‘Racism Is a Pandemic!’: Immunity, Auto-Immunity and COVID-19

In this article, I explore how the unequal exposure to death by COVID-19, taking place at the same time as the eruption of a global protest movement for racial justice erupted, can be understood through the interrelated notions of immunity and auto-immunity. 1 Immunity, considered here both as a juridical and a medical concept, and auto-immunity, taken as a core political tendency of democracies, together expose the racial constitution of the British state. Longstanding, structural racial inequities suppressed Black and Asian peoples’ immunity to the COVID-19 virus, at the same time that the state responded to a multi-racial uprising for Black lives with heavy-handed policing and the criminalisation of dissent, attempting to defend the British body politic from demands for racial justice.