Race and Ethnicity in Pandemic Times

John Solomos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000455021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited collection brings together social scientists working on race and ethnicity to address the question of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, with a focus on issues linked to racial and ethnic inequalities.

The fourteen chapters that make up this collection were produced during the pandemic in 2020 and are intended to address key facets of the impact of the pandemic in contemporary Europe, the United States, and globally. Individual chapters address the pandemic by drawing both on empirical research and conceptual analysis. They also seek to draw important connections between broader dimensions of racial and ethnic inequalities and the health inequalities that have been highlighted by the sharp impact of the pandemic on particular communities and groups. This volume speaks to the need for researchers working on race and ethnicity to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic through both original research and by reflection on current policy challenges and interventions.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a themed issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Fever dreams: W. E. B. Du Bois and the racial trauma of COVID-19 and lynching

Freeden Blume Oeur

ABSTRACT

In 1899, diphtheria claimed the life of W. E. B. Du Bois’s son, Burghardt. How can Burghardt’s death help us to understand the racialized consequences of the present coronavirus pandemic? This article considers what Du Bois described as the “phantasmagoria” that ensnares racial structures. I examine COVID as the latest iteration of a distinctly racialized American trauma narrated in the grammar of Du Bois’s reflections on disease, extrajudicial killings, and kinship. This fever dream of conflagration and asphyxiation has haunted Black lives since slavery. Du Bois gave meaning to this racial spectre in religious terms as a story of perpetual death but eventual emancipation. By situating Du Bois in relation to the work of Christina Sharpe (2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press), this essay ruminates on the orthography of slavery’s inheritances with regard to disease and its symbiotic relationship with lynching. I conclude by considering Du Bois’s invocation to darkwater as a demand for Black healing.

An early milestone in social epidemiology, W. E. B. Du Bois’s book The Philadelphia Negro (1899) reinterpreted the well-known epidemiological triad and identified systemic racism as an infectious social germ (Jones-Eversley and Dean 2018). It is a tragic irony that diphtheria receives scant mention in its pages. Once known as “the strangling angel of children”, diphtheria was a leading cause of youth mortality worldwide until immunization became widespread in the 1920s (Hammonds 1999). In the same year that The Philadelphia Negro was published, the disease claimed the life of Du Bois’s first child, Burghardt, not long after Du Bois had moved with his family to Atlanta, Georgia in the Jim Crow South.

How can Burghardt’s death as a result of diphtheria help us to understand the racialized consequences of the coronavirus pandemic? In the United States, the loss of human life to the disease has been staggering. According to the APM Research Lab (2020), African Americans suffer the highest death rate of any group, at a rate over twice that of whites. African American communities in the South have been hit especially hard. Two of the five counties with the nation’s highest COVID death rates are in Georgia (The COVID Tracking Project 2020).¹ Both are predominantly African American. Given these realities of concentrated suffering, scholars emphasize the “injuries of inequality” that make groups more vulnerable to disease (Watkins-Hayes 2019). An early analysis of COVID maintains that racial capitalism – the co-constituting logics of capital accumulation, white supremacy, and colonialism – is the “fundamental cause” of the virus (Laster Pirtle 2020). In Black Reconstruction in America Du Bois ([1935] 1998 , 698) himself described this cause as the “foundation stone” of American society, and that the “widespread physical results” of caste structure were “disease and death”.

My essay turns from the political economy of health disparities to what Du Bois described as the “phantasmagoria” that ensnares racial structures: those grotesque spectres that are seemingly illusory but have devastating material, somatic, and psychological consequences. I elucidate the “cultural classification” (Alexander 2004; Eyerman 2001) of COVID as the latest iteration of a distinctly racialized American trauma narrated in the grammar of Du Bois’s reflections on disease, extrajudicial killings, and kinship. Disease, in this view, is not simply a “routine harm” (Onwuachi-Willig 2016), but a ritualized form of terrorism. Drawing on Du Bois’s reflections on “the nature of the pain” (Alexander 2004 , 13), I conceive of the racial trauma of COVID as a fever dream that has haunted Black lives since slavery. Du Bois gave meaning to this racial spectre in religious and mythological terms as a story of perpetual death but eventual rebirth and emancipation. This essay situates Du Bois in relation to what Sharpe (2016) has called the orthography of slavery’s inheritances, and ruminates especially on the symbiotic relationship between disease and lynching. I then illustrate this symbiosis with a discussion of the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I conclude by reflecting on Du Bois’s invocation to darkwater as a call for healing in the face of white supremacist terrorism.

Children of trauma

Cultural sociologists describe trauma as a process where intellectuals broadly defined articulate the suffering of a population and help ingrain that suffering into the collective memory (Alexander 2004). For Eyerman (2001), the memory of slavery and its traumatic legacies are the sine qua non of Du Bois’s text The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Yet Du Bois was no ordinary narrator of shared memory. He had used the occasion of his 25th birthday in 1893 to position himself as a Moses for his people; his life’s intention was to “raise my race” (Du Bois 1985 , 29).² From this perspective, Du Bois was traumatized by the deaths of two “children” – his kinfolk – in 1899: his own son, Burghardt; and Sam Hose. By giving meaning to this trauma and its “reticences” and “repressions”, Du Bois helped chart the “intricate jungle of ideas conditioned on unconscious and subconscious reflexes of living things” (2007 , xxxiii).

The most personally traumatic essay in Souls is the volume’s shortest: the elegy for Burghardt, “Of the Passing of the First-Born”. It anchors the book’s spiritual preoccupations with birth, death, and rebirth; the volume’s Forethought refers to “buried” memories in the collective psyche while the Afterthought pleads that Du Bois’s cries not go “stillborn”. Burghardt Gomer Du Bois died at 19-months of age from diphtheria. White doctors refused to treat Burghardt and the elder Du Bois tried in vain to find one who was Black. Medical care for Black children at the time was especially limited in the South, and Burghardt would have had a better chance of survival in New England, where he was born (and a slightly better chance in Philadelphia) (Karp and Gearing 2015). Du Bois (2003 , 206) would later assert that higher rates of “infantile diseases” afflicting African Americans were an “index of a social condition” and not due to biological traits. Diphtheria is a bacterial infection that enters the respiratory tract and produces a horrible fever. It coats the back of the throat with a thick “pseudomembrane” that greatly restricts breathing. Burghardt was tortured and asphyxiated. His death reprised a reality of slavery where enslaved children died in large numbers from the same disease (Kiple and Kiple 1980).

So, while COVID may be novel in the sense that it was unknown before 2019, epidemics have, in fact, historically been a regular feature of the Black experience (Onwuachi-Willig 2016). Though a virus and not a bacterium, COVID infects in much the same way as diphtheria, invading the respiratory tract and producing inflammation in the lungs. Unnervingly recalling the “Shadow of Death” that claimed Burghardt ([1903] 2017 , 203), this inflammation appears as shadowy patches on computerized tomography (CT) scans, with the scientific name of “ground-glass opacity” (Fiore 2020). In cases of respiratory failure, patients require intubation, an emergency procedure first introduced in the treatment of diphtheria (Hammonds 1999).

During his time in Philadelphia, there is a good chance that Du Bois met Jacob R. Johns, a physician based in the city and a leading expert on diphtheria.³ In 1898 , Johns reported that the disease had recently devastated the city’s “Shelter for Colored Orphans”. The following year, in a Philadelphia medical journal published the month before Burghardt’s death, Johns provided a more comprehensive scientific report on diphtheria. He characterized the disease as “a bacterial fire, kindling itself into the respiratory mucous membrane and burning into the tissues … The longer [the bacilli] burn or the hotter the flame, the deeper, more far reaching, the damage resulting” (Johns 1899 , 193). Johns also shared the Spanish name for the disease, with allusions to lynching: garrotillo, derived from garrote, a mode of execution where victims are “strangled with a rope” (180).

Just as his first-born had burned and been strangled from the inside, horrible fires were also kindling themselves all around Du Bois. Just weeks before Burghardt died, Sam Hose was lynched near Atlanta. There were an estimated 6400 lynchings in the U.S. between the Civil War and mid-twentieth century (Equal Justice Initiative 2020). Hose had been burned alive and his body dismembered by the white mob. The familiar story is that when Du Bois saw Hose’s burned knuckles on display in a store window, he was motivated to leave strictly scientific endeavors and to pursue a life of political activism (Mathews 2018). Also well-known is Du Bois’s devastating early commentary on the menace of lynching. I wish to bring focus to how, in keeping watch beside the dead (Burghardt and Hose), Du Bois drew out an orthography of Black trauma (Sharpe 2016): a language to articulate the racial terror of the burning and asphyxiation of Black children. While Burghardt was a child and Hose an adult, Du Bois positioned African Americans as God’s children in “Children of the Moon” from Darkwater ([1920] 1999). Du Bois’s poem is a “transfiguring” of White Christianity (referring to the religion but also a metaphor for white supremacy) in the image of Black Christian nationalism. The wings of White Christianity had veiled the “limitless potential” of the children of the moon, or their “blazing Blackness” (Blum 2013 , 163). Diphtheria was a scourge for Black children, and COVID is proving especially fatal for Black adults; but together they preserve a systemic racism defined as “the state-sanctioned … vulnerability to premature death” (Gilmore 2007 , 247).

Historians have described the trauma of lynching a “contagion” that has a “multiplier effect” across families, communities, and generations (Mathews 2018 , 6; emphasis in original). Yet Du Bois had ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Race and ethnicity in pandemic times
• 1 Fever dreams: W. E. B. Du Bois and the racial trauma of COVID-19 and lynching
• 2 Face mask symbolism in anti-Asian hate crimes
• 3 Prejudice and pandemic in the promised land: how white Christian nationalism shapes Americans’ racist and xenophobic views of COVID-19
• 4 Race, police, and the pandemic: considering the role of race in public health policing
• 5 Racism and nationalism during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic
• 6 Compounded inequality: how the U.S. Paycheck Protection Program is failing Los Angeles Latino small businesses
• 7 Perceived COVID-19 health threat increases psychological distress among Black Americans
• 8 Anti-Asian discrimination and the Asian-white mental health gap during COVID-19
• 9 COVID-19, Black jurisdictions, and budget constraints: how fiscal footing shapes fighting the virus
• 10 How COVID-19 may alleviate the multiple marginalization of racialized migrant workers
• 11 Rethinking refuge in the time of COVID-19
• 12 Has the Covid-19 pandemic undermined public support for a diverse society? Evidence from a natural experiment in Germany
• 13 Cultures of rejection in the Covid-19 crisis
• 14 Race, immigration and health: the Hostile Environment and public health responses to Covid-19
• Index