Delegating Death

Abstract

Drawing from Michel Foucault’s discussion of the plague and smallpox epidemics, this essay unpacks the “inextricable link” between racism and biopower. By looking at the role of essential workers and ideas of differential risk in the current Covid-19 pandemic, this essay argues that Foucault’s work allows us to trace the techniques that biopower uses to generate and normalize the increased vulnerability of racialized groups. Techniques of quarantine and their exception for essential work expose the way that biopower relies on state racism through the production of differential and racialized vulnerabilities. One can draw connections between Foucault’s analysis of those of "little substance” who continued to work during plague quarantines and modern day essential workers to demonstrate how biopower protects the population by increasing and normalizing the vulnerability of an expendable subclass. Foucault explains these differentiated normalities through the smallpox epidemic, where the risk of contracting and dying of smallpox was distinguished based on age, location, profession, etc. One should build on Foucault here, and consider ‘race’ as another factor that is used to differentiate ‘normal’ levels of risk. This normalization preserves a system which makes people of colour vulnerable under the regime of biopower. While Foucault does not directly engage with race in his analysis of plagues and epidemics, his ideas on biopower provide a framework through which we can better understand the ways that racism permeates our current pandemic.

Governing a pandemic: biopower and the COVID-19 response in Zimbabwe

“…Preventive techniques that could be applied to the entire society without material and economic difficulties were thus more favourable, and, as Foucault points out, they were not the product of a known economic theory but of sheer practice and collection of field data 9. One of the underlying principles of biopower is the dividing practices that categorise the population according to vulnerability 16…”