Group
#13: Racial Injustice and States of Emergency
Black Liberty in Emergency
Norrinda Brown Hayat, Fordham University
Law School
State and local governments weaponized Covid-19
pandemic orders against Black communities stifling their movement often through
violence engaged in by the police. In cities where more than a modest Black
population existed, police employed unconstitutional stops and arrests in
connection with pandemic orders, including orders to mask, social distance and
stay-at-home; imposed fines and fees for violating pandemic orders and
prosecutors stacked pandemic violations on top of other charges resulting in
enhanced sentences for Black individuals. The modern jurisprudence around
quarantine, prior to the coronavirus pandemic, emerges from an early 20th
century case Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which had been interpreted to call for
deference to states’ decisions made in emergencies. Since Jacobson was decided
quarantines have been almost universally upheld and modern constitutional
safeguards held inapplicable. The role judicial deference under Jacobson has
played in limiting the free movement of people of color during public health
emergencies cannot be overstated. This paper challenges the idea that a public
health emergency justifies the reduction in Black fundamental rights as
normative. And asserts that the strict isolation of Black people in highly
segregated areas utilizing police force as was done in the Covid-19 pandemic
violates modern constitutional norms just as it would in a non-emergency. The
paper interjects race into the scholarly conversation urging for the
application of constitutional safeguards to laws passed in public health
emergencies. Beyond abolishment of these laws, the article calls for the
positive project of proliferating public health interventions that are rooted
in distributive justice.
“Essential” Violence and the Necessary Evils of
Imperial Law and Labor
Antonio Coronado, Georgetown University
Law Center
“If you work in a
critical infrastructure industry . . . you have a special responsibility to
maintain your normal work schedule.” My dad finished reading the company-issued
letter and flashed a proud smile my way. I remember wondering, three years ago
now, how important one had to be for the state to mark you for harm. He, like
an estimated 45.2% of U.S. workers, had been imposed with a socio-legal duty to
maintain what the letter described as the “security and resilience” of the
nation. As this paper demonstrates, the state’s designation of both labor and
people as “essential” continues a U.S. imperial practice of worker
dispensability, one that finds its foundations in chattel enslavement and
anti-Indigeneity. This piece makes the case that current U.S. labor policies
and emergent surveillance technologies have operated to obscure and deepen
workplace disparities along lines of legal agency. Using a lens of racial
capitalism, Section I underscores the lasting socio-legal implications of
“essential” work. Section II explores several examples of workplace
surveillance and coercive labor practices that have developed throughout the
pandemic. Lastly, Section III contributes to scholarship at this intersection
by proposing opportunities for policy and discursive intervention to persisting
legacies of labor exploitation. I join fellow scholar-storytellers of color in
naming the ways that essential workers are simultaneously positioned as
“heroes” of our economy and “expendable” cogs for labor; they are figured as
necessary while disposable, vital but without value.