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Introduction: Interlocking Pandemics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2021
Extract
We are at a moment. An inflection point. We are in a moment of interlocking pandemics. Not only the health pandemic sparked by the COVID-19 crisis. But a pandemic of policing, poverty, and protest. George Floyd and Eric Garner were arrested for crimes of poverty. We live in a time of record-breaking unemployment and economic fragility caused by the global health emergency—a crisis that has unmasked structural inequalities baked into the foundation.
- Type
- COVID‐19 Part II: Understanding the Disparate Impact on Marginalized Communities
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The American Society of International Law.
Footnotes
This panel was convened at 12:00 p.m., Thursday, June 18, 2020, by its moderator Catherine Powell of Fordham University School of Law, who introduced the panelists: Tendayi Achiume, UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance; Amanda Klasing of Human Rights Watch Women's Rights Division; and Matiangai Sirleaf of the University of Maryland School of Law.
References
1 The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus a “public health emergency of international concern”—WHO's highest level of alarm—on January 30, 2020. WHO Timeline, WHO's COVID-19 Response, at https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/interactive-timeline.
2 For a discussion of the ways Blacks and Latinxs are overrepresented both among “essential workers” and among the unemployed (as a result of the pandemic), see Catherine Powell, Color of COVID: The Racial Justice Paradox of Our New Stay-at-Home Economy, CNN (Apr. 10, 2020), at https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/10/opinions/covid-19-people-of-color-labor-market-disparities-powell/index.html (coining the term “color of COVID,” spawning the hashtag, #colorofcovid, and providing a basis for a CNN mini-series hosted by Van Jones and Don Lemon). See also Catherine Powell, Color of Covid and Gender of Covid: Essential Workers, Not Disposable People, 33 Yale J. L. & Fem. __ (forthcoming 2021), available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3713395; CFR Think Global Health Blog (June 4, 2020), at https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/color-and-gender-covid-essential-workers-not-disposable-people (making similar observations with regard to women, particularly women of color).
3 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903).
4 Catherine Powell, “Viral Convergence:” Interconnected Pandemics as Portal to Racial Justice, Just Security (Aug. 6, 2020), at https://www.justsecurity.org/71742/viral-justice-interconnected-pandemics-as-portal-to-racial-justice (contribution to Racing National Security symposium, at https://www.justsecurity.org/tag/racing-national-security).
5 Makau W. Mutua, Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights, 42 Harv. Int'l L.J. 201 (2001).
6 Aziz Rana, Freedom Struggles and the Limits of Constitutional Continuity, 71 Maryland L. Rev. 1015, 1022 (2012), available at https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2493&context=facpub#page=9.
7 Id.
8 Aziz Rana, Colonialism and Constitutional Memory, UC Irvine L. Rev. 263 (2015), available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=2482017.
9 James Thuo Gathii, The Promise of International Law: A Third World View, Grotius Lecture Presented at the 2020 Virtual Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law (June 25, 2020), available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=3635509.
10 Rana, supra note 6, at 1023. As Rana notes, even though “the reality of American life was one of settler colonization, the anti-imperial narrative of the American Revolution meant that those ethnically included did not see themselves as colonizers.” Id.
11 Id. at 1024.