Content Warning: Detailed Discussion of anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity, along with Ableism
“In the combat we continue!
With thirst for revenge,
With hunger for freedom,
With insurgent memory,
With untiring will.”
– Marcelo Villaroel Sepúlveda, an anti-authoritarian revolutionary imprisoned by the Chilean state.
In numerous COVID conscious spaces, there has been a tune sung about solving the pandemic with “love”. A fawning music aiming to persuade the anti-masker with “kindness” to cease their harm, under the belief that their ableist violence of COVID-spread is practiced out of ignorance. While it is true that the state and mainstream media is pumping mis-information which obscures the nature of the SARS-COVID genocide, and its also true how some people would mask if they “learned the science”, this default application of innocence to the anti-masker not only conceals the necessity of attack against eugenics but it also mis-represents how eugenics has always functioned.
In a “united states” building upon the ongoing dispossession and genocide of Indigenous people as well Black people, a banality of mass violence as “normal” exists in motion. It is the status quo of land theft and extractivism that is harming Indigenous communities across the continent. It is the denial of necessary resources to Indigenous communities, actively destroying and appropriating their cultures, the police violence against their existence, the day to day struggle under the regime of racial capitalism. This banality of violence also is built upon anti-Blackness, carrying out social death against Black people as Frank B. Wilderson III described. It is the policing of their existence by the racial capitalist civil society as a whole, along with this society actively denying Black proletariats the means to live, maintaining a world which is inherently anti-Black. This hyper-exploitation of Black people—in part to extract their labor power—and the colonial violence to maintain it on the land that white settlers stole from Indigenous people has set the foundation for racial capitalism as a whole.
The essence of the “united states” project can be best described by Frantz Fanon’s point on the heart of colonialism: its “not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason…it is naked violence”.[1]Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, page 23. This is the status quo in which the forces of racial capitalism seek to make eternal, one where its violence is reduced as a daily “normal” without any retaliation.
Eugenics is built with this foundation of anti-Blackness and anti- Indigeneity. Its the intense devaluing of Black people that permitted the Trans Atlantic Slave trade to have multiple check points designed to literally kill off disabled Black Africans.[2]C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, pages 7-9. It too is the anti-Indigenous nature of colonialism which permitted settler forces to disable Indigenous people in mass whether through horrid working conditions in places like the Cerro Rico mines[3]Eduardo Galeano, Opens Veins of Latin America, pages 39-41. or through the plundering of land. This was all while settlers introduced deadly viruses to spread among Indigenous communities, which especially harmed their disabled members.[4]See SARS-COVID Genocide Vol 1. These are the roots that set the precedent for the SARS-COVID genocide to run rampant, especially in the “united states”.
Black and Indigenous people having the highest per-capita deaths from COVID is proof of these roots. So too is the prisons being COVID death pins. And its not just the fault of capital requiring more commodity purchases to thrive. Eugenics needs more than just the state. It needs people who refuse to wear masks—despite being able to—as the foot soldiers of this genocide.
The thing is that the anti-masker never truly gave a fuck about disabled people. Their response to police shootings of disabled people, especially Black disabled people, is almost always silence—and in the rare occasion where people do retaliate against the cops, ableism then is usually never directly attacked or even discussed. When the news publish another article where they frame a parent’s murder of their disabled child as an instance of “mercy killing”, outrage is often at best minimal and from primarily disabled people. There is no mass anger regarding SSI being a poverty income, or being lethally hard to attain especially when factoring medical racism, transphobia, (trans)misogyny, and how ableist the medical field is. In fact, these same bystanders probably just scroll past the fundraiser posts from disabled people on their social media feeds. The fury against the ableist—and usually also racist—instances of medical abuse tend to only stay within the margins despite being a common occurrence. This apathy existed too, especially from white abled folks, during the Atlantic slave trade and Smallpox outbreaks. Considering how abled people have historically enacted almost no resistance against ableism, it is not surprising that they and the pro- status quo disabled people decided to partake in the SARS-COVID genocide.
In fact, it should be acknowledge how eugenics incentivizes ableism. It rewards abled people with an easier public life—as “sane” and “healthy”—in exchange for being an obedient and “productive” worker bee. It allows abled folks to treat disabled people as a punching bag, while they rarely face any consequence. It even gives white abled (and many white disabled) folks another excuse to call the cops should they see a disabled person of color having a mental breakdown in public. Ableism is also helping prop this society which white people of all classes benefit from, as it makes the mechanisms of slave labor “more profitable” and its weaponization of pandemics make colonization an easier process to enact. It allows for service work and production to be “efficient”, as it grants the means to fire those too disabled to labor “profitably”. The glorification of work as the “core to life” needs eugenics, for the existence of disabled people contradict it. Otherwise, this world of fast paced service and commodity circulation would not exist.
Ableism is a vital factor in the existence of this racial capitalist order, and the SARS-COVID genocide is granting additional rewards to abled people to help keep this world alive. In exchange for killing disabled people, they are can access plenty of consumerist entertainment and pretend that the Earth is not burning. It is a treat that even traitorous disabled people can partake in, despite how they are denied support by this society once the ableism bites them in the ass. Even when factoring Long COVID as a monkey paw consequence for participants of this genocide, abled people still benefit from the power they have over disabled people and are allowed to enjoy this fast paced world of super-spreader fun that exists to the detriment of disabled people’s lives. These are privileges that persist because of violence, and are privileges that the ableds have historically proven to be unwilling to relinquish without a fight.
History has demonstrated how it is almost always a fruitless endeavor to convince those in the oppressor role to give up their power. The abolitionists in so-called “Philadelphia” whom tried to free slaves through appealing to slave owners only managed to free a several dozen slaves.[5]Genders 4 Black Communisms, abolitionism is just spicy reformism, https://descentrealizer.medium.com/abolitionism-is-just-spicy-reformism-a-critique- b6432c0fc2d0 Meanwhile, millions were freed through slave revolts—including the great general strike that lead to the reconstruction period as W.E.B. Dubois detailed in Black Reconstruction. The failure of reformist gay rights groups to appeal to cisheteropatriarchal forces gave space for the Stonewall Riots to rupture, as the former did almost nothing to improve the conditions of BIPOC trans people. The Zapatista territories did not become autonomous out of sharing the “right” facts to the Mexican state and the trans-national extractivist corporations; they won autonomy out of organizing collective care and rebellion. In fact, the pitiful results of appealing to oppressors can be seen just from the insufficient struggle which reformist COVID-safety groups have done. Most people who have tried to share proper facts on the virus experienced minimization and denial in return by abled people. That is because oppression does not give in through “clean presentation”. It only succumbs under combat. To suggest otherwise is like having hope that an abuser will finally be persuaded to “realize” the harm they consistently cause; most survivors who have partook in restorative justice processes know how that is just a pipe dream.
The SARS-COVID genocide is an expansion of eugenics as a social war against disabled people. This period of massacre have its roots in racialized ableist violence, in particular against disabled Black people and disabled Indigenous people, and the brutality has (asymmetrically) expanded to all types of disabled people in the recent years. Collective care must be organized to keep disabled people alive through this genocide. However, attack against eugenics is necessary going forward as all genocides have only ceased when the people it victimizes fight back. The anti-masker is not acting purely as an individual. Rather, they are practicing violence as part of the collective force of eugenics. Rebellion should not be about appealing to the conscience of ableists. It must instead create a hostile environment for the ableist to the point where they are no longer capable of enacting their violence. For eugenics will only end when it is negated with the whole racial capitalist order!
References
| ↑1 | Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, page 23. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, pages 7-9. |
| ↑3 | Eduardo Galeano, Opens Veins of Latin America, pages 39-41. |
| ↑4 | See SARS-COVID Genocide Vol 1. |
| ↑5 | Genders 4 Black Communisms, abolitionism is just spicy reformism, https://descentrealizer.medium.com/abolitionism-is-just-spicy-reformism-a-critique- b6432c0fc2d0 |