Over the past year SJRC’s Theorizing Race After Race (TRAR) research cluster has produced a series of dialogues grappling with COVID-19 and Racism. The first two dialogues, hosted on UCHRI’s Foundry site, cover Black geographies of quarantine and Metrics, enumeration, and the politics of knowledge.
During August 2021, TRAR student researchers hosted a third dialogue with four scholars from around the Americas discussing how COVID-19 has revivified or changed existing debates about race and racism in different trans/national contexts. This dialogue has been posted to The Foundry as Race, Contagion, and the Nation: A Dialogue with Pedro Valdez, Abril Saldaña-Tejeda, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, and Jenny Reardon.
Below you will find information about relevant contexts that shape the topics discussed during the full dialogue.
As a UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) report from 2020 summarizes, xenophobia and racism toward migrant workers around the world has grown since the start of the pandemic, attributed to fears of contagion and charging migrants with spreading the virus. For example, just as the U.S. ‘weaponized COVID against migrants’, the Dominican Republic’s long history of structural racism against Haitians as well its and the U.S. governments’ deportations of Haitians during the past year threatened not only the general health of these migrants, but also caused a surge in COVID-19 cases in Haiti, already suffering from an unstable public health infrastructure.
Further intertwined with the COVID-19 pandemic has been mass protests (both in the U.S. and internationally) against racism, white supremacy, and police brutality sparked, in part, by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in Spring 2020. Much discussion ensued about the need to understand white supremacy and racism as factors creating structural threats to health. As one open letter signed by over 1,200 U.S.-based public health professionals and community advocates put it, “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.”
In an effort to think through these developments, the dialogue ranged widely with panelists offering their uniquely situated takes. First, panelists were asked about the possibilities and impediments to the collection of COVID data based on ‘race’ in their countries (the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and the United States). Next, they discussed strategies to move away from the biologizing and racializing discourse on pre-existing conditions and COVID-19 vulnerability that become tied to certain racial/ethnic groups. As one strategy, Dr. Saldaña made the case for treating social-structural forces, such as racism and poverty, as pre-existing conditions themselves. The discussion covered the utility of seeing whiteness as a race and the ways the power and privilege of whiteness becomes invisibilized even as it leads to harmful effects on others – for example, white U.S. citizens vacationing in Mexico without getting tested for COVID-19.
The dialogue further covered the function and role of borders, and understandings of the border as a racialized and carceral space of containment and expulsion. Panelists discussed how legacies of colonialism have gutted many national and transnational public health responses to the pandemic, thus failing to ensure adequate health and safety for those most vulnerable to the novel coronavirus. Panelists concluded the dialogue by discussing ways the meaning of racial justice has shifted trans/nationally since early 2020, and how they are grappling with these developments as they move forward with their work and projects.
Contributors
Dennis Browe is a Sociology PhD student who works across medical sociology, science and technology studies, and feminist theory. He studies the rise of precision medicine in the U.S., as well as the field of biogerontology, which links questions of population aging to the biomolecular study of aging in cells and organisms.
Sophia Parizadeh is a second-year undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz, majoring in Politics. She is interested in understanding systemic racial inequality and how it has been magnified during the COVID-19 pandemic. She hopes to shed light on other social justice issues and work towards forming solutions to today’s problems.
Dr. Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology at UCSC and Founding Director of the Science & Justice Research Center.
Dr. Abril Saldaña-Tejeda is an anthropologist at the Universidad de Guanajuato in central Mexico whose work includes scholarship on mestizaje and health patterns of non-communicable diseases and healthcare access.
Dr. Felicity Amaya Schaeffer is a Professor of Feminist Studies at UCSC who works on science and technology studies, border identities, indigeneity, and citizenship regimes, especially related to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Pedro Valdez is affiliated with the Sociology Department at the University of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, who currently holds a position at a national migration research institute.
Lucia Vitale is a PhD student in the UC Santa Cruz Politics department and interdisciplinary global health scholar whose work explores the right to healthcare (see “COVID’s Co-Pathogenisis”). She uses citizenship to frame inclusion/exclusion practices occurring at both the transnational scale in global health policy, and at the national scale in social policy. You can find her on twitter.