Radical Restorative Justice of The People's CDC

Abstract

Four days before the 2022 State of the Union address, the CDC made a change to the risk-prevention pandemic map of the United States that changed the color of the map from red to green. Before the change, the CDC worked with guidelines that identified a substantially high risk as 50 cases per 100,000 people. After the change, the low risk category became 200 cases per 100,000 - a significant diminution of the calculation. As the People’s CDC notes, “The resulting shift from a red map to a green one reflected no real reduction in transmission risk. It was a resort to rhetoric: an effort to craft a success story that would explain away hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths and the continued threat the virus poses.” The People’s CDC, a collaborative of volunteer health experts who offer policy recommendations and guidance around COVID-19 issues, reframes the official US responses to the global health crisis by disseminating critical information via social media. On their website People’s CDC identify their collaborative project: “working alongside community organizations, we are building collective power and centering equity as we work together to end the pandemic.” In this presentation, I situate the equity-focused work of the People’s CDC within restorative justice and world building movements. Using their “layered, collective, and equitable” social media publications as a guide, I employ recent research on collective action to analyze the ways that the People’s CDC resists the hegemonic inequities embedded in state run public health systems and corporate mass media by redeploying and rewriting the rhetorical strategies of those systems. I argue that the People’s CDC’s ethos of care and collaboration is employing restorative world building practices as a response to global crisis. As they say, “We must urgently create a new normal in which commitment to community care drives policy and behavior. This charge requires sustained and collective action.”