Unmasking Inequality in Our Pandemic Narratives.

Abstract

Unmasking Inequality in Our Pandemic Narratives Rebecca Garden (bio) The COVID-19 pandemic poses a narrative problem. In the pandemic’s early days, I participated in a widely shared experience: the lockdown phase, when so many of us were isolated in our homes and learning to navigate work and social interactions through digital spaces. Even in this self-imposed isolation, I felt connected to others; I was in the midst of the same story as thousands, even millions, of other people whose lives had been similarly altered. The sheer anxiety and vulnerability we felt about the prospect of infection were part of a unifying narrative about how we all were, or would be, equally affected by the pandemic. Given the Trump administration’s deliberate incompetence and the fragility of an infrastructure built to serve global capitalism rather than meet human needs, we were all, it seemed, at risk. In those early pandemic days and then months, I tried to perceive the contours of what Priscilla Wald defines as “outbreak narratives.” These are the narratives that combine public health understandings of and responses to contagion with our cultural storytelling to shape an “epidemiologically based conception of community.”1 These narratives represent “the affective experience of a sense of belonging that turns people into ‘a people.’”2 The many stories of mutual aid and care that emerged at this time contributed to an overarching narrative of community and belonging, to the idea of a “people” emerging from the collective experience of the pandemic. This narrative of belonging, however, masked another: a story of exclusion rather than community and care. In the midst of one of the most unifying narratives of recent history, stark divergences emerged. When it seemed everyone was on lockdown, some people still had to go to work in hospitals, nursing homes, meat processing plants, on delivery routes and in post offices, in supermarkets and corner stores and on farms: a category of occupations we learned was defined as “essential” by the US government. [End Page 219] Ultimately, the pandemic unmasked the deeply ingrained ableism, racism, and ageism in our society. It also revealed the way health care participates in these systemic inequalities. (I distinguish the system of health care from those individual health care providers who have been exposed to risk and worn down by inhumane working conditions, a situation the rhetoric of “COVID heroes” partially masks.) Being isolated in our homes was not, of course, a narrative shared by essential workers. Nor was it shared by those who were unhoused or unable to isolate in their domestic spaces, those suddenly without incomes, those without digital access, those who lived in institutions—like nursing homes and prisons—where they were left without protection from infection. That there are radically different stories about the pandemic seems obvious now, but that tacit acknowledgment may actually prevent us from thinking through and acting on this narrative problem and its role in reinforcing inequality. To push back on the universalizing pandemic narrative, I’ve looked for opportunities to uncover the hidden or masked stories in my own community. During the lockdown, my sister sewed and sent me (literal) masks for myself and my family to use and to distribute to others. I delivered small packages of them to contacts in neighborhoods in Syracuse, New York, where people hadn’t (or couldn’t have) hoarded boxes of N95s or even ordinary surgical masks. These are neighborhoods that have long borne the brunt of the systemic inequities produced by racist policies. The Near West Side, the South Side, and the North Side of Syracuse—historically segregated and devasted by racist housing policies and systematic neglect—have experienced a continuous expansion of what sociologist Paul Jargowsky characterizes as “extreme poverty.”3 Over the years I have developed relationships with people living and organizing within these neighborhoods. One of them, who I recruited as a “Community Educator” for my university, is Monu Chhetri, a Deaf New American who works as a sign language interpreter and an advocate for a vibrant Deaf refugee community living on the North Side of Syracuse.4 When the city locked down, Ms. Chhetri contacted members of her community to communicate to them...