Practicing a Love Ethic in the Ongoing Pandemic Part 1
This is part one of a two-part essay. Read/listen to part two.
EDIT: I share my own reflections of the BC context as a non-disabled person, who at the beginning of the pandemic had not addressed any of my ableism. BC’s pandemic response has been ableist since the beginning, rendering our children in schools as disposable and being negligent in recording and reporting data. BC has also not been one of the last provinces to abandon institutionalized protections. These are pieces that I was unaware of in the beginning of the pandemic, and it’s important that my own assumptions as a non-disabled person {that I share in this essay} do not perpetuate the general and false narrative of BC’s “goodness”.
13 min read | Listen to the essay instead.
CONTENT NOTE: brief mentions of the Freedom Convoy, attempted Indigenous genocide, eugenics, and a lot about ableism/abled supremacy
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I am a queer, middle-class, currently non-disabled Corean settler, femme, and immigrant with Canadian citizenship. I have been living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, colonially known as Vancouver, Canada since the age of 5.
In the past few years of the ongoing pandemic, I have been challenged to confront my own ableism and address my gaps while working with immunocompromised QTBIPOC client community members who are a part of the most marginalized by the capitalist pandemic response. In December 2022, I wrote this essay for a health & social justice course, in reflecting on the gap of disability solidarity in the so-called left.
In this essay, I use the dichotomous language of disabled/non-disabled despite disability being vast and varied and intersecting with other marginalized identities. As a currently non-disabled person, I am calling in non-disabled and non-primarily disabled folks who have abandoned pandemic-safety practices which are also shaped by race, class, gender, and citizenship. Dichotomous language is limited in acknowledging how disabled and even immunocompromised folks have been perpetuating abled indulgence and going back to “normal” lives. Although I don’t address this complexity in this essay, there is a need for conversations around not only disability solidarity but also cross-disability solidarity.
My desire to write this essay was rooted in collective grief as well as faith in collective love, in wanting to invite more people into the practice of refusing the disposability of the most marginalized, in the recognition that all of our liberations are tied together. While it is a difficult and confrontational read, I hope that those of us who identify with the so-called left are open to reading it as an invitation for accountability as a love practice.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I witnessed a type of collective spirit that I had never seen before in North America. There was common discourse in BC, in other parts of Canada and around the world about collectively working together to protect the health of everyone, especially those of frontline workers and high-risk populations. I remember being in awe because I had never seen this type of collectivism in North America, in contrast to my parents’ home country of Korea. However, by the end of year 2, the BC government followed suit with other provinces in spring 2022, dropping institutional protections and encouraging “back to normal life.” Little had changed about the threat of COVID-19 the virus, especially for at-risk populations, but through the removal of institutional safety practices, the BC government followed the rest of the world in centering abled peoples’ convenience over immunocompromised and disabled peoples’ lives.
While my community members with shared politics were quick to critique the Freedom Convoy’s anti-vaxx and anti-mask demands that had occurred a few months before the mask mandate was dropped, I watched them abandon their own COVID-19 safety practices. I acknowledge the grief and tiredness that have led most people, including those of the so-called left, to go back to “normal” and yet, it is important to name the implication in systemic ableism. Given that abled supremacy is normalizing disabled death, what is needed to resist the disposability of the most marginalized, such as poor and working class, disabled, queer and trans, Black, Indigenous, people of colour, in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic? Those of us in the so-called left who care about social justice are invited to embody and commit to a love and care ethic that is rooted in Disability Justice, interconnectedness, and collective responsibility, rather than solely relying on public policy to determine our practices.
In this essay, I will firstly contextualize the pandemic response of the BC government in spring 2022 that was in parallel with the minimization of Omicron and the Freedom Convoy of Canada. I will then illustrate how abled supremacy intersects with settler colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism, then finish off with an offering of a love and care ethic as an alternative to abled supremacy, largely inspired by Indigenous ontologies, Black feminism, and Disability Justice.
1. Omicron and the Freedom Convoy in BC’s Pandemic Response
For the first two years of the pandemic, Dr. Bonnie Henry and the BC government were praised for our COVID-19 response, for shaping policies such as vaccinations, masking, and isolation periods based on science. I know I felt relieved about our province’s response in emphasizing the importance of collective action in masking and getting vaccinated, especially in comparison to neighbouring provinces where health data and science were not taken as seriously.
However, things began to shift in early 2022 when the discourse around the Omicron variant as “mild” collided with the Freedom Convoy gaining traction in Canada. The minimization of Omicron’s impacts is perfectly illustrated by a comment made by the head of the American CDC. In a Good Morning America interview, Rochelle Walensky spoke with enthusiasm that “The overwhelming number of deaths — over 75 percent — occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities. So really, these are people who were unwell to begin with. And yes: really encouraging news in the context of omicron”. Although ABC News removed the comment from its original context of a study that proved the effectiveness of vaccinations for Omicron, the impact of Walensky’s comment was that it normalized the association of Omicron as an issue only for immunocompromised and disabled people, and not something to be worried about for vaccinated, non-disabled people. At the same time, the Freedom Convoy of truckers and their supporters halted the Canadian economy across the country with their demands for “freedom” against all COVID-19 policies. The Freedom Convoy was condemned by federal and BC politicians, as well as many community members of the so-called left who largely supported policy safety restrictions and critiqued the Freedom Convoy’s white supremacist, neo-Nazi individualism.
However, soon after, Dr. Henry’s discourse started to shift from taking collective action and protecting at-risk populations to emphasizing the trauma of living with mandates for two years and placing the burden of safety practices on immunocompromised people. She continuously emphasized the progress made in immunity based on high levels of vaccinations and the reduced risks of severe illness for the vaccinated. While there was a huge emphasis on vaccinations, there was little conversation on the continued benefits of masking.
Although I had previously admired Dr. Henry’s emphasis on protecting the most vulnerable, I felt devastated by her shift in emphasis on personal choice and a balance that involved “the psychological and economic toll restrictions have taken on British Columbians over the past two years”. Rather than considering the literal deaths of the elderly, immunocompromised, and children, her ideas around balance shifted towards prioritizing the economy and the mental health of the non-immunocompromised. Laroque and Foth clarify the underlying meaning of such balance, arguing that “the discourse about the need to find a balance between public health and the economy necessitates that wasted lives be rejected into death so that others can live on; the well-being of one part of the population necessarily restricts the well-being of others” (5). The economic and psychological toll that Dr. Henry was speaking to is not that of disabled and immunocompromised people whose mental health and financial resources would plummet with increased risk of community transmission. The comfort of the non-disabled is prioritized at the expense of disabled and immunocompromised people.
In defending the lifting of mask mandates, Dr. Henry started to shift the burden of responsibility onto at-/high-risk people, claiming that disabled and elderly people have always had to be cautious anyway, and so they could continue to mask if they want to. However, the non-disabled majority could go back to “normal” lives. Goodley et al. illustrate how “disabled people are assigned an at-risk categorisation (which may or may not be recognised in discussions of herd immunity) while non-disabled people are assumed to be healthy (which actually fails to recognise the precarity of an able-bodied and minded status)” (8). This categorization is a crucial component of abled supremacy because “the function of ‘risk groups’ is to reassure ‘normal’ people that someone else will die” (Goodley et al. 8). Dr. Henry and the BC government followed suit with the rest of ableist society in dropping institutionalized COVID-19 safety protections, rendering Omicron to be an issue for disabled people only — not something to be of concern for the majority of people who were not primarily disabled. The normalization of such discourse, alongside the dropping of protections and a lack of information on the risks and impacts of long COVID led to most people in Vancouver abandoning masking in general, including community members of mine with whom I thought shared my values for social justice. As such, most of the so-called left has ended up perpetuating the same ableism and individualism that we critiqued in the Freedom Convoy. When COVID-19 safety practices were mandated by policy, we stuck to them and supported them. But when granted permission from the state, many of us chose to perpetuate the same individualism and abled indulgence.
While it is easy to recognize the self-centeredness and individualism of the alt-right, white supremacist, neo-Nazi Freedom Convoy, we in the so-called left need to recognize that abandoning COVID-19 safety practices is the same act of settling into individual freedom that perpetuates abled supremacy. Andrews et al. describe ableism as representing “a form of control that a nondisabled majority wields over a disabled minority to marginalize their experiences, expectations, and contributions. Ableism, then, often objectifies disabled persons for the benefit of nondisabled persons.” (455). By denying our collectivity with disabled folks, we are objectifying them into a category with which we refuse relationality, and thus, collective responsibility. Abled supremacy renders our actions and experiences as separate through individualism, which becomes a more layered issue of racial justice, class struggle, and queer/trans liberation, as COVID-19 disproportionately impacts the poor and working class, queer and trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Colour.
2. Abled Supremacy x Settler Colonialism x White Supremacy x Capitalism
In North America, abled supremacy works with settler colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism to assign value to certain lives while rendering others as deviant, defective, and disposable. Let’s take a moment to reflect on the question: under settler colonial, racial capitalism, who is considered valuable and desirable, as in who will uphold the nation-state and economy? And who is rendered expendable and disposable, and either not useful or disruptive in the current system? Dene scholar Yellowhorse illustrates how disability and Indigeneity intersect, as “disability is formulated through settler colonial capitalism [as an] economic model of disability” (3). She argues that abled supremacy and settler colonialism work together of creating norms at the cost of lives rendered disposable by the state, as both require “the continual assertion of placing economic value over human life [which] is the epitome of violence and is a foundational, structurally enduring legacy of ableist violence within our global society” (Yellowhorse 4). Indigenous genocide is required for settler colonialism to function, and the eugenics of disabled people are normalized for non-disabled people to “go back to normal” lives amidst an ongoing pandemic. Given how systems of oppression intersect, Indigenous peoples are at higher risk of pre-existing illnesses that are exacerbated by the virus, and/or of becoming disabled or killed by the virus. This is due to health inequities, limited resources, and genetic predispositions created by 500 years of oppression in colonial North America. In these ways, an intersectional analysis of disability and Indigeneity illustrate the politics of biolegitimacy in North America, around “whom to let die [which] are often hidden in health policies, educational policies, social policies, etc., but have a direct impact on life expectancy, and reflect the ‘value’ ascribed to different lives” (Laroque and Foth 4). Those who can choose to turn away from this discourse of disposability and subscribe to individualism are implicated in settler colonial, capitalist, abled supremacy.
In a critique of the Freedom Convoy through a settler colonial framework, McLaren describes the Convoy’s sense of freedom as “contiguous with a form of settler colonial white supremacy… [which demands] the seamless ability to spread disease across the occupied Indigenous lands of the U.S. and Canada” (869). The Convoy’s anti-COVID-19 policy stance requires a sense of entitlement of autonomy and “freedom” that disregards the harmful and deadly consequences of personal choices on the collective, especially to the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island who are high-risk of severe illness from COVID-19, whose ancestors have already been murdered in the masses due to settlers spreading disease.
Writer Sostaita of Bitch Media offers a different take on the violence of individualism, in her analysis of how Republicans have co-opted the reproductive justice saying, “my body, my choice” in denouncing COVID-19 safety policies. She examines the neoliberal discourse of personal choice, contextualizing the anti-individualist frameworks of Black women who were the foundations of reproductive justice, and argues that the well-known saying is “being appropriated by people who reject any kind of responsibility to the other” (Sostaita para. 6). Sostaita demystifies the illusion of personal choice, especially in the context of the pandemic, insisting that “in the end, ‘my body’ is vulnerable to and caught up in yours, and my choices are shaped by and inseparable from yours” (para. 6). While both McLaren and Sostaita’s critiques were directed towards the political right ie. the Freedom Convoy and Republicans, their arguments remain relevant to those who began to neglect collective responsibility and subscribe to individualism by abandoning COVID-19 safety practices once mandates were removed and they had a “choice”.
As a currently non-disabled Corean settler with class privilege, I do understand the pull to “go back to normal life.” To continue to practice pandemic safety despite state neglect and propaganda of post-pandemic life requires one to confront the overwhelming systemic ableism that has seeped through almost every corner of life, including so-called left spaces that claim to value social justice. Disability Justice writer, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha calls this period “The Great Forgetting” or “The Great Gaslighting” and makes sense of it by recognizing that, of course, abled people don’t want to live disabled lives, and that “denial is many people’s only accessible survival strategy… [given] the face of few to no mass public rituals or acknowledgment for the millions of people who died from COVID, combined with almost zero collective survival public health strategies” (para. 10). They understand why the majority of the abled left have abandoned our disabled kin, and I do too. To continue to practice disability solidarity is to be in continual grief and rage and face immense social loss.
It also requires a confrontation of the impermanence and precarity of abledness. Queer, disabled, korean transracial and transnational adoptee, and Disability Justice educator, Mia Mingus writes,
“We are your feared present and your inevitable future. We are what age and time promise more than anything else, and this is one reason you fear us and why you have continually pushed us away and hidden us. You don’t want us too close, don’t want a daily reminder of difference and privilege; you don’t want to have to change your life for us. We are to be landfilled away, conveniently forgotten about so you can play pretend without interruption.” (para. 17).
For the abled left, distancing ourselves from the reality of the ongoing pandemic and from disabled kin allows us to ignore the inevitability and closeness of disability in our own lives. We can pretend that abledness is secure and that our lives won’t have to be interrupted by disability, whether it’s due to COVID-19 or aging or something else. As Arcieri illustrates, young, abled people don’t have to confront our own morality or death anxiety if we psychologically and physically distance ourselves from the elderly or disabled folks, and often use ableism and ageism as coping mechanisms to avoid guilt around this distancing (2450).
Continue to read part 2 for the next section on Embodying a Love Ethic in the Ongoing Pandemic.