Rhae Lynn Barnes - After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America

PRAISE FOR AFTER LIFE

So much grief. So many gone. We need an accountone that is deeply personal and objective. Some way to make sense of what has happened and what is happening to us. After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America is that accounting. Read every page. Absorb its lessons. Feel this book in these challenging times and experience something, at once powerfully healing and insightful.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of Begin Again:James Baldwins America and Its Urgent Lesson for Our Own

Breathtakingly refreshing in scope and content, After Life is history the way history should be written. Bringing together an incredibly diverse group of scholars, this book walks us through the worst days of the pandemic but offers us tools to create a better future.

Ibram X. Kendi, coeditor ofFour Hundred Souls:A Community History of African America, 16192019

Sometimes, you dont know what you really need until you read it. In After Life, some of Americas most searching minds sift through the wreckage of the pandemic to provide us precious shards of light, so that the unfathomable loss of lifemore than all the Americans who died in the Civil War or in World War IIwill not be in vain.

Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains:The Deep History of the Radical Rights Stealth Plan for America

Do nations have souls? Has America lost its soul? Loss and redemption are two deeply human and American ideas; generally we like the second one better. In this amazing collection of perspectives, loss takes its proper place as genuine tragedy. Largely by tapping historians, Barnes, Merritt, and Williams have found a gold mine of reflection on the moral, medical, racial, and political condition of the American experiment. These pieces show, darkly but beautifully, how thoughtful people have been hurt or destroyed, past and present; but they also inspire paths forward not to a promised land, but to a functional, honest society and a new republic.

David W. Blight, Yale University, author of Pulitzer prizewinning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Rhae Lynn Barnes, Keri Leigh Merritt, and Yohuru Williams have ring-mastered an excellent book of powerful thinkers mourning all the unnecessary losses of the past few yearsand pointing, possibly, toward American redemption.

Brad DeLong, author of Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Long 20th Century, 18702010

How do we make sense of the senseless? This remarkable collection begins to answer that question for the tragedy that was Americas politicized response to a lethal pandemic and everything that happened alongside it, including an attempted coup. As daring in scope as it is diverse in voice, After Life can help us heal with a fuller understanding of the reach of this formative and often disastrous time. The editors tell us that the early 2020s will define our livesthe sooner we understand that time, the sooner well understand ourselves. This book is an indispensable guide.

Andrew L. Seidel, author of The Founding Myth and American Crusade

2022 Rhae Lynn Barnes, Keri Leigh Merritt, and Yohuru Williams.

Each essay author retains the copyright for their respective essay.

Published in 2022 by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

www.haymarketbooks.org

ISBN: 978-1-64259-856-8

Distributed to the trade in the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution (www.cbsd.com) and internationally through Ingram Publisher Services International (www.ingramcontent.com).

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

Special discounts are available for bulk purchases by organizations and institutions. Please call 773-583-7884 or email for more information.

Cover design by Rachel Cohen. Cover art: Still image from digital short Fractured Light by Larry Barnes, copyright 2021.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

Dedicated to the memory of the millions whose names are unknown

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

PREFACE

AMERICAN CULTURE AFTER LIFE

Rhae Lynn Barnes and Keri Leigh Merritt

A fter Life is a collective history of pandemic America. Work on this book began with a sense of urgency in January 2021. At that time, 420,000 Americans had died from the first two waves of COVID-19. The number of people who had lost their lives by then was equivalent to the entire population of Oakland or New Orleans, and it surpassed the number of Americans who died in World War II. As the historian Catherine Mas remarked then in astonishment, The scale of deaths that were seeing on a daily basis, its like 9/11 every day. Its like a Pearl Harbor every day. Thinking about such loss through other American tragedies captures the lethality of this virus, Mas argued. History provided a kind of reference point that helps us understand as a society what it is were going through and what we need to do.

Every day, the incomprehensible death count kept ticking up and upin grim sidebars on social media, on news shows, and in newspapers announcing both the confirmed death count and the positivity rate by city, county, state, and country. The death toll rose throughout 2021 and 2022 due to a volatile intersection of greed, white supremacy, and governmental failuresthe result of much longer histories of inequalitysome of which we unravel in these pages. The criminal neglect of the Trump administration (20172021) and missteps by the Biden administration (2021) meant that Americans struggled without coordinated policies for too long. They were left to survive without succor in a do-it-yourself, Hobby Lobby pandemic.

By mid-September 2021, 663,913 people, or one out of every five hundred US residents, had officially died of COVID-19. By October 1, 2021, the city equivalent of the dead had grown: instead of Oakland or New Orleans, it was now as if the population of Boston; Washington, DC; or Seattle had disappeared from the citizenry. By spring 2022, we lost more people than currently live in San Francisco or Austinan unfathomable scale of grief.

These official numbers likely only account for a fraction of the real numbers of COVID-related deaths. The University of Washingtons Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation examined excess mortality during the pandemic, comparing 2020 statistics with nonpandemic years. They found a significant discrepancy in numbers, estimating that by May 2021 the worldwide COVID-19 death toll was almost seven million, more than double the reported number of 3.24 million. American scientists found a number 57 percent higher than official figures900,000 Americans died in a little over a year.

Americans who went untreated for heart attacks, strokes, cancer, or chronic diseases are missing from the official death totals. When cities could not flatten the curve of exponential growth, it was the patients who flatlined due to an overwhelmed healthcare system. In areas hardest hit by the virus, like Latin America, Russia, and India, the death toll is actually in the millions, rather than the hundreds of thousands, the