Abstract
With this issue of Critical Sociology (Volume 46:7/8), 2020 comes to a close. It marks the end of the second decade of the 21st century, but it also marks a turning point that changes the world as we knew it because of the COVID-19 pandemic. We will always be marking time with respect to our lives BC (Before COVID) and AC (After COVID); economic, social, and political realities will be transformed. Economic activity has tanked globally for several reasons. To stem the spread of this virus, country after country has shut down economic activity to keep workers at home and shoppers from coming to stores. Some countries, perhaps most industrialized countries, provided salary support so that workers sent home could still pay bills, shop online, cover routine expenses like rent and food, and generally keep the demand side of the economies minimally disrupted. Social gatherings were discouraged, businesses shifted to remote work with many employers considering making that change semipermanent, and residents of dense cities have begun to wonder whether living in expensive and crowded spaces continues to make sense. There were some positive impacts: the air was cleaner, and cities were quieter when traffic flows drastically were reduced as commuting to work ended; public spaces like parks and greenways became more appreciated as people sought to escape homes as they practiced social distancing. What was on everyone’s mind was whether life will “return” to normal, asking what would be the “new” normal, and wondering if we should now take the opportunity to redefine how life can be lived in cities (for example, more bike lanes, increased pedestrian-only streets, restricted traffic flows, and restricting congestion). In other words, time will be marked by BC and AC regardless how things work out in the end.
The United States, due to incompetence, venality, denials, and mendacity of President Trump and his enablers in the Republican Party, is suffering more than most trying to cope with the coronavirus. As of the end of August (while writing this editorial), worldwide there are over 20 million cases and almost three-quarters of a million deaths with over 5 million cases and almost 180,000 deaths in the United States alone (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/) That means a country, arguably one of if not the richest in the world, one that has just over 4 percent of the globe’s population, accounts for 26 percent of all cases and 22 percent of all deaths! We can point to many reasons: a private system of health insurance based on employment, which fails when tens of millions lose their jobs; a public health infrastructure that has been underfunded for decades; the closing of community hospitals and proliferation of private for-profit hospitals that have left large regions of the country with inadequate facilities to cope with the sick; and a strong reluctance to take the illness seriously because of a long-standing assault on science and the public sector by a significant segment of the population that advocates “personal responsibility” rather than social solutions. But perhaps most importantly, the country has been led by an administration whose main objective is to enrich itself at the public’s expense and shows little interest in the sufferings of the people other than the degree to which it may hurt the president’s reelection chances.
The economic consequences of this national calamity (and in truth, to most economies of the world) has been a contraction not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Global supply chains have been disrupted, and the shutdown has revealed exactly how dependent we are on easy and rapid flow of goods. When factories in China shut down, there were fears new products for sale and parts for manufacturing and repair in the United States would suffer. The front end of the supply chain broke. When the virus was finally under control and factories in China reopened, the demand for goods fell away as the economies of the world remained shut. The back end of the supply chain failed. Investment decisions were put off and US workers were laid off and sent home without paychecks. The lucky ones were furloughed or were fired so they qualified for unemployment insurance that was supplemented by various emergency measures (recently expired, as have a moratorium on evictions!). For many, there is a real fear that most of those jobs are lost forever. With over 40 million people out of work, the United States has no national program to offset the loss of employer benefits (if there were any to begin with) like health insurance, retirement contributions, and other subsidies and concessions received at work.
At the same time, the most vulnerable—those stocking grocery shelves, making food deliveries, keeping the basic services operational—were getting sick at record levels. First responders struggled to stay safe as personal protective equipment was in short supply and the federal government provided no support to states; President Trump acts like the federal government is in competition with state governments. Governors of some states made secret arrangements with companies to use private aircraft to get necessary supplies, keeping that hidden from dysfunctional federal agencies who might seize those supplies—a perversion of their mandate to assemble and distribute the same. Many businesses are failing or reorienting their activities: restaurants and bars may not survive; small commercial land owners and landlords can’t manage as rents go unpaid for months; banks are starting to put pressure on those who have not been able to pay loans or mortgages; major brick-and-mortar retail stores (already under stress due to online shopping) are closing or contracting permanently and filing for bankruptcy protection; and looming on the horizon are a projected 20 million renters who are seriously behind on rent and may be facing eviction. In spite of Pollyannaish proclamations by President Trump that the virus will just go away, that the economy is robust, and that schools and sports will return to pre-COVID levels, none of this has come to pass. Basically, the dire situation persists, and no one is clear how the economy will look when activity resumes. Life BC and AC!
The decade’s end has heralded several societal turning points as well. The emergence of the power of the Black Lives Matter movement and a significant US (and global) reckoning with systemic racism has finally challenged our society to come to terms with its history and the way racism has been central in our day-to-day existence. Not since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s has there been such a significant national confrontation with racism in the United States (and parts of Europe). What is different this time are that: (a) it is no longer about claiming rights denied but interrogating the systems which sustain the denial of those rights and (b) it is more than a generational movement as protests against police brutality and violence against Black and Brown bodies have engaged both young and old people in major urban centers and surrounding suburban and rural communities—often in places characterized as white residential areas. The trope of the 1960s, warning suburban Whites that poor Blacks will be rioting in their towns (so vote “law and order”) fails because many suburban families are witnessing their own children participating in these demonstrations.
The killing of George Floyd proved to be one killing too many. The shooting of Breonna Taylor raised the call for recognizing that it was not only young Black and Brown men and boys who suffered through the use of excessive and unrestrained force by police. Chants and signs at protests and on lawns demanded that we “say their names” to personalize and memorialize the human cost of police violence. One only needs to consider the treatment of Dylann Roof by police who, after killing nine African Americans in church on June 17, 2015, is allowed to stop on the way to jail and pick up some fast food because he was hungry. Juxtapose that with the countless number of Black and Brown men and women killed by police at traffic stops, while shopping, or during arrests for minor infractions, all shot and killed because the police “felt threatened” by the presumption these persons posed a threat to the safety of the officers involved. Malcolm X made it clear that when society casts the African American community—whether in his case Harlem in New York City, or the Chicago of the Black Panther Party—as a dangerous, violent, and lawless place it comes as little surprise that the police, upon entering the community, are anticipating and thereby instigating violence. The only bombing of an American city took place in Philadelphia when their police department acted against the MOVE headquarters killing 11 people and destroying 65 homes. Detroit suburban residents described the unrest in 1967 as local lawlessness and social breakdown (that is, by the city’s African American community) requiring the reaction by Detroit police to restore order; residents inside the city indicated it was a history of police brutality mixed with intense intergenerational poverty that pushed the community over the edge.
Yet, this time it is different. There is a national effort at varying levels of intensity seeking a reassessment of community policing coupled with a call to reevaluate the resources going to local law enforcement. Questions are asked whether police departments should be heavily militarized and armed by surplus hardware acquired from the Department of Defense, and whether they should be required to serve so many social service functions. Efforts are now underway to consider redirecting some of the funding for police departments to mental and community health agencies that serve needs now addressed by calls to a police force inadequately trained or resourced to properly handle those situations.
But the discussion does not end there. Symbols of the racist past are being challenged, from revisiting the real cause of the American Civil War to removing the statues to and names of Confederate generals and politicians from public buildings to banning the Confederate battle flag as a symbol of Jim Crow and the renewed oppression of former slaves. The history of slavery is now front and center through programs like Project 1619 (https://www.project1619.org) that reevaluates the history of slavery in America, and a reexamination and reclamation of events like the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 (https://www.tulsahistory.org/exhibit/1921-tulsa-race-massacre/) to remind the country of the long-standing cost of racism in both property destruction and lives lost. As a nation, we have begun a broader examination of how racism has played a role in the arts, in educational outcomes at all levels, in entertainment and sports, in the legal profession and corporate leadership structures, with regard to health care outcomes, income and wealth inequalities, and why residential segregation persists in spite of decades of legal efforts. In short, for perhaps the first time the US public is contemplating what exactly systemic racism means in practice, how it significantly effects the life course of non-Whites, and how altering systemic racism has to go beyond “sensitivity” and “diversity” training, which, in the end, has done little to really change how we have functioned to this point. For the first time, we have begun to approach the possibility of a truth and reconciliation moment and entertained the possibility that we need to understand and consider the shape of reparations for the harm done over 250 years of formal slavery and another 150 years of Jim Crow and de facto racial subjugation.
As 2020 comes to a close, it marks the convergence of all of these trends: COVID-19, economic collapse, and reexamination of race leading up to this presidential election. Donald Trump has run this country as a kleptocracy, filling government agencies with cronies and political favorites whose only quality is a slavish loyalty to Trump rather than serving in the interests of this country, and whose only objective is to enrich themselves at the public trough. We only need to reflect on how often, and how many, of his political aides and administration appointees have been charge with or found guilty of a range of misdemeanors and felonies as an indication of the overall corruption of Trump’s presidency. His politics have been divisive, his focus has been on undermining long-won efforts at worker health and safety, environmental and natural protection, creating friction with allies, and attacking human rights at home and abroad. Lacking any real moral center, Trump has cynically promoted religion to gain the support of conservative Christians, has shamelessly used his office to enrich himself, his family, and his businesses, from the start has launched an assault on the foundation of our immigration policies seeking to reverse demographic trends toward a more multicultural society, and at every turn has tried to establish an “imperial presidency” modeled after other political strongmen he admires. The blatant politically focused racism (Trump and his father have a long history of racist practices in their economic activities) first manifest during the “birther” movement challenging the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency is resurrected as he questions Kamala Harris’s citizenship and right to be on the national ticket as Vice-President. Racism and xenophobia have been hallmarks throughout his administration. Trump reveals his fascist tendencies (I will resist the comparisons to Weimar Germany and the ascendance of the National Socialists to power) through the use of private contractors who pose as federal police to assault peaceful protestors, lies about everything and anything at rates not ever seen before by politicians (who, as a rule, don’t have good reputations to begin with), and has done everything he can to undermine effective government at a time when it is essential—in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic to offer a national response, and most recently in his assault on the US Postal Service for the unabashed and self-proclaimed goal to prevent mail-in voting this year.
Finally, this year marks 50 years since a group of radical sociology students and faculty began publishing a periodical mimeo of critical scholarship and analysis, in a publication called The Insurgent Sociologist; that eventually morphed into the journal Critical Sociology, what is now in your hands. Because it was initially printed as a newsletter, the first four issues of Vol. 1 appeared between January 1969 and April 1971. Vol. 2 came out in 1972 and thereafter the journal was published annually. which is why in 2021 we are publishing Vol. 47; in one form or another this journal has been published for 50 years. The quality and format of the journal improved year after year, and the last year it was published as The Insurgent Sociologist was 1987. The early years of self-publication produced quite an array of interesting cover art (see http://criticalsociology.org/the-insurgent-sociologist-cover-art/). In the following year, the journal’s name was changed to Critical Sociology.
For the past several years this journal has been published by SAGE, UK. With their support and help has brought us greater visibility, and they expanded the space dedicated to publishing critical and radical content. Our readership is increasingly international, as are the authors who submit their scholarship to the journal. The journal’s year after year increasing Impact Factor—a trivial indicator but reflecting how our articles are being cited—demonstrates how our articles have had an ever-widening impact on critical scholarship. This year, in appreciation of the work we are doing and of the journal’s success, SAGE has increased our page allocation per volume (hence the large size of this issue). This will allow us to publish more (and longer) articles and provides additional space for the ever-increasing requests to put out special issues and symposia. Finally, we welcome Amanda Garrison (CMU Sociology) as our Graphics Editor in an effort to liven up the pages of each issue and utilize the blank pages generated by production requirements. It is consistent with our desire to broaden how scholarship is presented in order to make it more accessible to a wider audience. I see this as a reflection of the creative and colorful covers that graced the first few decades of its existence.
This year capitalism faces a critical juncture as globalization is becoming undone by growing economic and cultural nationalism, neoliberal austerity has failed and is generating increasing popular opposition to its policies, environmental and economic crises in many parts of the world are driving an increasing number of people to migrate even as liberal societies are rethinking their openness, and regional and local micro-warfare threatens to expand and escalate into wider global conflicts. Critical Sociology will continue to publish scholarship that interrogates and expose these tendencies and their origins.