Introduction

Whether you are African, coloured, Arab, American, European, Russian, Chinese, Indian, Canadian or of Caribbean descent, in this era of Covid-19, your chances of being recognised as equally human anywhere in the world, are immense. A way of describing the recognition is by saying that all human beings show a sense of solidarity we lacked in the pre-Coronavirus years. Our current social vision, as it manifests itself in this crisis, is of a world in which such solidarity is felt. What this means is that there is something within each of us—our essential humanity—which resonates with the presence of this same thing in other human beings in a world of differences. This way of explicating the notion of solidarity does not cohere with the historical categories of “one of us” against “not one of us”, “neighbours” against “strangers”, “citizens” against “expatriates” and “immigrants”, “male” against “female”, “straight” against “gay”, “worker” against “owner”, “able-bodied” against “disabled”, “civilised” against “primitive”, and so on. The idea is that we all possess some component which is essential for being a fully-fledged human. It is a radical shift from being an antagonistic to a complementary difference.

Guiding questions