IN THE FINAL CHAPTER of his 1992 book Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Persistence of Racism, Derrick Bell, Harvard Law School’s first tenured Black professor, describes a fictional world eerily similar to the one we know today. Local and federal governments ostensibly have no money. “Decades of conservative, laissez-faire capitalism had emptied the coffers of all but a few of the very rich,” the narrator says. Because of a host of poor choices, the country “was struggling to survive like any third-world nation,” and financial exigencies “curtailed all but the most necessary services.” The parallels are acute: “the environment was in shambles, as reflected by the fact that the sick and elderly had to wear special masks whenever they ventured out-of-doors.”
In the story, English-speaking extraterrestrial beings land on the shores of New Jersey and offer to solve everything: gold to bail out companies, chemicals to clean the environment. The country can have this deal for one sweet price: “all the African Americans who lived in the United States.” This is the central, controversial claim in Bell’s work of science fiction: that white people would sell Black people to aliens for the right price. The story concludes with a successful trade. Twenty million Black men, women, and children are stripped to just one undergarment, lined up, chained, and whisked away, like many of their ancestors’ centuries before.
Bell’s story lays bare the politics of disposability. But unlike the world of the story, the world of COVID-19 is not divided solely into Black and white. It is also white and non-white; poor and not poor; essential and nonessential; white collar and blue collar; Asian and not Asian; undocumented and citizen; able-bodied and sick; young and elderly; first-generation college students and blue bloods; free and imprisoned; celebrities with access to instant testing and plebeians; red states and blue states; and countless other binaries. From these overlapping inequities, we get a glimpse of who is disposable: the people who occupy any of the wrong categories. The scholar and cultural critic Henry Giroux analyzes this politics in his book Against the Terror of Neoliberalism (2008). “It is a politics in which the unproductive (the poor, weak and racially marginalized) are considered useless and therefore expendable,” Giroux writes, and “in which entire populations are considered disposable, unnecessary burdens on state coffers, and consigned to fend for themselves.”