Underlying Conditions: Global Anti–Blackness amid COVID–19

Abstract

Recent events have revealed two global crises-one, the COVID-19 pandemic and related quarantine measures, and two, police violence against Black individuals and subsequent protests. Both reveal how anti-blackness is global, and how populations racialized as Black are forever suspect and marginalized. As a Black woman who has researched race and racism in France for over a decade, I see how these two crises present themselves in France as indictive of how anti-blackness manifests globally. On April 18, 2020, in Villeneuve-la-Garenne, a banlieue 1 in the Hauts-de-Seine département north of Paris, Mouldi, a 30-year-old man, left his apartment and went on a brief ride on his moped to get some air that evening. He later admitted he did not have the proper attestation, or signed certificate needed in order to travel more than five kilometers from one's home during France's COVID-19-related quarantine period. He quickly collided with a police car. Accounts vary, but some residents felt the officers purposely opened the police car door as Mouldi approached, causing him multiple injuries including a broken leg. In the immediate days afterwards, some residents burned cars and buildings and shot fireworks and police fired teargas at protestors in both Villeneuve-la-Garenne and nearby banlieues. As one French analysis put it, this is revolt against "the police who control them all year round, who 'tutoyer' them, 2 who insult them, who violate them" (Ramdani 2020; Le Parisien 2020). From his hospital bed, Mouldi appealed for calm (Le Parisien 2020; McAuley 2020a; Ramdani 2020). This incident reflects both the confinement of marginalized populations, even before COVID-19 as I discuss below, as well as the tenuous relations between racial and ethnic minorities-or visible minorities in French parlance-and the police. COVID-19 has illustrated various racial and ethnic inequalities, or the general marginalization of Black individuals, and the global attention to the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, has illustrated the persistence of anti-Black violence around the world. RACE, PLACE, AND MARGINALITY In an interview in March with Mediapart (a French online journal), Youcef Brakini, an activist working with Comité Vérité et Justice pour Adama, stated "all year round, the quartiers populaires [working-class neighborhoods] are confined" (Polloni 2020). Between March 17th and May 11th, France was under lockdown, or l'état d'urgence sanitaire

The U.S./France Contrast Frame and Black Lives Matter in France

“…By police violence, we are referring both to harassment by the police through such practices as identity control checks ( contrôles d’identité ) and actual deaths by the police. A 2009 Open Society Institute report demonstrated that identity control checks disproportionately target “visible minorities.” 3 Additionally, a 2012 Human Rights Watch report 4 found that the majority of Black and North African-origin individuals reported identity checks by the police as a major problem; they are six to eight times more likely than whites to undergo “pat-downs” (Beaman 2020). As to actual deaths by the police, these estimates vary, but one estimate states that between 1977 and 2020 703 people died due to the police 5…”

Contested Whiteness: Useful Heuristic or Reinscribing Dominance?

“…Connections to any of the facets and tactics of whiteness as a project of dominance would be worth investigation, such as issues raised by the uncertainties articulated above, including colorism, proximity to whiteness, and the overall messiness of race and ethnicity (Johnston-Guerrero, 2016). Beyond this, inquiry surrounding connections to global white supremacy (Mills, 2008) and global anti-Blackness (Beaman, 2020;Bledsoe & Wright, 2018) are particularly important. Finally, exploration of connections between this articulation and other theoretical articulations of whiteness, including considerations of the constructive power of discourse (Yoon, 2012), are important to pursue.…”

Silence May Equal Death, But So Does Uncompensated Queer Labor

“…It comes as no surprise that people from underserved and marginalized communities have suffered more from discrimination, violence, pandemic related losses. and mental health crises than those from affluent majority groups (Al-Ali, 2020;Beaman, 2020;Ivers & Walton, 2020;Matache & Bhabha, 2020). LGBTQ+ people around the world have also suffered from violence, discrimination, job loss, depression, anxiety, and isolation due to the pandemic (Gato et al, 2021;Kamal et al, 2021;Madrigal-Borloz, 2020).…”