Fundamentally uncaring: The differential multi-scalar impacts of COVID-19 in the U.S.

Abstract

2020 in the United States was marked by two converging crises—the COVID-19 pandemic and the large-scale uprisings in support of Black lives. These crises were met with both a counterproductive and inadequate response from the federal government. We examine these converging crises at the individual, social, and political scales. The biological realities of COVID-19 impact different populations in widely varied ways—the poor, the elderly, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, and those living with comorbidities get sick and die at the highest rates. Social distancing guidelines shifted millions of people to work-from-home and millions more lost their jobs, even as care laborers, preponderantly women, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, were asked to put their and their loved ones' lives on the line for the continuation of all of our lives. These biological, social, and economic crises have been punctuated by civil unrest, as millions took to the streets for racial justice, noting the unequal impacts of the pandemic. These converging crises have laid bare decades of neoliberal and neoconservative policies and ideologies, undergirded as they have been by racial capitalism, for their fundamental uncaringness. In this paper, we argue that this pandemic not only made a wider population more acutely aware of the necessity and importance of the need to care and for caring labors, but also that we stand at the precipice of potentiality--of producing a more caring society. To frame our argument, we draw on Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock's (1987) framework of three bodies—individual, social, and political—to unpack the multi-scalar entanglements in the differential impacts of COVID-19, questions of care, and their articulation in the current political-economic context.