Ryan Hatch Anthony
Science in Society Program, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA.
Big Data Soc. 2022 Feb 23;9(1):20539517211067948. doi: 10.1177/20539517211067948. eCollection 2022 Jan.
The Trump Administration's governance of COVID-19 racial health disparities data has become a key front in the viral war against the pandemic and racial health injustice. In this paper, I analyze how the COVID-19 pandemic joins an already ongoing racial spectacle and system of structural gaslighting organized around "racial health disparities" in the United States and globally. The field of racial health disparities has yet to question the domain assumptions that uphold its field of investigation; as a result, the entire reform program called for by racial health disparities science is already featured on the menu of the white supremacist power structure. The societal infrastructure that produces scientific knowledge about patterns of health and disease in the human population needs to confront its structural position as part of the racial spectacle organized around racial health disparities in the United States. This paper offers an interpretation of racial antimatter to explain why the data will not save us in the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing on articulations of racial spectacle and structural gaslighting within critical race theory and Afropessimist thought. By positioning events in the COVID-19 pandemic together within the same racially speculative frame, I show how the collection of racial health disparities data came up against white supremacists' political ambitions in a time-space where the demand for human life to matter and the iterative regeneration of racial antimatter collided. This paper highlights the need for ongoing analysis of the unfolding and future spectacles organized around racial health disparities.
特朗普政府对新冠疫情种族健康差异数据的治理，已成为抗击这一流行病及种族健康不公正这场病毒之战的关键战线。在本文中，我分析了新冠疫情如何融入了一场已然持续的种族奇观以及围绕美国乃至全球“种族健康差异”构建的结构性误导体系。种族健康差异领域尚未对支撑其调查领域的假设提出质疑；因此，种族健康差异科学所倡导的整个改革方案，早已出现在白人至上主义权力结构的菜单上。产生有关人类健康与疾病模式科学知识的社会基础设施，需要正视其作为美国围绕种族健康差异构建的种族奇观一部分的结构性地位。本文借助批判种族理论和非洲悲观主义思想中有关种族奇观和结构性误导的阐述，对种族反物质进行解读，以解释为何数据无法在新冠疫情中拯救我们。通过将新冠疫情中的事件置于同一个种族推测框架内，我展示了在一个对人类生命至关重要的需求与种族反物质的反复再生发生碰撞的时空里，种族健康差异数据的收集如何与白人至上主义者的政治野心产生冲突。本文强调有必要持续分析围绕种族健康差异展开的当前及未来奇观。
