COVID-19 and ‘crisis as ordinary’: pathological whiteness, popular pessimism, and pre-apocalyptic cultural studies

ABSTRACT

In this essay I elaborate the concept of ‘pathological whiteness’ as a way to articulate and understand the ways in which openness to infection, transmission and death by COVID-19 has become a central element of US white conservative subjectivities, discourses and embodied practices during the pandemic. Of particular importance are the ways in which potential or actual infection is understood and enacted as a biological threat to racialized others through the weaponization of one’s own body, with infection and transmission of COVID serving as a form of racist necropolitical violence mobilized to defend and maintain white supremacist policies and futures. I analyse some of the key logics and examples of this pathological whiteness, and situate it within a broader cultural conjuncture defined by what [Calvente, L. and Smicker, J., 2019. Crisis subjectivities: resilient, recuperable, and abject representations in the new hard times. Social Identities, 25 (2), 141–155] have discussed as ‘crisis as ordinary.’ I briefly explore some of the main relationships of pathological whiteness to crisis as ordinary, and conclude by gesturing to some possible considerations for contemporary cultural studies work when trying to analyse and intervene into this cultural formation.

KEYWORDS:

• Race and racism
• whiteness
• violence
• pathology
• horror

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Further information

This Special Issue article has been comprehensively reviewed by the Special Issue editors, Associate Professor Ted Striphas and Professor John Nguyet Erni.

Notes

1 The Three Percenters are an anti-government militia based on the false historical claim that only 3 percent of the inhabitants of the original U.S. colonies opposed the British monarchy and fought in the American Revolutionary War, and who see themselves as a similar small but elite group of ‘real Americans.’ The Oathkeepers are an anti-government militia founded in reaction to the election of Barack Obama and is primarily composed of ex-military and law enforcement, who believe that the democratically elected government of the U.S. has in fact been ‘coopted by a shadowy conspiracy that is trying to strip Americans of their rights’ (Sparling and Grasha 2021). The Boogaloo Bois are best understood as an ‘absurdist internet culture’ adjacent to both groups like the Proud Boys and troll sites like 8kun ‘defined by ideas and terminology that are simultaneously ridiculous and terrifying,’ whose core conceit is a nihilistic desire for a second American Civil War (Mooney 2021). These reactionary groups form overlapping networks whose connections have intensified throughout the candidacy and presidency of Trump, and along with the Proud Boys are as of this writing broadly seen as likely responsible for the most extreme violence of the 1/6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol (Savage et al. 2021; Goldman et al. 2021).

2 For more on the updating, consolidation, and mobilization of white grievance politics and narratives of white victimization in the post-Obama era, see especially Skocpol and Williamson’s (2012) The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, Hoschild’s (2016) Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, Ashley Jardina’s (2019) White Identity Politics, Ibram X. Kendi’s (2019) How to Be An Antiracist, and Ijeoma Olou’s (2020) Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. The key throughline of these works is the clear production of a white ‘Christian’ ethnonationalist identity that is framed as under assault by the basic existence of racialized Others, who are perceived as illegitimate economic and political subjects threatening ‘real’ white Americans.

3 Examples of this convergence range from the successful election of Republican Qandidates (candidates for election who endorse the Qanon conspiracy that Democratic politicians are running a secret network of child sexual slavery and cannibalism that is on the verge of being revealed and shut down by Trump) such as Reps. Marjorie Taylore Greene and Lauren Boebert (who is currently under investigation for her potential role in aiding the 1/6 attacks) to a majority of House Republicans endorsing Trump’s false claims and of election fraud their subsequent vote against the certification of the results of the U.S. presidential election after the insurrection.

4 Online disinformation campaigns around COVID-19 have been a key point of articulation between different online communities such as the anti-vaxxer movement, previously mentioned right-wing extremists, conspiracy theories like Qanon, and ‘mainstream’ Trump supporters and Republicans more generally. There is now a fairly well-defined feedback loop between extremist online content, ‘mainstream’ conservative media, and conservative politicians, where outlandish claims on messages boards and social media get amplified by more famous media personalities like Tucker Carlson and Rush Limbaugh, who then are in turn cited by conservative politicians to justify their antidemocratic actions, which is taken as evidence by the conspiracy theorists that they were correct and their claims are legitimate since real politician are citing and responding to them. The Republican vote against certifying the presidential election is the most recent and extreme example of this, with politicians like Ted Cruz justifying their vote by claiming that many people had concerns about the integrity of the election, while of course leaving out the ways in which they helped generate and normalize those very concerns. For a helpful introduction to how these overlapping disinformation networks operate, see Starbird (2017).

5 For works that elaborate relevant discuss the literalization of ‘toxic’ whiteness and masculinity more generally, see Metzl (2019) and Case and Deaton (2020). For the disproportionate harm that this pathological whiteness still inflicts on communities of colour see Pezzullo (2007) and Clark (2019). For discussions of the production and performances of toxic white masculinity online see Nagle (2017), Salter and Blodgett (2017), and Condis (2018)

6 While a comprehensive summary of the literature is beyond the scope of this essay, my understanding of these broader racial formations is particularly reliant on the bodies of work and conceptual framings of critical race theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesiare, C.L.R. J ames, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Sylvia Winters, Achille Mbembe, Fred Moten, Alexander Wehilye, Sharon Patricia Holland, Patricia Hill Collins, David Scott, and Kara Keeling.

7 This logic of subjunctive violence is present in practices like the Proud Boy initiation rituals, which include rituals such as being ‘beat in’ by members until the initiate is able to list the name of five different breakfast cereals. Here the absurdity is simultaneously a direct element of the violence, a cover for its ‘seriousness’, and also a bearer of a ‘secret meaning’ (in this case about masculine self-control that is also connected to the ban on masturbation). As Gavin McInnes, the founder of the Proud Boys, put it ‘you must get the crap beaten out of you by at least five guys until you can name five breakfast cereals’ because in addition to being funny, it is also training for ‘better adrenaline control. Both physical fighting and arguing require you to maintain your composure and not get petty … defending the West against the people who want to shut it down is like remembering cereals as you’re being bombarded with ten fists’ (Nickalls 2017). As we have now seen, this particular blend of absurdity and violence allowed many law enforcement personnel, journalists, academics, and more to be stuck wondering how seriously to view groups like the Proud Boys as an actual threat until they were already roving the halls of the U.S. Capitol looking for politicians to kidnap or kill. Practices like ‘doxing’ (finding and releasing personal information about individuals online), ‘swatting’ (used doxed personal information to call in police teams to those locations with the intent of causing property damage, injury and/or death) and ‘manifesting’ (posting plans and justifications for violence online, which might end with there or might end in actual attacks as in Santa Barbara, Christchurch, and El Paso terror attacks) are also key examples of this concept.

8 While it is too recent to definitively say, preliminary reports from the Biden administration seem to suggest that there was literally no plan at all for COVID-19 vaccinations developed by the Trump administration. According to one source in the Biden administration there was a ‘complete lack of vaccine distribution strategy under former President Trump’ and that their team would have to ‘start from square one because there simply was no plan’ (Lee 2021). If confirmed, this is another example of how actions by the Trump administration that were often described as simply ‘unconventional’ and ‘rude’—in this case not meeting with members of the incoming Biden team—were actually disguising and enabling inaction that will lead to people’s deaths.

9 While a more in-depth account of these shifting and interconnected juridical formations within the political strategies of the contemporary U.S. conservative movement are beyond the scope of this paper, a critical cultural studies framework that can help make sense of them is present in recent work by John Erni (2019), particularly in his discussion of the ‘juris-cultural’ and multiple ‘legal modernities’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Josh Smicker

Dr Josh Smicker is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Chair of the Department of Communication at Catawba College, and is a former associate editor of the journal Cultural Studies. His work is primarily focused on the intersections of new media technologies and experiences and management of trauma and violence, both in terms of the use of technologies as therapeutics as well as platforms for mobilizing new forms of violence and horror often organized around race, gender, and sexuality. His work has been presented at many national and international conferences and published in multiple peer-reviewed journals and books, with some of his most recent research focused on elaborating the concepts of ‘crisis as ordinary’ and ‘crisis subjectivities’ in collaboration with Lisa Calvente in the journal Social Identities and the edited volume Cultural Studies in the Classroom and Beyond: Critical Pedagogies and Classroom Strategies. He is currently working on a book project analysing race, monstrosity, and politics of/as horror in the wake of the Trump presidency and COVID-19 pandemic in the current US conjuncture with Lisa Calvente.