To die a thousand deaths: COVID-19, racial capitalism, and anti-Black violence

Abstract

In this short commentary, we discuss the ways in which racial capitalism has developed a historical and ecological landscape through which COVID-19 has emerged, spread, and created uneven impacts across long-standing racial divisions inseparable from capitalist accumulation and expansion. We argue that this perspective on COVID-19 (and infectious disease in general) creates strong alliances with calls for reparations rooted in abolition of policing and incarceration, especially in light of the conjuncture of pandemic and uprising in response to police violence in the United States context. By bringing long-standing Marxian notions of alienation and metabolic rift, crucial for understanding the ecological and epistemic fissures leading to COVID-19’s spread, in conversation with writing on racial capitalism and anti-Blackness, we hope to illuminate pathways to a more grounded historical and ecological analysis that supports a radical vision of ecosystem health.