(Re)Made in America: Survivorship after the Shoah

The holocaust survivor

The Shoah received relatively modest attention in American public life until the 1960s, and the designation ‘holocaust survivor’ was slow to enter common parlance. ¹ Immediately after the war, an individual’s specific experience served as the descriptor – whether one had fought with the Partisans, been confined to a concentration camp, or was otherwise persecuted or uprooted. Most were classified more generally by their status as ‘displaced persons’, or ‘refugees’ (Grinberg, 2019). At first, those who survived encountered considerable ambivalence. ² Reflexive concern for their maltreatment gave way to pity and often condescension. Shock at the horrors they endured soon turned to pointed questions about their complicity – whether for not resisting or rebelling, or for colluding in various ways with the Nazis, as Raul Hilberg (1961) and Hannah Arendt (1963), among others, insinuated. Scrutiny from the clinical professions was similarly disconcerting, yielding new diagnostic classifications, such as ‘survivor’s syndrome’, which held that victims were plagued not only by guilt for having lived when others perished, but also for unconsciously identifying with their victimizers. ³

The trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 profoundly altered the image of the Shoah survivor. Broadcast around the world, it was, as Arendt remarked, a ‘show trial’ staged less to ascertain Eichmann’s culpability (after all, most of the witnesses had no connection to him) than to document and publicize Jewish suffering. ‘What is important’, Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion expounded, ‘is the spectacle’. The prosecuting attorney Gideon Hausner announced in his opening statement that in addition to the more than 100 witnesses he would call to testify, he shared his platform with ‘six million prosecutors’ (Azoulay and Honig, 2016). The proceedings thus cast survivors in a new role as heroic defenders of the dead and as bearers of history, inaugurating what Annette Wieviorka (2006) calls the ‘advent of the witness’. In assuming this new socio-juridical position, Shoah survivorship came to signify something more than having withstood a hardship, becoming instead the foundation of ‘an iconic, almost mythic authority’ (Lipstadt, 2011: xx).

Perhaps no individual in the United States more actively defended, or better epitomized, the remaking of holocaust survivorship outside the courtroom than Elie Wiesel. Wiesel exalted survivors’ testimonies as a new literary genre on par with Greek tragedy, the Roman epistle, and the Renaissance sonnet. He also construed the Shoah as a biblical event, one he analogize to Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac (Blutinger, 2009; Garber and Zuckerman, 2004). Scholars credit Wiesel (and the NBC television mini-series Holocaust that aired in 1978) with popularizing the moniker ‘The Holocaust’ to categorize the Nazi’s Final Solution. Unlike ‘shoah’, which refers to total ruin without any religious inflection, ‘holocaust’ evokes the idea of a sacred sacrifice. In place of shame or guilt, Wiesel advised survivors to embrace the Shoah as ‘a glorious chapter in [Jews’] eternal history’. After all, he reasoned,

It is still the greatest event of our time . . . Everything today revolves around our Holocaust experience. Why then do we face it with such ambiguity? Perhaps this should be the task of Jewish educators and philosophers: to reopen the event as a source of pride, to take it back into our history. (Fackenheim et al., 1967: 288)

In Wiesel’s rendering survivorship became an honor, an earned status and an accomplishment.

By the 1980s, the growing reverence for survivorship compelled Primo Levi to express apprehensions about placing Shoah survivors on the proverbial pedestal. Survivors realize, he argued, that those who lived did so by resorting to means that were ignoble, petty, and often cruel: ‘The worst survived – that is, the fittest; all the best died’ (Levi, 1988: 63). Opposing the glorification and sentimentalization of survivors’ experiences Levi pointed to the ‘gray zones’ of connivance and transgression that made surviving possible. Notwithstanding some Shoah survivors’ reluctance about transforming their maltreatment into a celebrated status (Hoffman, 2005; Stein, 2014), the veneration of survivorship had already taken root in the United States. Indeed, when Levi’s first book about the atrocities of the Lager, If This is a Man (1947), was republished in English 14 years later, his publisher gave it a new title, Survival in Auschwitz (1961) – further evidence of the growing ubiquity of the term.

While the Shoah has become a template for conceptualizing genocide and collective memory in many corners of the globe, it assumed a unique place in American public culture, manifested in the early 1990s in the establishment of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and the box-office success of Stephen Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (1993). Natan Sznaider overstates matters when he asserts that for Americans, ‘All victims have turned into Jews’ (Sznaider, 2003: 182). But his observation that the genocide of Europe’s Jews transformed Americans’ attitudes about victims and survivors is insightful. Perhaps, most significantly, it helped raise the standards for what constitutes victimization, propagated expectations about how victims should respond to their injuries, and elevated the status of survivorship. By the last decades of the century, rituals of bearing witness in public were shared by Shoah survivors and other sufferers (e.g. victims of sexual violence) who sought to raise consciousness about their experiences and to demonstrate their resilience by speaking out in a variety of forums – from the public square to social media.

Recasting victims as ‘survivors’ provides ‘a language . . . to console instead of confront’, as Lawrence Langer (1995: 5) observed. The lexical modification alters the affective charge, softening victims’ torment and diminishing bystanders’ despair by processing it through a prism of promise and noble sacrifice, by retelling the story of victimization ‘in terms of heroic dignity, moral courage, and the triumph of the human spirit in adversity’. Langer (1995: 158) considers the origins of such translations to be ‘characteristically American’. This transformation in terminology has been so absolute that even the canonic An Introduction to Holocaust Studies (2005) provides numerous index entries for ‘survivors’, but none for ‘victims’ (Bernard-Donals, 2005: 299).

‘I’m not a victim, I’m a survivor’

To fully understand how ‘survivor’ became a laudatory title, we also need to examine how ‘victim’ became a term of derision. The lineage of the disparaging use of ‘victim’ can be traced back to the 1980s, when a new and cynical conception of victimhood served to attack multiculturalism, feminism, racial politics, the welfare state, and various progressive policies designed to support the least advantaged. Other disdainful idioms surfaced in tandem (e.g. ‘victimist’, ‘victicrat’, ‘victim politics’), and ‘victim’ itself was deployed to condemn the character of sufferers irrespective of their condition and to chastise them for enfeebling and effeminizing the nation (e.g. Dershowitz, 1994; D’Souza, 1998; Hughes, 1993; Rophie, 1994; Steele, 1990; Sykes, 1992; Wolf, 1993). Politicians and pundits lamented the decline of the United States into a ‘nation of victims’ – declaring that feminists, racial minorities and welfare recipients, among others, were undermining the fundamental American ethos of self-sufficiency by demanding government assistance, preferential treatment, and the protection of ‘politically correct’ regulations. The specter of the Shoah is evident in anti-victimism where it serves as a yardstick that, in its rarely matched extremes, dulls other forms of victimization and mutes contemporary victim claims. ⁴

Anti-victimists consider the majority of victims’ allegations to be fraudulent – generated either by imposters (who are neither harmed nor deprived by any sensible standard) or by swindlers (who exploit their disadvantages to achieve gains incommensurate with their actual circumstances). However, instead of providing guidance on how to better evaluate such assertions, they concentrate on the claimants’ psychological state, their ‘victim mentality’, contending that they blame others rather than accept personal responsibility for their condition. Questions of social injustice are, therefore, depoliticized by casting them as matters of personal attitudes or feelings, thereby precluding consideration, much less redress, of institutional hierarchy or privilege, structural domination, pervasive inequalities that advantage some by subordinating others. According to this inherently neoliberal rationality, no one needs to be a ‘victim’ because each of us can be self-determining, if we have the right character and affective disposition.

While the drive against ‘victimism’ peaked in the United States in the 1990s, it recently returned with a vengeance. The current targets may have different names (e.g. #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, intersectionality, ‘safetyism’, micro-aggressions, and ‘cancel culture’), but the refrain is remarkably consistent – a dangerous ‘victimhood culture’ imperils standards of ‘honor and dignity’ (Campbell and Manning, 2014) – as is the chorus of new and dubious claims of victimization by dominant groups. Once again, complaints about complaining overwhelm public discourse. Consider only the titles of books published in the last decade: The Victims’ Revolution (2012), The Violence of Victimhood (2012), Cry Bullies (2017), Victimhood: The New Virtue (2017), The Rise of Victimhood Culture (2018), The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), and Privileged Victims (2020).

Distinctions between deserving and undeserving sufferers are hardly new, and disentangling misfortune from injustice can be politically necessary, but framing systematic economic, social, and political disparities as a matter of failed self-responsibilization is a more current and problematic development. Note that ‘victim mentality’ entered English only three decades ago. It functions as a synonym for ‘victimhood’, a word coined earlier but not previously in everyday use (Ngram, 2020). This pejorative understanding of victimhood has become our commonsense quite beyond political affiliations. No one wants to be a ‘victim’ even when they have experienced victimization.

Being a victim or a survivor today has little to do with vulnerabilities, injuries or injustices endured – it is an expression of ‘who you are’. Examples may be found beyond American society. Austrian Natasha Kampusch is a case in point. Abducted at the age of 10, and imprisoned in a basement for 8 years, she told the press upon her release: ‘I am not a victim just because others say that. Outsiders cannot make someone a victim’ (Adler, 2007). The UN Goodwill Ambassador responsible for human trafficking, Julia Osmond, expresses a comparable sentiment: ‘[T]he use of the terminology “victim” is synonymous with weakness[,] . . . with shame. The people that I have met . . . are survivors, they are resourceful, alive, and productive’ (Van Dijk, 2009: 25). Correspondingly, the president of a Peruvian survivors’ association explains,

Legally speaking, I am a victim, but I do not feel like a victim. If the day comes when I feel like a victim, this would be like conceding victory . . . [W]hen I say I am a victim . . . I . . . become one of the living dead. (De Waardt, 2016: 433)

The term ‘victim’ may be juridically stipulated to claim rights and receive restitution, but as these remarks demonstrate, even the victimized view victim status as suited only to the feeble, broken and defeated, losers or the (socially) dead, and thus disavow the designation. The prevalence of this appraisal of victimhood, and the concomitant suspicion that being a victim is primarily a matter of ‘feeling’, signifies the culmination of a neoliberal sensibility; not only in terms of the retreat from making public demands and engaging in collective action, but also in terms of individuals adopting the affective dispositions and personal qualities necessitated by entrepreneurial subjectivity. When human vulnerability is refused or denied, adversity becomes not a moment for recognition, restitution or care, but instead an occasion to further hone various forms of self-management and self-optimization such as positivity, ‘bouncebackability’, and ‘recoverability’, (Chowdhury, 2020; Gill and Orgad, 2018).

Neoliberalism’s anti-victim campaign is now joined by populism. With the ascent of the Tea Party and other permutations of contemporary populism culminating in Trump’s presidency, some of the most vociferous voices emerge from those who seek to establish their own victim status on the basis of alleged inequities that supposedly result from the preferential treatment of ‘privileged victims’. Such inverted logic undergirds the politics of resentment against ‘line cutters’ – racial and sexual minorities who purportedly capitalize on the attention of the federal government while poor whites are left behind (Hochschild, 2016); anti-immigrant groups’ manifestos remonstrating against their ‘replacement’ by non-white ‘invaders’ (Goodluck, 2019); and legal challenges to policies, such as affirmative action and prohibitions on discrimination. In Evergreen Association, Inc. versus Andrew Cuomo 2020, for instance, the plaintiff relied on anti-discrimination laws to contest how those same laws prohibited him from discriminating against others. In the anti-victimist moral economy efforts to address victimization can be turned on their head, what Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018) calls ‘the insidious flip’ – cast as extensions of the very problem they seek to remedy (e.g. ‘reverse discrimination’) – thereby creating a rhetorical impasse of endless disputes over who is really a ‘victim’. The anger privileged groups feel when they misconceive of themselves as persecuted by progressive policies, moreover, justifies violence.

Any discussion of the politics of survivorship would be incomplete without a brief comment on modern ‘survivalism’. While the origin of the survivalist movement is politically diverse and some members even eschew politics altogether, in its current guise it seems to attract predominately individuals and groups on the far Right. The history and nomenclature of the survivalism is beyond the scope of this essay, especially since its adherents increasingly prefer other designations, such as ‘Preppers’ and ‘Retreaters’ (Mitchell, 2001). Nevertheless, whereas anti-victimism arguably operates in a rather different register, there are striking parallels between its approach and that of survivalism. Both uphold a bleak, sometimes apocalyptic, view of society, resources, and supply chains, and a deep antipathy toward government – survivalists take it to the extreme. Both emphasize individual agency, personal responsibility, and self-reliance. The two discourses are preoccupied with victimization, whether past, present, or in the survivalist case, future – the calamity waiting around the corner. Whether adopted by followers or affixed by sensationalist media the term ‘survivalism’ as a political sensibility and a philosophy of life participates in the general cultural process of infusing ‘survivor’ with an evaluative, moral, and political edge.

The trauma of surviving

Developments within psychiatry and other therapeutic fields also contributed to fortifying the hierarchical opposition between victim and survivor. A variety of programs and services have been devised to help victims recuperate by, among other means, rebuilding their self-esteem. Trauma counselors and social activists urge victims to embrace the vernacular and identity of survivorship, endorsing this lexical change as ‘less passive, negative, and disempowering’ (Chambers, 1993). The National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship (NCCS), for instance, enlarged the category of ‘cancer survivors’ beyond individuals who completed treatment to incorporate patients still battling the disease, their family members, and even their caregivers. ‘Cancer survivor’ has a precise biomedical definition: those who have remained disease-free for 5 years. When it was adopted in its expansive form in 1986, however, the NCCS explained that it intended the change to ‘survivor’ to function as a motivating psychosocial designation that would inspire those included in the now-capacious category of ‘cancer survivors’ to become ‘cancer thrivers’ (NCCS, 2014).

The presumption that such renaming enhances victims’ recovery brought about a sea change in nomenclature in a variety of contexts. Battered women’s shelters, for example, became ‘survivors’ agencies’. A shift in mission accompanied the new designation – from organizing women to fight for protective legislation to focusing instead on self-help and individual healing. Reclaiming one’s recuperation as a survivor frequently entailed rituals of speaking out, and thus, in a manner, implemented the feminist axiom that ‘the personal is political’ by publicizing violence previously silenced as private shame. ⁵ At the same time, the current discourse of survivorship ultimately individualizes and domesticates such speech acts, further privatizing the public, as we have seen. Collective oppression and systematic exploitation become almost inarticulable under neoliberalism since ‘all experience is merely individual’, as Chandra Mohanty surmises, ‘and the social is always collapsed into the personal’ (Mohanty, 2013: 971).

A therapeutic rationale designed to assist victims of harrowing experiences (from rape to genocide) ‘work through’ and ‘heal’ emotionally from trauma melds at this point with anti-victim discourse that attributes personal failure to individuals and groups who politicize their suffering. Unwittingly, then, survivors and their advocates tacitly align with anti-victimism, solidifying the stigma attached to victimhood, if only to enhance individual victims’ self-worth. Survivors become model or ‘true’ victims by rejecting the ‘victim’ label. This preference for ‘survivor’ disregards the political campaign to vilify ‘victimism’ and participates in the erasure of hard-fought gains to establish that, for instance, naturalized heterosexist behavior can be a form of violence, that the rape victim is, in fact, a victim of both a particular individual and of a larger patriarchal system. Before the mid-1970s, ‘prosecutrix’ served as the legal designation for a victim in rape trials. Defense attorneys still maintain that referring to a rape victim as a ‘victim’ is prejudicial, because it undermines the presumption of a defendant’s innocence until proven guilty (e.g. People v. Bryant Case No. 03-CR-204 (Dist. Ct. Eagle County, Colo. 2004)).

The reliance on ‘positive thinking’ terminology to rebaptize victim services and organizations, as well as the general push toward the grammar of survivorship, elides suffering by relegating it to the past – the underlying premise being that survivors already overcame their injuries simply by an act of will power. Whatever resources survivors might still require, furthermore, are predicated on their initial success in overcoming their victimization. As therapeutic rationalities infuse policy debates about injustice and endemic inequality, they operate to occlude structural disparities by turning from an evaluation of material and social circumstances to target an individual’s character instead. The struggle for power becomes an exercise in self-help – a change of attitude (adopting a ‘survivor mentality’ rather than a ‘victim mentality’). Self-critique eventually supplants social criticism (Saleci, 2010: 31). In Christina Scharff’s (2015) formulation, ‘When positive attitudes are valued at the expense of anger or despair, critique and the impetus to change something other than the self have little use-value’ (p. 7).

The remaking of survivorship dovetailed with new expansive understandings of trauma. The vocabulary of trauma moved from the purview of clinicians and their precise definitions to become common in everyday speech. As use proliferated, so did interpretations of what constitutes a traumatic experience, its effects, and remedy. If in the late 19th-century psychiatrists understood trauma as a neurosis that plagued only the cowardly and weak, with the adoption of ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ in the 1980s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) ‘trauma’ evolved from a scientific term to a universal signifier and moral category. This change in meaning and usage was influenced by the experience of Shoah survivors as well as by burgeoning social movements such as feminism (Fassin and Rechtman, 2009). ⁶ Reconceiving trauma as a normal response to abnormal conditions opened the possibility of shared understandings among differentially situated individuals and groups, in turn providing a fragile foundation for at least affective affinities. But any sense of collectivity that might be facilitated by universalizing trauma occurs by flattening essential differences among forms of victimization, thereby ensconcing a vague and homogenized sense of adversity that anyone and everyone can assert. Trauma has become so entwined with the demand for justice, moreover, that it seems to have displaced other means of perceiving injustice and addressing victimization. Nowadays, Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman (2009) propose, ‘psychic trauma speaks only that truth about the victim that society is prepared to hear’ (p. 276).

Compulsory survivorship

I have focused primarily on the United States so far because the tracked trajectories – the ‘Americanization of the Holocaust’ during the 1970s, American psychiatry’s ‘reinvention of trauma’ in adjusting the DSM classification in the 1980s, and fierce contestation over ‘victim politics’ in the 1990s – were significantly shaped there. At the same time, there is evidence that survivor discourse traveled beyond America’s already-porous cultural borders, as noted in examples cited earlier. In Israel, to provide one more illustration, a movement has begun to replace the historical and current term ‘Nitzoley Shoah’ (to refer to those who were saved from extermination) with the term ‘Sordei Shoah’ (meaning Shoah survivors). As we might now expect, proponents justify this revision of terminology by contending that ‘survivor’ highlights the victim’s agency, while still acknowledging the protracted process of recovering from the trauma of the Shoah (Pori’ya, 2011). Similar sentiments are regularly on display at various international celebrations staged around the globe that pay tribute to a great variety of survivors of hardships and ailments, from cancer, AIDS, and stroke, to suicide and gun violence (e.g. Different Strokes, 2020; NCDS, 2020).

Even as this revered conception of survivors has been naturalized and normalized, becoming a regulatory requirement that cannot easily be refused (DeVolder, 2013), a few signs of dissent are emerging. Oncologists and cancer patients, for instance, have been debating the appropriateness of the designation ‘cancer survivor’. In Italy, patient advocacy groups adamantly reject the term ‘survivor’, while in England, the classification is viewed as ‘excessively heroic, as overemphasizing positive over negative feelings about cancer’ (Surbone et al., 2013). Reflecting on her own experience with breast cancer, Barbara Ehrenreich (2010) raises another point, reminiscent of concerns articulated by some who survived the Shoah, that celebrating survivorship implicitly disparages the dead: ‘Once the treatments are over, one achieves the status of “survivor” . . . Did we who live “fight” harder than those who died?’ she asks. ‘Can we claim to be braver, better people than the dead?’ (p. 81). Others, such as Susan Gubar, find the label vexingly imprecise. ‘I’m not a survivor’, she writes. ‘Perhaps we need a word for that murky in-between zone that a number of us inhabit daily’ (Gubar, 2012).

Some victims of sexual assault have also begun rebuffing ‘compulsory survivorship’ (Larson, 2018). They consider the imposition of survivorship to be another manifestation of blaming the victim. In this case victims are blamed not for causing their own victimization, but for failing to adopt the narrowly prescribed relationship to their injuries. In other fields as well poignant questions about how current survivor discourse ultimately derides victims and burdens them with their own recovery are finally being raised more widely by those ascribed the title. This contestation from ‘within’ (i.e. from victims who refuse the title ‘survivor’) resonates with recent theoretical labor (e.g. Cole, 2007: 137–140; Orgad, 2009). Tanya Serisier (2018), for example, criticizes the exclusionary politics of survivorship that tends to give the stories of white cis-women more credence and greater influence. Specific practices associated with survivorship have likewise been interrogated; for instance, the custom of bearing witness. While feminists elaborated practices of public testimony to make sexual violence visible, some warn that this confessional mode of speech might ultimately serve to undermine the confessor and lead to cooptation (e.g. Alcoff and Gray, 1993). Hesitations about survivorship also align with another – and by now quite plentiful – literature that exposes and denounces neoliberalism’s ‘happiness imperative’ and ‘cruel optimism’ (e.g. Ahmed, 2010; Berlant, 2011). Although this critique does not directly address the hegemony of survivor discourse, conceiving of survivorship as a matter of disposition and choice certainly coheres with the neoliberal insistence on positive thinking, ‘shock absorption’, and adaptability to perpetually precarious conditions (Bracke, 2016).

Survivor bias

Given how overburdened ‘survivor’ has become, Gubar suggests we abandon the term. One intriguing possibility comes from scholar and member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe Gerald Vizenor who employs ‘survivance’ to depict how Native Americans contested their oppression and erasure. As an intransitive verb, ‘survivance’ does not have a direct object; it is ‘the action, condition, quality, and sentiments of the verb “survive’’ (Vizenor, 2008: 19). Rather than a subject position, ideology, or theory, survivance is a practice that, he clarifies, exceeds ‘instincts of survival, function, or subsistence’ (Vizenor, 2009: 1). Vizenor (2008) specifies that the exercise of survivance both exhibits and instigates ‘active resistance and repudiation of dominance, obtrusive themes of tragedy, nihilism, and victimry’ (p. 11). While the word ‘survivance’ is not Vizenor’s coinage, ‘victimry’ is. Thus, even this alternative term that seems promisingly to turn from a posture of accommodation and self-help to collective resistance still retains the victim/survivor binary and a disparaging conception of victimhood.

As long as ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’ remain ensnared in ideological webs, contriving new words will do little more than circumvent our ambivalence about victimization (whether our own or that of others); they will not dismantle the hierarchical distinction that elevates survivorship as agentic and demeans victimhood as passive. The conception of agency undergirding this binary presumes a fictive state of absolute sovereignty and invulnerability whereby victimization and agency exist as opposite conditions (Cole, 2016). In our current understanding of victimhood, victimization and agency are ‘each known by the absence of the other’ as Martha Mahoney (1994) explicates:

You are an agent if you are not a victim, and you are a victim if you are in no way an agent . . . [A]gency [then] does not mean acting for oneself under conditions of oppression; it means being without oppression, either having ended oppression or never having experienced it at all (p. 64).

To conceive of survivorship otherwise, therefore, requires tarrying with our aversion to both situational and ontological vulnerability, the ambiguities of agency and causality, as well as the uneasiness we experience when confronted with the suffering of others.

The current construction of survivorship, furthermore, forecloses the possibility of shared responsibility, or, as Kelly Oliver (2001) writes it, ‘response-ability’, to emphasize the ethical obligation to respond to others’ maltreatment. The call to ‘be a survivor, not a victim’ is deployed as a mandate to take personal responsibility and demonstrate resilience in the face of unlivable conditions, disqualifying alternative responses whether complaint, contesting the status quo, or resisting the perpetuation of violence. Such declarations reduce human vulnerability to a calculus of privatized risk and choice, making overcoming injury and injustice a matter of individual achievement, precluding united struggle and recanting the interdependence that makes survival possible.

The politics at stake in the entwined processes that remade our evaluation of victims and survivors, especially in the United States, is the conceptual foundation they provide for the neoliberal projects of depoliticizing inequality and individuating claims of injury, as well as the populist project of demonizing both elites and marginal groups as threats to the imaginary ‘people’ and its supposed collective will (Mueller, 2016). Words do things: being able to accurately name one’s condition is the route to claiming recognition from others and redress from political institutions. By charting the changes in how we speak about victims and survivors, we can observe how language disciplines our understandings of suffering and injustice, rendering some matters unspeakable.

Postscript

This article is being written in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis in New York City. How the global pandemic will alter survivor discourse remains to be seen. In one sense, the virus has served as a great equalizer, indiscriminately ensnaring us all. In the aftermath of the pandemic, ‘survivors’ will include many beyond those who became ill or lost a relative, friend, colleague or neighbor, for there are few who have not experienced the enveloping fear and whose lives have not been profoundly disrupted. The fact also remains that we are not all equally exposed to this pandemic’s dangers, and that these inequities are born of pervasive injustice, gross economic disparities, and racial discrimination that systematically expose already-made-vulnerable groups to the virus at much higher rates, to devastating effect.

By now, we can observe how adversity leads some to erect borders around local, national and political communities, rather than generating solidarity. That we instinctively privatize the fight against the virus and distance ourselves emotionally from its victims – as we distance ourselves physically from each other – is also disturbingly evident. The deadly threat has compelled patterns of behavior associated with ‘survivialism’– the hording of consumable goods from food to toilet paper, a deep distrust of governmental regulations, and a defensive posture toward others (if only because they may be asymptomatic carriers – vectors of the disease).

The challenge in the aftermath of COVID-19 will be to balance our generalizable, shared experience of enduring this pandemic with the awareness that our collective political decisions laid the groundwork for the disproportionate suffering and death of those our public policies have left behind. As I have argued in this essay, over the last few decades, a novel and expansive conception of survivorship has served to conceal deepening inequalities, deny injustices, and silence sufferers. Moving forward requires attentiveness and reflexivity when the term is again widely employed. COVID-19 is another stark reminder of our responsibility to repair, amend, and change the forces that victimize, inviting us to reflect on our common vulnerabilities and interdependencies, as well as our shared responsibilities to one another.