As the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic peaked in the late spring of 2020 in the United States, the strategy for mitigating the spread of the virus centered around limiting bodily interactions between people, known popularly as ‘social distancing’. Mayors across US cities delegated the task of monitoring social distancing to the local police. As soon as local police began to execute the new public health mandates, racial minorities were 80 percent more likely to be ticketed and issued summons for social distancing violations (Moore, 2020).

This chapter examines why social distancing mandates are enforced disproportionately on racial minorities by offering a comparative analysis of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Englewood, Chicago. Both of these urban neighborhoods have historically allowed racial and religious minorities to configure a home that exceeds beyond an apartment or other legally classified residential dwelling to include a broad range of built structures such as schools, delis, synagogues, churches, and parks. However, digital technologies, such as iPhone tracking devices and iPhone apps, that allow users to report violators of social distancing have rendered such private spaces as contagious, thus emboldening public officials to regulate them as part of policing social distancing. This central tension not only exacerbates the contentious relationship between state officials and minorities but also reverses state officials’ historical approach to the maintenance and regulation of public health in US cities. Far from a legal or political theory, we argue that the idea of the ‘private’ structures the urban design of New York City and Chicago into discrete neighborhoods, protecting religious and racial minorities from persistent surveillance, and must be maintained through the production of urban spaces which facilitate religious and racial minorities to move around without constant surveillance (see also Volume 3).

Germ theory and the ethnic enclave

Measures taken against the spread of infectious diseases for at least two centuries have played a formative role in urban design. In particular, industrializing cities during the turn of the 20th century were compartmentalized into discrete ethnic neighborhoods that were set apart from public spaces of gathering to restrict the mobility of incoming migrants who were feared to have been carriers of deadly epidemics. In the aftermath of the tuberculosis epidemic, nativists mobilized scientific discoveries in virology and epidemiology, called germ theory, to affix tuberculosis (TB) onto Jewish migrants arriving at Ellis Island (Markel, 1999: 5).