The data will not save us: Afropessimism and racial antimatter in the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The Trump Administration's governance of COVID-19 racial health disparities data has become a key front in the viral war against the pandemic and racial health injustice. In this paper, I analyze how the COVID-19 pandemic joins an already ongoing racial spectacle and system of structural gaslighting organized around “racial health disparities” in the United States and globally. The field of racial health disparities has yet to question the domain assumptions that uphold its field of investigation; as a result, the entire reform program called for by racial health disparities science is already featured on the menu of the white supremacist power structure. The societal infrastructure that produces scientific knowledge about patterns of health and disease in the human population needs to confront its structural position as part of the racial spectacle organized around racial health disparities in the United States. This paper offers an interpretation of racial antimatter to explain why the data will not save us in the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing on articulations of racial spectacle and structural gaslighting within critical race theory and Afropessimist thought. By positioning events in the COVID-19 pandemic together within the same racially speculative frame, I show how the collection of racial health disparities data came up against white supremacists’ political ambitions in a time-space where the demand for human life to matter and the iterative regeneration of racial antimatter collided. This paper highlights the need for ongoing analysis of the unfolding and future spectacles organized around racial health disparities.

Racing the Machine: Data Analytic Technologies and Institutional Inscription of Racialized Health Injustice

“…This research thus lends empirical support to the Black Public Health Collective’s (2020) declaration that “race-based data are not racial justice,” recognizing technological effects may be paradoxical (Cruz and Paine 2021; Hoeyer 2023; Thompson 2021; Ziebland, Hyde, and Powell 2021) and themselves highly unequal (Noble 2018; Obermeyer et al 2019; Vyas et al 2020). It further joins recent critical scholarship in reimagining the role of data within collective struggles for freedom and social justice (Benjamin 2019; Hatch 2022; Nelson 2016; Rodríguez-Muñiz 2016).…”

Contested Truths Over COVID-19 in East Africa: Examining Opposition to Public Health Measures in Tanzania and Uganda

“…We then analyzed 500 randomly selected tweets via a close reading. Our analysis is informed by the work of scholars such as Melanie Walsh (2021) and other data feminists who combine computational analysis with an awareness of the extractive, reductive, and spectacular risks of data science (D’Ignazio & Klein 2020; Hatch 2022). We have thus refrained from identifying any users or tweet IDs in this study except for those of public figures.…”

Data citizenship: Quantifying structural racism in COVID-19 and beyond

“…[T]he assumption that collecting data on racial health disparities in the COVID-19 pandemic will lead to the reduction or elimination of those disparities [is an] assumption that keeps scientists in an endless search for more and more refined measurements of racism's harms, while the political and economic systems that comprise the fundamental causes of those harms are given a pass until all the data are counted. (Hatch, 2022: 2)…”

“…This advocacy corresponds with a trend toward treating statistical inclusion as a matter of racial justice among community organizers (Rodríguez-Muñiz, 2021;Thomson, 2016), and among health scientists (Bliss, 2012;Epstein, 2007). And yet, critical scholars have questioned whether the collection of attuned racial statistics serves to redress racial inequities at all (Benjamin, 2019;Hatch, 2022). Hatch (2022), for example, argues that when it became clear the highest case rates and deaths from COVID-19 were among Black and Latinx communities, the Trump administration withdrew federal public health infrastructure and left it up to states and municipalities to determine and enforce public health mitigation.…”