Our time is one of multiple pandemics. I propose the term “viral colonization” to understand some of the dynamics that we are currently living.
During the Spanish colonization of Haití and Anahuac (between 1492 to 1521), up to 90% of the indigenous fatalities were caused by viruses such as smallpox and influenza, and not by warfare or forced labor. We are currently observing a similar instance of colonization by means of viruses and pathogens in the governmental inaction to the novel coronavirus pandemic in countries such as the United States and Brazil. We see this in the United States in how the pandemic is taking a disproportionate toll on racialized and internally colonized communities, such as Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities.
Thus far Black and Latinx people in the United States have been three to four times as likely as their white counterparts to catch the disease, and around six times as likely to die from it. For Indigenous people, these numbers skyrocket to a death rate of up to nineteen times the rest of the American population combined. Far from being a health crisis that “does not discriminate” (as much of the news media has maintained), the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has efficiently moved through the structures of inequality and oppression that are the building blocks of our social and political life. In this instance, governmental inaction on the current crisis should be recognized as nothing less than a tacit acceptance of a neocolonialist agenda that seeks the debilitation (if not the outright elimination) of racialized and internally colonized communities.
There is a second sense, however, in which the notion of “viral colonization” can be useful to better understand our contemporary present. According to the International Encyclopedia of Public Health, “viral colonization” takes place when “a person acquires two different viral strains simultaneously.” In other words, when one virus strain or subtype infects a person that is already infected with another strain of the same virus. This is why viral colonization is often more commonly known as “coinfection” or as “superinfection.” This second medical definition allows us to symbolically take away the novelty out of the novel coronavirus pandemic. In other words, it allows us to understand the coronavirus pandemic as already a co-infection or superinfection predicated on a racist social and political infrastructure. Indeed, many have pointed out how shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, one of the most common symptoms of the coronavirus disease, corresponds to the well-known slogan “I can’t breathe” of the Black Lives Matter movement, the largest anti-racist social movement in the United States since the Civil Rights era. The racist social and political infrastructure exemplified by the killings of unarmed Black people is here a preexisting condition that also results in a deadly case of suffocation.
It is then in a context of viral colonization that we are currently seeing the unfolding of one of the most sweeping nationwide series of protests targeting the racist social and political infrastructure of the United States. Frantz Fanon’s words remain as relevant as they were in the 1960s, when he argued that the oppressed revolt when it becomes “impossible for them to breathe.” Following Fanon’s analysis of social transformation, one may interpret these uprisings as revealing the actional emergence of a new generation that will inherit the long history of anti-racist struggle in this country. In his well-known The Wretched of the Earth, a book written at the heights of the Algerian Revolution and which went on to deeply influence generations of Black and Third World activists, Fanon issues a caution: “Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.”
As a response to the exceptional circumstances produced by the superinfecting necropolitical intersection of the novel coronavirus and an epidemic of anti-Black state violence, these ongoing protests could be seen as this new generation’s first step toward discovering its mission. To be sure, the question of generations is not simply an issue of new individuals coming of age politically, but as David Scott has pointed out, it is also a question of how traditions will be renovated as they are inherited. In terms of the long history of anti-racist struggle in this country, therefore, the birth of the new generation interrogates the preoccupations of older co-existing generations to ask: Have we fulfilled or betrayed our mission?
If our time of multiple pandemics is one of viral colonization characterized by the phrase “I can’t breathe,” then what is needed across all sectors and corners is a response that recognizes the decolonizing lifeforce of breath. In this sense, “I can’t breathe” is not just the scream that anticipates a violent premature death, but it is also the interpellation that affirms life, breath, and breathing, as a decolonial praxis. And here, Fanon’s relevance continues to be pertinent, as revolution becomes for him the “oxygen which creates and shapes a new humanity.” We will have overcome our current crises when racialized and colonized communities have the oxygen to refashion humanity, as Aimé Césaire put it, “to the measure of the world.”
Rafael Vizcaíno
Rafael Vizcaíno is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at DePaul University. For more information, see his website.
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