Weighing the Risks at the “Boiling Point”: Black Lives Matter during COVID-19
By Janani Umamaheswar and Catherine Tan
In our last post, we described how the COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating existing social and racial inequalities in the U.S. We noted that many of our Black participants feared that the pandemic has created new opportunities for police surveillance — and subsequently, increased risk of fatal encounters between Black/African American people and police officers. While concerns about law enforcement emerged early as an important finding in our research, issues surrounding racial injustice and policing have become significantly more important in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations that have spread across the nation.
Drawing on three waves of in-depth interviews with students at a socioeconomically and racially diverse university in the Northeast (for a current total of 115 interviews with 45 participants), we find that through the fight for racial justice, Black participants channel their fears — of both law enforcement in particular and of the pandemic more generally — into an empowering, collective experience.
We began our research on April 1st, 2020 when many states started implementing shelter-in-place orders. Even our earliest interviews revealed that the pandemic was disproportionately damaging the mental and physical wellbeing of our Black participants, many of whom described concerns about how police biases might shape the enforcement of pandemic-related orders. In an interview ten days before the death of George Floyd, Walter (22) said that even when he carries documentation proving his essential worker status, he knows it is not a “Captain America’s shield” and he worries that police officers might choose to disregard the document and charge him for breaking stay-at-home orders. During this time, Walter perceived two great challenges — surviving the pandemic and surviving the police: “I could try my hardest to not get got…because that’s my main thing is just to not get got by the police and not get got by coronavirus. I’ll be good if I can get past those two.”
As we moved toward the last phase of our interviews, George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis on May 25th when a police officer pushed his knee into Floyd’s neck until Floyd could no longer breathe. With the national and worldwide BLM protests that ensued, the social landscape suddenly looked radically different and the narratives of our Black participants shifted from fear to empowerment. As Benny (23) noted, the protests reflect a “boiling point” as Black people respond to the damage inflicted upon their communities by both COVID-19 and police brutality. Many of the same participants who were afraid to leave their homes in April and May are now actively participating in the BLM protests.
When asked about their views on these protests happening against the backdrop of a global pandemic, Black participants forcefully expressed their belief that the importance of participating in the protests far outweighs the risk of contracting COVID-19. For example, when we first interviewed Tanya (22), she described how seriously she implemented public health recommendations: “I don’t go outside. I only go outside like every two weeks to go grocery shopping.” By the third interview, Tanya (like so many of our participants of color) was prepared to break quarantine to participate in BLM protests, and she described: “It definitely makes me nervous, but I feel like it’s necessary. Like, that’s something I’m willing to risk.”
Additionally, our Black participants noted that the significance of COVID-19 has almost been erased from their consciousness because they are now prioritizing fighting for racial justice. Importantly, participants are under no illusion that the risks of COVID-19 have disappeared. Coral (23), for example, described her participation in the protests as “very, very high risk,” but she also has faith that the individuals fighting to protect Black lives would do their best to limit the spread of disease among fellow protestors. In the most recent interview, Walter also highlighted how the devastation of COVID-19 pales in comparison to deaths from centuries of systemic racism, “…I feel like the coverage of corona… It doesn’t necessarily make you feel hopeless, at least to me. There are people that are close to me that have gotten it, and even some people that have passed away, but I feel like corona just popped up a couple months ago. Racism been killing people I know and love forever, people who I probably haven’t even met.”
After enduring months of isolation and anxiety, the BLM movement has provided our Black participants a meaningful sense of community, purpose, and solidarity. Even as COVID-19 continues to devastate communities of color, our participants frame the struggle for racial justice as more urgent and, ultimately, more important. Their decision to protest is rationally informed by comparing the toll of COVID-19 and police brutality on Black communities. As Coral powerfully stated: “Even if it takes one year, two years, eventually, they’re going to come up with a vaccine [for COVID-19], and it’s not going to take them hundreds of years. Whereas the Black Lives Matter movement, we’re fighting for hundreds of years of us dying at the hands of people who are supposed to be protecting us.”
The recent murders of (among many others) George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks — during a global pandemic that has disproportionately harmed Black communities — highlight the intersecting struggles for justice that Blacks/African Americans are facing right now. These struggles were reflected in our study as Black participants weighed the risks of contracting COVID-19 against the risks of police violence, ultimately deciding that the latter required a deliberate transformation of fear to anger and of isolation to activism.
Janani Umamaheswar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Southern Connecticut State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the Pennsylvania State University and her research has been published in journals such as Civic Sociology, Women & Criminal Justice, Punishment & Society, and Crime, Media, Culture.
Catherine D. Tan is an incoming assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Vassar College. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Brandeis University and M.A. in sociology from Columbia University.
