Anti-Racism Is the Paradigm
Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi have taught us all how to view America’s original sin of racism. With their help, many of us now understand that there is no such thing as not-racist. There is only racist or anti-racist. Anti-racists are easy to identify. If they are white, they work hard not to center themselves, to amplify Black voices, and are always humble, self-critical, and eager to learn how to overcome the racism and anti-Blackness into which they were born and against which they must struggle all their lives if they wish to be moral and refrain from (further) oppressing the POC in their lives.
While it is true that a few people who are racially but not politically Black disagree with this paradigm, those people are white-adjacent and need not be taken seriously. Nikole Hannah Jones said it best:
Recently, it has become clear to me that their anti-racist wisdom is applicable to living with COVID.
COVID is systemic, and, like everything else American, an integral part of our system of systemic racism and white supremacy. Our systems of freedom, free enterprise, people traveling freely over city, state, and county borders without regard to COVID vaccination status, exists solely to spread COVID to as many people as possible. Freedom, American style, is a deliberate genocide against POC.
America’s original COVID sin is not sending out the military to vaccinate everyone by force. Until this sin is rectified, we will all live with systemic COVID as part of systemic racism.
Just as there is no “not racist,” only racist or anti-racist, there is no “not having COVID.” You are vaccinated, boosted, and masked, OR you are infected and spreading COVID. You are anti-COVID or anti-vaxxer. There is no in-between.
What do I mean by “anti-vaxxer”? You know damn well what I mean. People who are unvaccinated and/or oppose mandates—people who defend America’s original COVID sin of failing to send the military out to vaccinate everyone by force—are anti-vaxxers.
What if I’m vaccinated but oppose mandates?
Then you are anti-vaxxer adjacent and just as responsible for systemic COVID as anti-vaxxers.
What if I have “natural immunity”?
Some may argue, “But what if I am naturally immune? What if I test regularly and simply do not have COVID?”
This is white nonsense.
Just as there is no not-racist, there is no “natural immunity.”
There is no middle ground here. No room for moderates or wishy-washy declarations from those who want to be free to perpetuate systemic COVID without consequence or accontability.
How to be Anti-COVID
Accept that COVID is systemic—just as systemic, now, as systemic racism and white supremacy. Commit to relentless humility and self-reflection, always asking what you can do better to fight COVID.
In order to be on the right side of the science, at a minimum: you must boost at every opportunity, masks (N95s only) at all times, and use your privilege to oppose all anti-vaxxers. Argue for mandates. Write President Biden urging him to use the military to vaccinate Americans by force. That is the bare minimum reparations needed to begin to set right the travesty of systemic COVID.
Systemic COVID is now baked into the very core of American society and only an anti-racist revolution will repair it. Until that grand and glorious day when the regime falls, we must all fight COVID with every tool at our disposal.
That starts with accepting the necessity to be anti-COVID. Not just merely “not a spreader of COVID.” Get busy. Educate yourself. Do the work.
This is the internet, so someone will take me seriously. Yes, this whole post is a joke.
Thank you to: first, the professors in the mandatory diversity classes who taught me to deconstruct the world. I will be angry until my student loans are paid off (hence this monetized Substack, ha ha); and second, to James Lindsay, who taught me how to turn literally anything into Critical Theory by following the idiot-simple playbook they gave me in those classes. His new book, Race Marxism, is excellent and you should read it.