthy. The local social safety net was thus decimated long before the pandemic hit.

With an influx of federal funding from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, Mayor Lightfoot spent over 60 percent of the discretionary funds on police personnel (Dudek 2021). She then spent 69 percent of American Rescue Plan (ARPA) funds paying back bank loans to balance the budget (Cherone 2021). Cities prioritize revenue replacement to safeguard their ratings for investment. But Chicago spent more on revenue replacement than any other major U.S. city. Expansions in federal funding are often administered through state and city programs, and local governments play a large role in deciding how funds are operationalized. Chicago officials made political decisions to prioritize business and police interests over buttressing the social safety net for the poor.

In addition, the federal government largely did not reimagine how to allocate federal aid—it simply expanded eligibility and payouts through existing programs like unemployment insurance, food stamps (or SNAP benefits), and Medicaid. These systems have never benefited the poor; they are not designed to. Before the pandemic, less than half of low-income Americans received social benefits of any kind (Moffitt and Ziliak 2020). Furthermore, undocumented and mixed-status families were barred from receiving pandemic social assistance (Olayo-Méndez et al. 2021). The social safety net is porous and does not meet the needs of individuals facing multiple converging social crises, and the extension of aid was temporary. Candice, a Black woman I interviewed from Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, questioned why pandemic social assistance could not be the norm instead of the exception:

What my problem was, it took a pandemic for them to do it. . . . Whatever they was giving, eventually it was going to stop. . . . What about before the pandemic and after the pandemic? That’s what I’m talking about. These same people need help, not just ’cause it’s COVID. . . . Where was all this assistance, all this free food and all this free money, and extra food stamps? You got people out here that need this stuff way before the pandemic and still need it after the pandemic! . . . They should have been doing this all the time.⁹

Candice indicated the precise problem with approaching vulnerability in a piecemeal, emergency fashion.¹⁰ I now turn to explaining the city of Chicago’s “racial equity” COVID-19 mitigation plan.

Municipal Governing through Emergency: Chicago’s “Racial Equity” Approach

When news first surfaced about the concentration of deaths from COVID-19 in Black communities and the concentration of cases in Latinx communities, state and city officials responded immediately. Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker commented: “Decades of institutional inequities and obstacles for members of our Latinx communities are now amplified in this pandemic. And while we can’t fix generations of history in the span of a few months, we must advance equity in our public health response today” (Nowicki 2020; emphasis added). Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot expressed a similar sentiment: “Now, we’re not going to be able to erase decades of health disparities in a few days or weeks, but we have to impress upon people in these communities that there are things they can do . . . to help themselves” (Taylor 2020; emphasis added).

In these quotes, Governor Pritzker and Mayor Lightfoot admit that deep, underlying structural disadvantage is the root cause of the disproportionate racial effects of COVID-19 while simultaneously claiming there is nothing to be done to address it. Slow emergencies are characterized by protracted processes that are difficult to pinpoint as causes (Nixon 2011). As a result, structural disadvantages are translated into biological determinants (like preexisting health conditions) or behavioral norms (like not masking) that can be addressed by medical, technocratic solutions (like testing and vaccines). Lightfoot’s directive that marginalized communities should “help themselves” urges people to enact self-responsibility, placing blame on individuals even as she recognizes historical disadvantage. Because slow violence is spatially and temporally distanced from its causes, it is easy to point to it in political rhetoric but to completely avoid addressing it in policy initiatives. As such, “decades of health disparities” simply become intransigent, historic truths, impossible for any administration to actually remedy. The urgent and spectacularized approach Chicago officials took to halting the spread of the coronavirus was given political leverage, and to some degree, this required detaching the epistemic effects of racism (high rates of death and hospitalizations in Black and Latinx communities) from their root causes (decades of racist housing, health care, unemployment, policing, welfare, and education policies).

In May 2020, Mayor Lightfoot created the Racial Equity Rapid Response Team, RERRT, which incorporated representatives from three predominantly Black neighborhoods with high rates of death from COVID-19 and three predominantly Latinx neighborhoods with the highest infection rates to sit on a task force. Members included city officials and epidemiologists, hospital administrators and clinic staff, members of the CDPH, and one large nongovernmental organization from the region. Members of this task force designed and operationalized testing and educational programming. When vaccines became available, epidemiologists from CDPH designed the Chicago COVID Vulnerability Index to identify the 15 neighborhoods that would receive vaccine prioritization. Because only certain neighborhoods were selected and vulnerability moved as resources were allocated, keeping up on epidemiological metrics of COVID-19 vulnerability was key to triaging what the city considered “scarce resources.” As one CDPH official explained, “Unfortunately, when you have a very scarce resource, and you want to give it to folks who are most likely to get the least of it, there ends up being a fighting-for-the-scraps phenomenon.”¹¹

There were three processes through which city agents claimed “equity” but nonetheless exacerbated or ignored structural inequalities. First, the city invested heavily in technocratic, medical responses to infectious disease spread instead of broader expansions to its social safety net, which also required investing in building a robust epistemic infrastructure to track disease metrics along racial lines. City officials used epidemiological modeling to determine which neighborhoods were most vulnerable at any given time to decide where testing and vaccine resources would be allocated. Once an area’s positivity or death rate fell, those resources were retracted and repurposed elsewhere. Communities were thus pitted against one another for limited public health resources. The shifting spatial patterns of outbreaks activated an epidemiological surveillance infrastructure to manage geographic disparities in the epidemic while it precluded sustained public health supports (Decoteau and Garrett 2022).

Second, by investing in and circulating racial disparity statistics, to drive its triaged approach to the pandemic, officials delinked the epistemic effect of racism (population metrics of racial disparities) from its causes. Quantifying racism reduces its historical complexity into something that can be legible and usable within an administrative apparatus. Racial statistics treated race as an individual- or group-level variable that was disembedded from its structural context (Hatch 2022; Sewell and Pingel 2020; Zuberi 2001). Investment in lowering the numbers (of cases and deaths in Black and Latinx neighborhoods) became a technical exercise that was detached from peoples’ grounded experiences of racial harm and neglect. One epidemiologist who worked with the RERRT task force explained why racial statistics were so important to the city’s response:

I’m a fan of saying what gets measured is what gets done. . . . Probably our first-year bachelor students would’ve predicted which communities got impacted. So, why do you have to measure it? I don’t know. I guess partly because I’m an epidemiologist. I do think people wanna see the data. They wanna see the evidence.¹²

By eschewing investment in direct services and abstracting individual experiences into statistical variables, certain lives are prioritized over others based on how they are represented with data. Residents felt this acutely, as Sophia, a resident of Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, explained:

We’re not only data. [Lightfoot] needs to . . . speak to at least one person, . . . so she can understand what’s going on. In reality . . . there’s so many stories, so many, many people that like, didn’t have enough resources, that had a bad time during COVID, that lost their jobs. . . . She has to sit down with them and know, so she can understand . . . we’re just not numbers, we’re humans.¹³

By distancing the epistemic effects of racism from its structural causes, the circulation of racial statistics operates as a “racial spectacle” (Davis and Ernst 2011; Hatch 2022; Noble 2014; Wailoo 2020). Racial spectacles concentrate the public gaze in a unified way that is detached from lived, racial realities and obfuscates critical debate about the causes of inequality (Noble 2014). The circulation of COVID-19 statistics without social context reified racial group differences and pulled attention away from the need to repair the broader “racial design of public health” as a whole (Wailoo 2020).

Third, the circulation of racial statistics during the COVID-19 pandemic spatially ontologized racial difference by targeting parts of the city as high-needs areas without attending to the historical conditions that created the converging slow emergencies people in those neighborhoods were facing. The city’s “racial equity approach” treated the most racially marginalized with policies that were distinct from the rest of the population, thereby enacting a caesura in the administration of health (Krupar and Ehlers 2017). As such, the city engaged in medical hotspotting. City officials used data to target neighborhoods that had high positivity rates or low vaccine rates with additional resources, and once those rates improved, resources were retracted and repurposed elsewhere. A CDPH epidemiologist explained:

We’ve done hot spot/cold spot analyses, and look at those week over week over week over week to see is the hot spot getting cooler? Is it moving? Using information like that, we deploy our community-based COVID testing sites. If we’re seeing a community area, or cluster of zip codes, where there are a high number of COVID diagnoses, that’s where the testing efforts will go.¹⁴

While purportedly addressing racial differences and working against them, these policies subtly insinuate that certain bodies, located in particular neighborhoods, should be treated as social problems. This spatially ontologies structural racism (Krupar and Ehlers 2017:224). Medical hotspotting also governs through emergency. Particular people in marginalized neighborhoods are targeted with exceptional aid in the midst of an emergency without attending to the broader infrastructural lacks they face. Medical hotspotting presumes scarcity and triages care, and it deploys cost-benefit analysis to determine health care spending. Furthermore, it requires the ongoing use of surveillance technologies to track which neighborhoods and census tracts are most vulnerable at any given time. All of these processes not only extract out from peoples’ lived realities, but they also ignore endemic emergencies and naturalize racial harm in spatial ways.

It is important to acknowledge that the public health workers and epidemiologists who worked on the RERRT initiative believed wholeheartedly that an investment in epidemiological tracking would help the city know where to invest its resources to address the social determinants of health. And many community organizers who were part of the RERRT task force appreciated having access to that data to direct their limited time and energy at the height of an urgent pandemic. This is why scholars like Walby (2020) label the public health response to the pandemic “socially democratic” as opposed to neoliberal. And yet, public health actors and programs are not immune from political influence, and Chicago officials made very conscious choices to prioritize business investments and data infrastructure over extending social assistance to Chicago’s most vulnerable residents. Public health experts’ investment in tracking the virus’s uneven effects ultimately fueled neoliberal governance. The RERRT approach presumed scarcity and triaged resources by providing aid to neighborhoods with the worst metrics. Once a neighborhood’s positivity or death rate abated, the neighborhood was abandoned. Data were used in a reactive as opposed to diagnostic fashion, and peoples’ grounded experiences with multiple converging endemics were rendered invisible and natural. I turn now to explaining how peoples’ slow emergencies were accelerated.

Slow Emergencies

In his work on environmental disasters and chemical radiation, Nixon (2011) discusses slow violence as an attritional lethality that often goes unnoticed because it is categorically unspectacular, making attributing blame difficult. Because slow emergencies are mundane, they often fade into the background, making it easier for corporations and political actors to ignore and naturalize them. In this way, the racism built into American infrastructure goes unheeded and ignored (Carmichael and Hamilton 1967). For example, when asked what issues his community was facing during the pandemic, Carlos, a Black man from Austin, explained:

Health issues, of course. Mental issues, mental health. Drug abuse, alcohol abuse. Domestic violence, crime. . . . Just like the very mask I wear and you wear, that’s what’s happening. Everything is being masked, masked, masked. . . . Racism is still an issue undiscussed, again, hidden.¹⁵

Many Chicago residents felt their slow emergencies were purposefully ignored by state officials, but they also felt these emergencies accelerated during the pandemic. First was the overwhelming sense that Black deaths were accumulating at breathtaking speed. Shirley, a Black woman from Austin, spoke to me as she prepared to attend her aunt’s funeral, just weeks after losing her fiancé. She whispered, “COVID took a lot of people. A lot of people.”¹⁶ Marlin, a Black man from Austin, told me he had “been to so many funerals, right? . . . Everybody walking around in trauma.”¹⁷ Walter, also a Black man from Austin, whose wife suffers from chronic disruptive pulmonary disease, described the first few weeks of the pandemic to me:

It was scary. . . . I didn’t know how I was goin’ to be able to feed my wife. I didn’t know how I was goin’ be able to support her. . . . When you see all these peoples every day, like in March . . . when you turn the TV on, that’s all you was seeing, peoples just dying all the time, and not just one or two. It was a hundred a day, you know what I’m sayin’? . . . It was hard for us, especially for Black people. . . . Peoples dying every day. . . . It was hard for us to even try an’ wrap our mind around.¹⁸

The pandemic exposed, to some degree, the concealed processes of slow death that vulnerable communities have faced for decades, but there was little political will to counteract the effects. Harold, a Black man from Austin, explained:

There should have been more drastic action taken as far as certain communities. The people in those wealthy areas were getting help and things to that nature ASAP when people . . . in what they consider poverty-stricken neighborhoods were in wait. They were in wait.¹⁹

Harold noted that racially and socioeconomically marginalized groups were politically abandoned during the pandemic. In fact, recognizing the intractability of structural inequality led many politicians to disavow their responsibility to address it—as if it were an ontological truth and not a result of political decision-making. Because of structural disadvantage and the fact that certain communities were already living on the edge, state officials “let die” certain racially marginalized communities by not intervening with broader social supports.

As the pandemic dragged on, increasingly less attention was paid to the accumulated precarity facing communities of color. Pandemic unemployment insurance was terminated just as the Delta variant began surging, and inflation ran rampant as Black communities experienced the brunt of hospitalizations from Omicron. Phyllis, a Black woman from Austin, explained in an interview in February 2022: “And now the price of food is steady going up, and the price of gas is steady going up. And those are the things we need, not the things that we want. . . . Now it’s all about survival. People are not living life, they surviving.”²⁰

Slow emergencies are unspectacular, distanced from the policies that instigated them, and reified through constant inattention. Slow emergencies converge with sacrificial logics because the same populations often suffer from both. This is because welfare requires workfare; because people living through slow emergencies often have few accumulated resources on which to rely when disasters strike, forcing them to accept unfair labor conditions; and because low-wage insecure labor has always been racially segmented.

Sacrificing “Essential” Workers

The declaration of the state of emergency enabled the expansion of welfare, but it also sacrificed frontline workers, throwing them into immediate emergency. The category of so-called “essential work” was bifurcated. Higher-income medical professionals were heralded for their selflessness and given greater protections for the risks they were taking. Lower-income workers who continued to labor in poorly remunerated and dangerous jobs in agriculture, meatpacking, delivery, food preparation, janitorial services, transportation, and medical facilities were largely ignored and taken for granted (Carrillo and Ipsen 2021). They were not offered work protections or sick leave. Rodrigo, a Mexican American man from Little Village, told me:

We’re essential, but they don’t treat us essential. . . . We are the ones that feed you, clean, and pick the fruit, and work the soil, and make the factories run, and make the restaurants run. . . . We immigrant communities make this nation run. Because of us, this nation runs, so they care that we do stuff for them, but when it’s time for us to go home [and quarantine], we’re forgotten because all they want is our service, but not [to] service us.²¹

Because lower-income frontline workers also faced slow emergencies and often could not access structural safety nets, they were forced into an impossible choice between feeding their families or being protected from exposure. Sharon, a Black woman from Austin, called this a “double negative”:

That’s the double negatives, because they have to make a living because everybody who’s working has a family. . . . They have to pay bills. . . . How am I gonna feed my kids? Or take care of my elderly mother if y’all forced me out at my job? But then you gonna tell me I have to work in this pandemic. You don’t give a fuck. You don’t care about my safety. You’re not protecting me. So like I say, it’s a double negative.²²

In an interview with the chief architect of the city’s “racial equity” project, I asked why work protections were not a citywide priority given that officials knew high infection rates were driven by unsafe work conditions. She said it was not the city’s job to impose work restrictions and safety measures and admitted “there was very little we could do.”²³ In fact, other states and cities did institute hazard pay programs for essential workers. An activist I interviewed suggested the city could have done more to protect workers:

The city does technically have some oversight over businesses. . . . The mayor’s office was as much there to support business interest as it was its residents, probably more so. Because the business community didn’t want to shut down. . . . How does the city not have power to support the rights of workers when they’re very much intentionally supporting the business owners?²⁴

After a full year of the pandemic, epidemiologists were marveling at the new risk category of “occupational hazard” that had emerged, suggesting vulnerability maps were skewed because more working-class neighborhoods were hit hard, alongside neighborhoods suffering from historic disinvestment.²⁵ That frontline workers became a new risk group during COVID-19 was well known by city policymakers, yet nothing was done to protect them.

In addition to the paradoxes of being called “essential” but being put in harm’s way for the sake of the economy and the middle class, the fact that undocumented communities were ineligible for unemployment benefits and stimulus payments communicated clearly that state officials saw them as disposable. And their service to the nation was rendered invisible. As Miguel, an undocumented Mexican worker, recalled: “We felt that were ignored. . . . And we were not appreciated. . . . I see on the buses, a lot of Hispanics and African Americans who were also essential workers and we went to work in the restaurants, or cleaning. . . . No, of course we were not recognized.”²⁶ This is a form of exclusionary inclusion. The labor of frontline, lower-income workers was absolutely necessary to protect the health and welfare of the nation, but these workers were sacrificed to safeguard the norm, and they were seen as constantly replenishable, a forever exploitable industrial reserve army.

Theorizing Emergency

Governing through emergency is a temporally bounded set of state policies that presumes a scarcity of resources, triages care, and separates the root causes of inequality from its immediate effects. These governmental strategies are also anticipatory. They are put in place for a delimited amount of time to govern the immediate emergency, until the system as usual regains its stability and the norm is ensured protection. Bounding these emergencies temporally necessarily involves obfuscating the links to more sustained, protracted, and converging emergencies that the racially marginalized have faced for decades.

Slow emergencies and sacrificial labor logics often overlap to expose the same communities to premature death but through different mechanisms of exclusionary inclusion. Slow emergencies necessarily take more time to develop and operate via the intransigence of structural reproduction. They are largely invisible and protected by their slow evolution, which obscures their causes. But they perhaps have the most lethal, long-term effects. Whereas slow emergencies are largely governed via letting die policies and operate at the outskirts of the norm, the emergency of “essential work” is enacted through sacrifice. Certain peoples’ livelihoods are exploited for the protection and profit of others. Frontline workers are included in the social imaginary but are disposed of as a sacrifice for the sake of the nation and the economy. Both of these endemic emergencies were ignored and exacerbated by the policies enacted to govern the emergency of COVID-19. For populations enduring slow emergencies and/or sacrificial exploitation, the urgent/immediate and the everyday/mundane are intimately linked. For people experiencing these conditions, the protracted crisis of slow violence is often disrupted by more acute emergencies, like death, eviction, and political protest. Constant anxiety, trauma, and the gnawing boredom of quarantine take place amid more immediate crises of pandemic times.

Conclusion

On May 11, 2023, the COVID-19 public health emergency ended (Cubanski et al. 2023), terminating the last social assistance extended during the pandemic. But in fact, most pandemic relief was terminated in the winter of 2021–2022, when many communities were facing surges in Delta and then Omicron infections and soaring inflation. Kelly, a Black woman from Albany Park, told me the withdrawal of support was a “slap in the face” that reminded her “how this country really sees its people . . . as disposable.”²⁷ In early May 2023, the Centers for Diseas Control and Prevention stopped tracking positivity rates. At that time, 76,000 people were still contracting and 250 people were still dying from COVID-19 on a weekly basis.²⁸ Nearly one in five people who contract COVID-19 experience symptoms of long COVID.²⁹ Others are struggling to survive the legacies of enduring poverty, inflation, sickness, and loss. Yet the nation has moved on, ready to live with COVID-19 as an endemic illness.

COVID-19 could have been a moment of reckoning, a historic occurrence that reversed market fundamentalism and state racism and secured a robust social safety net for all. The trillions of dollars of federal relief that poured into cities throughout the nation could have been used to build infrastructure that served the most vulnerable residents. Instead, this aid was doled out in neoliberal ways that secured the ongoing exclusion of already marginalized communities.

I have argued that contemporary racial bio-capitalism operates through exceptional governance in multiple ways. First, it does not simply abandon but extends aid to exceptional, racialized subjects—those whom the data deem most vulnerable during an acknowledged political crisis. In other words, a liberal, Black mayor could not abandon her Black residents when their deaths were mounting without suffering political fallout, so she extended aid but presumed scarcity and economized her public health approach. Second, Black and Latinx Americans are not just excluded—they are the target of exclusionary inclusion. In various ways, they are needed to uphold the norm of white supremacy and racial bio-capitalism, but they are prohibited from reaping its benefits, except in exceptional moments. Latinx and Black low-wage workers were absolutely essential to the COVID-19 state emergency. Without them, the privileged would have suffered, and the economy would have tanked. People trapped in slow emergencies were also turned into political clout; they were transformed into metrics used by political actors. Lower-income, racially marginalized communities were made to wait for assistance because resolving their vulnerability was deemed an intractable problem—a problem that any one political administration could not possibly address.

Black and Brown Chicagoans (and Americans) were socially vulnerable targets of state racism and neglect long before the COVID-19 pandemic, but their social precarity was also exacerbated by pandemic conditions and policies. Unless we reckon with the structural causes of inequality and racism, their exceptional dispossession will, once again, be forgotten and ignored.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the experts and residents who shared their experiences of the pandemic with me. I would also like to thank Cal Garrett, Cynthia Brito, and Fructoso M. Basaldua, Jr. for their dedicated hard work collecting data and engaging in data analysis for this project. This article is based on the Memorial Coser Salon from 2023, and I would like to thank the Salon participants for their thoughtful feedback. Andy Clarno and Paige Sweet offered helpful suggestions to improve the article. Two anonymous reviewers for Sociological Theory also offered generous feedback that strengthened the analysis.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project was funded by the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy, the Institute for Policy and Civic Engagement, and the Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

ORCID iD

Claire Laurier Decoteau

Notes

Author Biography

Claire Laurier Decoteau is professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Ancestors and Antiretrovirals: The Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS in Post-apartheid South Africa (2013), The “Western Disease”: Contesting Autism in the Somali Diaspora (2021), and Emergency: COVID-19 and the Uneven Valuation of Life (2024)—all published by the University of Chicago Press. Broadly, her research explores epistemic contestations over health and illness, the politics of knowledge production, and the ways in which marginalized people navigate and contest state norms. Decoteau has won numerous prestigious awards for her scholarship, including the Robert K. Merton Award, the Lewis A. Coser Memorial Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting, and the Robin M. Williams, Jr. award.

References

Agamben

Giorgio

. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Anderson

Ben

. 2017. “Emergency Futures: Exception, Urgency, Interval and Hope.” The Sociological Review 65(3):463–77.

Anderson

Ben

Grove

Kevin

Rickards

Lauren

Kearnes

Matthew

. 2020. “Slow Emergencies: Temporality and the Racialized Biopolitics of Emergency Governance.” Progress in Human Geography 44(4):621–39.

Anderson

Benedict

. 2016. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York, NY: Verso.

Auyero

Javier

. 2012. Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bonilla-Silva

Eduardo

. 2017. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Inequality in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Bourdieu

Pierre

. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Carmichael

Stokely

Hamilton

Charles V.

1967. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

Carrillo

Ian R.

Ipsen

Annabel

. 2021. “Worksites as Sacrifice Zones: Structural Precarity and COVID-19 in US Meatpacking.” Sociological Perspectives 64(5):726–46.

10.

Cherone

Heather

. 2021. “Use Half of Federal Relief Package to Cancel ‘Scoop-and-Toss’ Borrowing, Chief Financial Officer Urges.” WTTW, April 14. https://news.wttw.com/2021/04/14/use-half-federal-relief-package-cancel-scoop-and-toss-borrowing-chief-financial-officer.

11.

Chotiner

Isaac

. 2023. “How the US Lifted Children out of Poverty and Then Threw Them Back into It.” New Yorker, September 20. https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-the-us-lifted-children-out-of-poverty-and-then-threw-them-back-into-it.

12.

Clarno

Andy

. 2017. Neoliberal Apartheid: Palestine/Israel and South Africa after 1994. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

13.

Cubanski

Juliette

Kates

Jennifer

Tolbert

Jennifer

Guth

Madeline

Pollitz

Karen

Freed

Meredith

. 2023. “What Happens When COVID-19 Emergency Declarations End? Implications for Coverage, Costs and Access.” Kaiser Family Foundation. https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/what-happens-when-covid-19-emergency-declarations-end-implications-for-coverage-costs-and-access/.

14.

Davis

Angelique M.

Ernst

Rose

. 2011. “Racial Spectacles: Promoting a Colorblind Agenda through Direct Democracy.” Law, Politics and Society 55:133–71.

15.

Decoteau

Claire Laurier

. 2013. Ancestors and Antiretrovirals: The Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS in Post-apartheid South Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

16.

Decoteau

Claire Laurier

Garrett

Cal Lee

. 2022. “Disease Surveillance Infrastructure and the Economisation of Public Health.” Sociology of Health and Illness 44(8):1251–69.

17.

DuBois

W. E. B.

1998. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. New York, NY: Free Press.

18.

Dudek

Mitch

. 2021. “Critics Slam Lightfoot’s Spending of $281 Million of Coronavirus Relief Money on Police.” Chicago Sun Times, February 18. https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2021/2/18/22289859/chicago-mayor-lightfoot-cares-act-coronavirus-relief-money-police-department-costs-daniel-la-spata.

19.

Faberman

Rhea

Krawchenko

Katiana

. 2021. “The Impact of Chronic Underfunding on America’s Public Health System: Trends, Risks, and Recommendations.” Trust for America’s Health. https://www.tfah.org/report-details/funding-report-2022/.

20.

Flynn

Meagan

. 2020. “‘Those Numbers Take Your Breath Away.’” Washington Post, April 7. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/04/07/chicago-racial-disparity-coronavirus/.

21.

Foucault

Michel

. 1990. History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Translated by Hurley

New York, NY: Vintage.

22.

Foucault

Michel

. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Sheridan

New York, NY: Vintage Books.

23.

Foucault

Michel

. 2003. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976. Translated by Macey

New York, NY: Picador.

24.

Gilmore

Ruth Wilson

. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press.

25.

Giordano

Cristiana

. 2014. Migrants in Translation: Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press.

26.

Goldberg

David Theo

. 2002. The Racial State. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing.

27.

Hatch

Anthony Ryan

. 2022. “The Data Will Not Save Us: Afropessimism and Racial Antimatter in the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Big Data & Society 9(1):20539517211067948. doi:10.1177/205395172110679.

28.

Kotsko

Adam

. 2022. “What Happened to Giorgio Agamben?” Slate, February 20. https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/02/giorgio-agamben-covid-holocaust-comparison-right-wing-protest.html.

29.

Krupar

Shiloh

Ehlers

Nadine

. 2017. “Biofutures: Race and the Governance of Health.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35(2):222–40.

30.

Miller

Claire C.

Parlapiano

Alicia

. 2023. “The US Built a European-Style Welfare State. It’s Largely Over.” The New York Times, April 6. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/04/06/upshot/pandemic-safety-net-medicaid.html.

31.

Moffitt

Robert A.

Ziliak

James P.

2020. “COVID-19 and the US Safety Net.” Fiscal Studies 41(3):515–48.

32.

Nguyen

Vinh-Kim

. 2009. “Government-by-Exception: Enrollment and Experimentality in Mass HIV Treatment Programmes in Africa.” Social Theory and Health 7(3):196–217.

33.

Nixon

Rob

. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

34.

Noble

Safiya U.

2014. “Teaching Trayvon: Race, Media and the Politics of Spectacle.” The Black Scholar 44(1):12–29.

35.

Nowicki

Jerry

. 2020. “Amid Apparent Virus Plateau, Pritzker Says Stay the Course.” Capital News Illinois, May 6. https://capitolnewsillinois.com/NEWS/amid-apparent-virus-plateau-pritzker-says-stay-the-course.

36.

Olayo-Méndez

Alejandro

De Haymes

María Vidal

García

Maricela

Cornelius

Llewellyn Joseph

. 2021. “Essential, Disposable, and Excluded: The Experience of Latino Immigrant Workers in the US during COVID-19.” Journal of Poverty 25(7):612–28.

37.

Piven

Frances F.

Cloward

Richard A.

1992. Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, Updated Edition. New York, NY: Vintage.

38.

Robinson

Cedric J.

2020. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. 3rd ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

39.

Schwartz

Barry

. 1974. “Waiting, Exchange and Power: The Distribution of Time in Social Systems.” American Journal of Sociology 79(4):841–70.

40.

Sewell

Alyasah Ali

Pingel

Emily S.

2020. “The Dual Contingencies of Ethnoraciality: Status-Context Disparities in Health Information Sources among Sexual Minorities.” Social Science Research 87:102395. doi:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2019.102395.

41.

Taylor

Keeanga-Yamahtta

. 2020. “The Black Plague.” The New Yorker, April 16. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-black-plague.

42.

Wacquant

Loïc

. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

43.

Wagner-Pacifici

Robin

. 2010. “Theorizing the Restlessness of Events.” American Journal of Sociology 11(5):1351–86.

44.

Wagner-Pacifici

Robin

. 2017. What Is an Event? Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

45.

Wailoo

Keith

. 2020. “Spectacles of Difference: The Racial Scripting of Epidemic.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 94(4):602–25.

46.

Walby

Sylvia

. 2020. “The COVID Pandemic and Social Theory: Social Democracy and Public Health in Crisis.” European Journal of Social Theory 24(1):22–43.

47.

Weheliye

Alexander

. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

48.

Weinbaum

Alys Eve

. 2019. The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism’s Philosophy of History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

49.

Willse

Craig

. 2015. The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

50.

Zamudio

María Inés

. 2020. “Lightfoot Calls for Action on Racial Disparities In COVID-19 Deaths.” WBEZ, April 6. https://www.wbez.org/stories/chicago-mayor-calls-for-action-on-covid-19-racial-disparities/f1b8d274-efc6-4d14-b28a-11263fc1f12b.

51.

Zuberi

Tukufu

. 2001. Thicker Than Blood: How Racial Statistics Lie. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.