The Precarity of Preexisting Conditions

Abstract

Feminist Studies 46, no. 3. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 615 Elora Halim Chowdhury The Precarity of Preexisting Conditions The World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, which, in the opinion of many health and policy professionals, was late in the game. Both the virus’s path and the preventive measures taken in response illuminate far-reaching relations of social and political inequity. The rate at which it has traveled across borders—national, urban/suburban, industrial and agricultural, race/gender/class, citizen, migrant and refugee, professional and daily wage worker—brings into sharp relief its stunning spread and expanse as well as the tremendous asymmetries of our lives. One could argue that the differential border crossings of the virus have been the consequence of unfettered capitalist development and accumulation. Indeed, feminist scholars in particular have identified capitalism as the virus, humans as its agents, and the ensuing pandemic and its fault lines as being caused by relentless, Anthropocentric greed, plunder, individualism , and “progress.” From the outset, I have been following the responses and coverage in my two contrasting “homes”—the United States, with its long imperial history of spectacular military aggression, presumably the world’s most powerful nation—and Bangladesh, one of the world’s most resilient countries because of its history of travail and also its triumphs. At present, a series of unfathomable blunders by the highest office in this country has resulted in the United States having the highest number of 616 Elora Halim Chowdhury COVID-19 cases as well as the most deaths in the world. Journalists have talked about the “missing six weeks” that could have slowed down the virus’s progression and allowed for a more concerted strategy to fight the disease. New York City, the epicenter in the United States, has been ravaged by the highest number of deaths—as well as job losses—occurring especially among African American and Latino communities.1 Similar patterns are emerging in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and New Orleans, especially in communities ostensibly unemployed, and underemployed, living in substandard housing, with lower life expectancies, without adequate access to “healthy diets,” and suffering from “preexisting” socioeconomic and health precarities. Many of them, not surprisingly, also make up the category of “essential workers”—at once disposable and at the same time on the frontlines fighting COVID-19 without suitable protection. Anthony Fauci, the wise director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, has advised six US presidents. He responded to the bleak racial inequity and higher numbers of death and disease among African Americans by saying, “There is nothing we can do about it right now except to give them the best possible care and to avoid complications.” In a similar vein, during a webinar on the South Asian response to COVID-19, Srinath Reddy, president of Public Health Foundation of India, when questioned about the sensibility of the stern lockdown and its murderous consequences for migrant laborers, responded that the time for a post-mortem of such policies was later; current efforts needed to prioritize healthcare. In response to the glib “not now, later” response by authorities, American studies scholar Lynnell Thomas poignantly asks, “That begs the question, when can we do something about 1. The latest available COVID-19 mortality rate for Black Americans is 2.5 times higher than the rate for Latinos, 2.6 times higher than the rate for Asians, and 2.7 times higher than the rate for Whites. See “The Color of Coronavirus : COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the U.S.,” APM Research Lab, September 16, 2020, https://www.apmresearchlab.org/covid/deaths-byrace . For a picture of job losses by ethnicity, see Jens Manuel Krogstad, Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, and Luis Noe-Bustamante, “U.S. Latinos among Hardest Hit by Pay Cuts, Job Losses Due to Coronavirus,” Pew Research Center, April 3, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/03/u-s-latinosamong -hardest-hit-by-pay-cuts-job-losses-due-to-coronavirus. Elora Halim Chowdhury 617 it? When can we stop replaying the same press conferences, rewriting the same sobering reports, reissuing the same dire warnings?”2...