Emergency: Covid-19 and the Uneven Valuation of Life

A forceful critique of how and why states failed to protect marginalized communities in their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the implications of ignoring the existing emergencies that exacerbated the pandemic’s devastating effects.

The COVID-19 pandemic inaugurated a state of emergency unprecedented for most Americans. Some could observe this emergency from the relative safety of their homes, but those in marginalized communities, without access to the same privileges, were forced to risk their health and well-being.

In Emergency, sociologist Claire Laurier Decoteau documents and theorizes the emergencies of COVID-19 by looking at the experiences of Chicagoans and the policies that shaped their lives. She describes the uneven racial impact of COVID-19 on Black and Latinx Chicagoans as a crisis within a crisis, caused by a convergence of emergencies: a state of emergency that protected white supremacy and wealth, the slow emergencies racially marginalized populations have faced for decades due to the long-term gutting of care infrastructure and deindustrialization, and the sacrifice ＂essential workers＂ were asked to make to protect the United States economy. As Decoteau shows, the city’s ＂racial equity＂ project used data to determine which communities would be given scarce resources, but once positivity or death rates declined, resources were retracted and redistributed elsewhere. City officials thus attempted to manage these converging emergencies by manipulating epidemiological data and orchestrating systems for interpreting that data. Decoteau makes clear that the emergencies precipitated by COVID-19 long predated the pandemic, and that we will continue to live with their compounding crises if we do not tackle their structural underpinnings.

Claire Laurier Decoteau is professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her previous books include Ancestors and Antiretrovirals: The Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa and The Western Disease: Contesting Autism in the Somali Diaspora, both also published by the University of Chicago Press.