On COVID and Racism as “Twin Pandemics”: Foucault, Anti-Racism, and Inoculation

ABSTRACT: This paper draws on Michel Foucault’s work to offer a critique of how two problems – COVID 19 and the racism that gave rise to the 2020 racial uprisings – were conjoined under one language of disease and, consequently, one model of disease management. Drawing on Foucault’s account of apparatuses [ dispositifs ] of security, it argues that the conjunction of COVID and racism tacitly invokes what I call a model of inoculation, wherein the goal is to nullify and normalize a threat. Invoking this inoculation model by analogizing COVID and racism tacitly oriented understandings of both what the problem around the racial uprisings was and how it ought to be solved. I argue that this analogy mobilized anti-racist practices toward stabilizing reforms over potentially more thoroughgoing societal changes.