Scan barcode
A review by reads2cope
The Viral Underclass by Steven W. Thrasher
5.0
Despite seeing so much praise for this book, I was still surprised t how much I enjoyed it. Thrasher seamlessly joins together struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia, Transphobia, ableism, poverty, the carceral state, militarized borders, climate change, and so much more without it ever feeling overwhelming in a book that I flew through. The COVID-19 pandemic should be radicalizing for anyone who has the slightest empathy and urge for community care, and The Viral Underclass is exactly the clarifying and motivating text for people who feel something is not right and need a final push to connect the dots.
Thrasher powerfully exposes the hypocrisy of the Democratic party and the broader Western "left" for rightfully opposing the racism, anti-science propaganda, and broad militarizations of of the "right" while in practice actually expanding these same dangerous systems. "Being told by Democrats that you have nowhere else to go, many (though not all) activists who might oppose carceral politics under Republicans do not protest Democrats who are just as prone to lock people up in cages. And once the Democratic Party embraced the carceral state, it hid from view its most violent effects, mitigated a lot of opposition, and stymied efforts to build a politics of care." (For me, this is exactly how and why the USA re-elected Trump this month.) Thrasher specially calls out how the Clinton Administration expanded the carceral state and defunded housing and food and health care access, how the Obama Administration created the deportation machines, how California Attorney General Kamala Harris fought to stop court-mandated releases of prisoners and kept California dependent on enslaved labor (with Governor Gavin Newsom), and how the Biden Administration further militarized borders and increased deportations, hoarded vaccines, appointed open eugenicists to his COVID-19 task force, lied about the transmission of the COVID-19 virus, and so so much more. "These kinds of disparities have persisted and increased across both Republican and Democratic administrations. However, the populations most affected by them are reliable voting constituents for the Democratic Party, which sometimes says it feels viral pain while causing so much of it to proliferate."
Thrasher powerfully exposes the hypocrisy of the Democratic party and the broader Western "left" for rightfully opposing the racism, anti-science propaganda, and broad militarizations of of the "right" while in practice actually expanding these same dangerous systems. "Being told by Democrats that you have nowhere else to go, many (though not all) activists who might oppose carceral politics under Republicans do not protest Democrats who are just as prone to lock people up in cages. And once the Democratic Party embraced the carceral state, it hid from view its most violent effects, mitigated a lot of opposition, and stymied efforts to build a politics of care." (For me, this is exactly how and why the USA re-elected Trump this month.) Thrasher specially calls out how the Clinton Administration expanded the carceral state and defunded housing and food and health care access, how the Obama Administration created the deportation machines, how California Attorney General Kamala Harris fought to stop court-mandated releases of prisoners and kept California dependent on enslaved labor (with Governor Gavin Newsom), and how the Biden Administration further militarized borders and increased deportations, hoarded vaccines, appointed open eugenicists to his COVID-19 task force, lied about the transmission of the COVID-19 virus, and so so much more. "These kinds of disparities have persisted and increased across both Republican and Democratic administrations. However, the populations most affected by them are reliable voting constituents for the Democratic Party, which sometimes says it feels viral pain while causing so much of it to proliferate."
"People who live with and die from viruses are not the parasites. The parasite is capitalism.”
“Like homophobia and stigma, austerity is a plague around the world. Debt shapes our options in life, making it hard to build community and shelter. When this happens, viruses and addiction flourish freely. While Athens and Appalachia were both made vulnerable by austerity, their people were resilient in using community-based interventions when possible to mitigate austerity’s impact upon the viral underclass. Their examples illustrate how anarchy does not mean chaos, as it is often mischaracterized in the United States. Rather, anarchy means a horizontal politics of mutual aid and communal responsibility without the threat of violence from the state; it means a community where people share their abundance and care for and prioritize one another in a way that governments, time and time again, have failed to do. The answer in pandemics, then, from Appalachia to Athens to the Big Apple, isn’t austerity. The answer is a community-based response of mutual care and responsibility — anarchy and abundance — an ethos enacted bravely by transgressive gender-bending angels like Zackie Oh and like Queens, New York, activist Lorena Borjas.”
There were also histories here I was unfamiliar with. While I know about the continuing human rights violations the USA is committing at Guantanamo Bay detention camp, I did not know the USA created that facility in response to the "the Haitian refugee crisis of 1991, not the attacks of 9/11," where the USA forcibly sterilized Haitian asylum seekers as eugenicists believed it could prevent refugees (who had not yet even been granted a legal appeal to enter the USA) from birthing children with HIV. This horrific policy was mimicked in 2020 when President Joe Biden kept international borders closed and continued to target countries like South Africa and other African countries with travel bans because they shared research about new COVID-19 variants that were already circulating in the USA. Further, as Thrasher wrote, "Almost three decades later, in 2020, while most international borders were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, ICE deported people with coronavirus from its U.S. prisons to Haiti, threatening to overwhelm the impoverished nation. And in a single week the following year, when the Haitian president was assassinated in his own home, the United States was contemplating giving its own people a third booster COVID-19 shot, while no one in Haiti had yet been vaccinated at all; Haiti was the only country in the Western Hemisphere with no vaccines in mid-2021. That fall, the Biden administration continued to exile Haitian refugees under Rule 42, a provision of the 1944 Public Health Service Act that allows federal authorities to expedite deportations during a pandemic (and which the Trump administration controversially invoked to expel migrants seeking asylum). In fact, as the Guardian reported, the Biden administration “deported more Haitians in a few weeks than the Trump administration did in a whole year,” and the administration sought contractors who spoke
Spanish and Creole to prepare detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay for an expected influx, once again, of Haitian refugees seeking asylum."
He deftly continues to show the connections between disease and liberatory movements:
"Viruses are used to determine who is deserving of being allowed to cross various borders — of geography, of gender, of American-ness, of worthiness... Think about the body you live in: with every breath you breathe in and out, the idea that your body has permanent borders between what’s inside and outside it is revealed to be a fiction... There are no stark borders between races, between those living with viruses and without, between those in the United States and outside it, between being American and non-American (or un-American), between men and women. Borders are myths, and while viruses are used to justify their necessity and marginalize those who don’t fit neatly on one side of them, viruses ironically disprove them...
For any person to enjoy the benefits of lower community viral loads, breathable air, and the kind of equitable vaccination that leads to herd immunity, communal thinking is required. But true communal thinking is not nationalist thinking... What if viruses teach us that there is no “me” and no “you” at all and that we all share one collective body? And that such individualistic thinking creates not only an underclass, but alienation across lines of class? ... What if we all share just one body — a body that stretches across not just our egos and political philosophies and national borders, but even species?...
If we humans are going to survive pandemics from any virus—let alone if we are going to survive the existential climate crisis—we cannot do so while behaving as if each of our destinies were disconnected. “It’s not a bad thing to say we’re interdependent,” [disability activist Alice Wong] continued, raising a concept foreign to many Americans. It requires courage and an acceptance of vulnerability to admit how SARS-CoV-2 has shown, as Alice put it, that “we’re in the same soup. Exactly in the same soup and open to the exact same things.” Our connection is not merely biophysical but cultural: “This is about the invisible conditions that are swirling around us. In our air. In our atmosphere. Through our words.’”
There is so much more I want to share about this phenomenal book, but I will have to just say, stand up for the marginalized in your community and WEAR A HIGH QUALITY MASK and read this book.
“Like homophobia and stigma, austerity is a plague around the world. Debt shapes our options in life, making it hard to build community and shelter. When this happens, viruses and addiction flourish freely. While Athens and Appalachia were both made vulnerable by austerity, their people were resilient in using community-based interventions when possible to mitigate austerity’s impact upon the viral underclass. Their examples illustrate how anarchy does not mean chaos, as it is often mischaracterized in the United States. Rather, anarchy means a horizontal politics of mutual aid and communal responsibility without the threat of violence from the state; it means a community where people share their abundance and care for and prioritize one another in a way that governments, time and time again, have failed to do. The answer in pandemics, then, from Appalachia to Athens to the Big Apple, isn’t austerity. The answer is a community-based response of mutual care and responsibility — anarchy and abundance — an ethos enacted bravely by transgressive gender-bending angels like Zackie Oh and like Queens, New York, activist Lorena Borjas.”
There were also histories here I was unfamiliar with. While I know about the continuing human rights violations the USA is committing at Guantanamo Bay detention camp, I did not know the USA created that facility in response to the "the Haitian refugee crisis of 1991, not the attacks of 9/11," where the USA forcibly sterilized Haitian asylum seekers as eugenicists believed it could prevent refugees (who had not yet even been granted a legal appeal to enter the USA) from birthing children with HIV. This horrific policy was mimicked in 2020 when President Joe Biden kept international borders closed and continued to target countries like South Africa and other African countries with travel bans because they shared research about new COVID-19 variants that were already circulating in the USA. Further, as Thrasher wrote, "Almost three decades later, in 2020, while most international borders were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, ICE deported people with coronavirus from its U.S. prisons to Haiti, threatening to overwhelm the impoverished nation. And in a single week the following year, when the Haitian president was assassinated in his own home, the United States was contemplating giving its own people a third booster COVID-19 shot, while no one in Haiti had yet been vaccinated at all; Haiti was the only country in the Western Hemisphere with no vaccines in mid-2021. That fall, the Biden administration continued to exile Haitian refugees under Rule 42, a provision of the 1944 Public Health Service Act that allows federal authorities to expedite deportations during a pandemic (and which the Trump administration controversially invoked to expel migrants seeking asylum). In fact, as the Guardian reported, the Biden administration “deported more Haitians in a few weeks than the Trump administration did in a whole year,” and the administration sought contractors who spoke
Spanish and Creole to prepare detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay for an expected influx, once again, of Haitian refugees seeking asylum."
He deftly continues to show the connections between disease and liberatory movements:
"Viruses are used to determine who is deserving of being allowed to cross various borders — of geography, of gender, of American-ness, of worthiness... Think about the body you live in: with every breath you breathe in and out, the idea that your body has permanent borders between what’s inside and outside it is revealed to be a fiction... There are no stark borders between races, between those living with viruses and without, between those in the United States and outside it, between being American and non-American (or un-American), between men and women. Borders are myths, and while viruses are used to justify their necessity and marginalize those who don’t fit neatly on one side of them, viruses ironically disprove them...
For any person to enjoy the benefits of lower community viral loads, breathable air, and the kind of equitable vaccination that leads to herd immunity, communal thinking is required. But true communal thinking is not nationalist thinking... What if viruses teach us that there is no “me” and no “you” at all and that we all share one collective body? And that such individualistic thinking creates not only an underclass, but alienation across lines of class? ... What if we all share just one body — a body that stretches across not just our egos and political philosophies and national borders, but even species?...
If we humans are going to survive pandemics from any virus—let alone if we are going to survive the existential climate crisis—we cannot do so while behaving as if each of our destinies were disconnected. “It’s not a bad thing to say we’re interdependent,” [disability activist Alice Wong] continued, raising a concept foreign to many Americans. It requires courage and an acceptance of vulnerability to admit how SARS-CoV-2 has shown, as Alice put it, that “we’re in the same soup. Exactly in the same soup and open to the exact same things.” Our connection is not merely biophysical but cultural: “This is about the invisible conditions that are swirling around us. In our air. In our atmosphere. Through our words.’”
There is so much more I want to share about this phenomenal book, but I will have to just say, stand up for the marginalized in your community and WEAR A HIGH QUALITY MASK and read this book.