Emergency

COVID-19 and the Uneven Valuation of Life

Claire Laurier Decoteau

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English

University of Chicago Press
31 January 2025

Social impact of disasters; Illness & addiction: social aspects; Sociology & anthropology; Medical sociology; Infectious & contagious diseases

A forceful critique of how and why states failed to protect marginalized communities in their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the implications of ignoring the existing emergencies that exacerbated the pandemic's devastating effects.

The COVID-19 pandemic inaugurated a state of emergency unprecedented for most Americans. Some could observe this emergency from the relative safety of their homes by working remotely, conducting routine medical appointments over video calls, and getting groceries by delivery. At the same time, those in marginalized communities got sick and died without access to the same privileges, sometimes even at the expense of others. After all, someone had to ship goods from warehouses, someone had to clean the hospital, and someone had to shelve and deliver groceries.

In this book, sociologist Claire Laurier Decoteau attempts to document and theorize the emergencies of COVID-19 by looking at the experiences of Chicagoans and the policies that shaped those experiences. She describes the uneven racial impact of COVID-19 on Black and Latinx Chicagoans as a crisis within a crisis, caused by a convergence of emergencies: a state of emergency that protected white supremacy and wealth, the slow emergencies racially marginalized populations have faced due to the long-term gutting of care infrastructure and deindustrialization, and the sacrifice ""essential workers"" were asked to make to protect the United States economy. As Decoteau shows, the city's ""racial equity"" project attempted to manage these converging emergencies by building up epistemic infrastructure and manipulating epidemiological data. City officials used data to determine which communities would be given scarce resources, but once positivity or death rates declined, resources were retracted and redistributed elsewhere. The city focused on the urgent and spectacular while ignoring the long-term disinvestment in marginalized communities, including healthcare resources. Decoteau makes clear that the emergencies precipitated by COVID-19 long predated the pandemic, and that we will continue to live with their compounding crises if we do not tackle their structural underpinnings.

By: Claire Laurier Decoteau
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9780226836881
ISBN 10: 0226836886
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 31 January 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

List of Abbreviations List of Figures and Tables Preface Introduction: Converging COVID-19 Emergencies 1: Exposing and Governing Racism 2: Fragmented Health Infrastructure 3: Quantifying Racial Emergencies 4: Slow Emergencies 5: Sacrificing “Essential” Workers 6: Trust and Distrust in Pandemic Times Coda: Lest We Forget Acknowledgments Appendix A: Timeline of Important COVID-19 Dates Appendix B: Methods Notes References Index

Claire Laurier Decoteau is professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her previous books include Ancestors and Antiretrovirals: The Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa and The Western Disease: Contesting Autism in the Somali Diaspora, both also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews for Emergency: COVID-19 and the Uneven Valuation of Life

"""Claire Decoteau’s Emergency is a vital read. It is a sociological antidote for our growing collective amnesia about the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing, multiple ravages of racial biocapitalism. May we heed its many lessons."" -- Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, University of California, Berkeley"