In the winter of 2019, an invisible life form awakened in the Eastern Hemisphere and began to spread across the oceans. The earth’s most powerful nation watched as faraway workers in hazmat gear tested for what no one could see and deluded itself into believing that American exceptionalism would somehow grant it immunity from the sorrows of other countries. Yet the virus arrived on these shores, and it planted itself in the gaps of disparity, the torn kinships and fraying infrastructure in the country’s caste system, just as it exploited the weakened immune system in the human body. Soon, America had the largest coronavirus outbreak in the world.
The virus exposed both the vulnerability of all humans and the layers of hierarchy. While anyone could contract the virus, it was Asian-Americans who were scapegoated for it merely because they looked like the people from the part of the world that the virus first struck. As the crisis wore on, it was African Americans and Latinos who began dying at higher rates.
Pre-existing conditions, often tied to the stresses on marginalized people, contributed to the divergence. But it was the caste like occupations at the bottom of the hierarchy — grocery clerks, bus drivers, package deliverers, sanitation workers, low-paying jobs with high levels of public contact — that put them at greater risk of contracting the virus in the first place. These are among the mudsill jobs in a pandemic, the jobs less likely to guarantee health coverage or sick days but that sustain the rest of society, allowing others to shelter in place.
As the number of deaths climbed to the highest of all nations, America — and those looking to it for leadership — had to come to terms with the untested fragilities of its social ecosystem. The pandemic, and the country’s fitful, often self-centered lack of readiness, exposed “a failure of character unparalleled in U.S. history,” Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University, wrote in Foreign Policy. The pandemic forced the nation to open its eyes to what it might not have wanted to see but needed to see.
