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Whiteness, Visuality and the Virus

The corona virus was supposed to be the great equalizer, a leveler of the divides of race, class and gender. Instead, the invisible pathogen has not only made existing inequalities palpably visible, it has weaponized them. In one week in April, the virus has become racialized.

The corona virus was supposed to be the great equalizer, a leveler of the divides of race, class and gender. Instead, the invisible pathogen has not only made existing inequalities palpably visible, it has weaponized them. The far-right, last seen at Charlottesville, is back with a new claim: the right (for you) to die. The old settler-colonial slogan “Liberty or Death” has been revamped: “my (white) Liberty in exchange for your Death.” In one week in April, the virus has become racialized.

The far-right activism has followed from a perverse and reverse act of self-recognition. Those white people inclined to an overt declaration of white supremacy became aware that Black, brown and Indigenous people were being disproportionately affected. Hearing this, they concluded that they are immune.

Or more exactly, when “protestors” were asked if they thought the epidemic was real, they agreed that it was but claimed that they were protected by a “higher power.” This phrase comes from the rhetorics of Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step groups rather than Christianity. It was used to carry a double meaning in the familiar dog-whistle locutions of US white supremacy: the higher power is God, manifested as whiteness.

Learning to see in reverse

Let’s track how the “invisible enemy” constantly evoked by Trump became visibly non-white people. In a ten day span, the virus became racialized domestically, congruent with the ongoing xenophobia attached to the disease as being “Chinese.”

It had been predicted in March that minorities would suffer economically. But it was not until early April that media began to report on the disproportionate rates of death and infection in these communities. A wave of reports began in national media around April 7, 2020. By April 17, the Center for Disease Control was reporting that of those cases where racial and ethnic identity was known, 30% of COVID-19 patients were African American and 18% were “Hispanic/Latino.”

A week after this media wave broke, the first “protest” against stay-at-home measures happened in Michigan on April 15. Organized by Trump front groups like the Michigan Conservative Coalition (MCC), the event was quickly co-opted by the far-right. The MCC called for people to stay in their cars. Instead, rifle-carrying men in combat gear posed on the steps of the Capitol. While police might have intervened–imagine this with protestors from the Nation of Islam–this unpermitted, armed action was allowed to continue and garner wall-to-wall media coverage.

Lansing, MI, April 15, 2020.

It was right after a Fox News segment on April 17 covered the event that Trump sent out his “LIBERATE” tweets. As at Charlottesville, the far-right received presidential endorsement, even as the MCC now urges its followers not to attend follow-up Operation Gridlock events later this month. But the Betsy Devos-funded Michigan Freedom Fund, a co-organizer of the event, is still all in, calling the stay at home order “arbitrary and capricious.” The president and a leading cabinet member are conspiring against their own policies in other words.

If Michigan saw assault rifles, two days later on April 17, Denver saw a white woman in a top-end Dodge RAM 1500 tell a medical worker to “go back to China.” Not because he was Chinese, but because social distancing is communism, and the virus “is” Chinese. So it makes “sense.”

Health care workers stand in the street in counter-protest to hundreds of people who gathered at the State Capitol to demand the stay-at-home order be lifted in Denver, Colorado, U.S. April 19, 2020. REUTERS/Alyson McClaran

You just know this woman has 5,000 rolls of toilet paper in her McMansion alongside a freezer or two full of food. While she feels herself to be a brave anti-Communist, she did not in fact dare to walk the streets. The next day in Kentucky the all-white “protestors” chanted “Facts Not Fear,” a Fox News slogan, even as cases peaked in the state.

There is, then, a range of class and political positions among the white activists. What they share is a fear that whiteness is being dissolved in the emergency created by the pandemic. When they say–as they all do–that they would rather work than receive a government handout, it expresses the long-standing belief that welfare is only for people of color and so-called “white trash.” Being required to stay home and receive government funds provokes a furious–if small in number–backlash at being reframed as a dependent person, understood by them to mean a person of color, rather than a “free” person, meaning white. Slavery is never far away in the US.

It has all had an effect. On April 9, 81% of Americans supported stay at home policies, including 68% of Republicans (Quinnipiac). A week later (April 16), Pew Research found 66% concerned that the country would reopen too quickly. By April 19, that support had dropped to 58%, with less than 40% of Republicans in support (NBC News/WSJ). Other polls are close to that number with some as high as 64%. Polls are fickle, and biased, yes. But let’s not presume that a handful of activists can’t change minds, just because we intensely disagree with them.

Facts really don’t have much to do with this. Whiteness connects by emotional cathexis. White supremacy contains a volatile mix of anger, resentment and fear of failure, which is then combined with violence, especially against women. “Lock Her Up,” a slogan again in use at the Michigan protest, remains its watchword. Guns are its iconographic form. Its vocabulary is selectively drawn from the 1776 settler-colonial uprising in defense of slavery, also known as the American Revolution

Breaking the frame of whiteness

What’s at stake now is whether the far-right variant of white supremacy becomes hegemonic over the new conjuncture. Or if something entirely new can be imagined, as thinkers from Gramsci to Grace Lee Boggs, Stuart Hall, Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore have long exhorted us to do. It will take what Hall called “a profound cultural transformation” to undehumanize the settler-colony and imagine something different.

Whiteness “works” as an ideology because it provides a frame to sustain contradiction, or as Hall put it:

it articulates into a configuration different subjects, different identities, different projects, different aspirations. It does not reflect, it constructs a ‘unity’ out of difference

Hall, “Gramsci and Us”

Its goal is to make xenophobic white supremacy the ‘common sense’ (which is not to say ‘good sense’) not of politics as a whole but of the right. And, as Hall put it, they have ‘totally dominated that idiom, while the Left forlornly tries to drag the conversation round to “our policies.”‘

To break the frame offered by white supremacy will have create what Arundhati Roy calls “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” It will be both digital and material. A portal is not quite a frame. It that may have edges but not borders. It creates a sense of relation not of exclusion. The intensity of white reaction responds to their sense that that gateway is, paradoxically, now more visible than it has been for some time. How this plays out depends on how the several waves of Covid-19 infection are imagined and configured. I really don’t know what will happen.

By Nick Mirzoeff

Writer, teacher, activist.