Prof. Claire Decoteau: “Social Autopsy of Covid-19 in Chicago”
2021 Colloquium Series
September 22, 2021
12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Infection and death rates in Chicago reveal the uneven racial impact of COVID-19. Illinois state and city of Chicago officials have adopted data-informed policies that promote a racial equity framework to address the coronavirus and its racial disparities. Yet, Black and Latinx Chicagoans continue to face disproportionate levels of infection, hospitalization and death from COVID-19, and have also experienced escalating housing, employment, welfare, food and health insecurity. So why is there no measurable racial equity visible in these patterns of social vulnerability? Based on interviews with 40 policy makers and 100 residents, I propose three mechanisms by which racial equity frameworks failed to address core vulnerabilities during the pandemic. First, there has been uneven investment in infrastructure under neoliberal governance. While penal and vital infrastructures have received tremendous funding, care infrastructures have been gutted and marketized, leaving vulnerable communities without safety nets when disasters strike. Second, the resources mobilized were medico-technical in nature (e.g. testing, contact tracing, vaccines), which failed to address vulnerabilities associated with lack of labor protections, housing and financial insecurity, and fragmented healthcare resources. Finally, in their emergency governance, the city and state employed key epidemiological metrics (e.g. vulnerability scores, gaps in life expectancy) to direct scarce resources to certain vulnerable communities and claim success in achieving “equity,” but these efforts were not sufficient to meet need and favored certain forms of service provision at the expense of others. In addition, bureaucratic measures designed to reduce fraud plagued the administration of public funding for critical services like housing assistance and welfare distribution. In an era in which racism is being increasingly addressed as a public health crisis, I analyze “health equity” frameworks as a new neoliberal model of poverty governance, “delivered” via scarcity frameworks, in a reactive fashion, and only in the form of very specific medico-technical “solutions.”
Date posted
Sep 28, 2021
Date updated
Sep 28, 2021