Lockdown Protests are Just an Expression of White Privilege

Lawsuits demanding that stay-at-home orders be repealed have been filed this week in Maryland, Minnesota, and Nevada. In Michigan, a Family Dollar store security guard was shot after telling a customer to wear a face mask, which is mandated throughout the state for all retail stores. In Oklahoma, McDonald’s employees were shot at for asking customers to leave the dining area, which was closed due to coronavirus restrictions. Small but media-gobbling gatherings of armed protesters continue to gather, demanding that state stay-home orders be rescinded, using lethal weaponry to demonstrate a power their numbers cannot convey. Members of the state Supreme Court in Wisconsin, hearing arguments in a case challenging the governor’s safer-at-home rules, invoked the language of “tyranny” and the Japanese internment to describe the current public health efforts to contain a pandemic.

As essayed by Dahlia Lithwick on Slate, the words freedom and liberty have been invoked breathlessly in recent weeks to bolster the case for “reopening.” Protesters of state public safety measures readily locate in the Bill of Rights the varied and assorted freedom to not be masked, the freedom to have your toenails soaked and buffed, the freedom to take your children to the polar bear cage, the freedom to publicly display your worship preferences (even if it imperils public safety), and above all-- the freedom to shoot the people who attempt to stop you from exercising such unenumerated but essential rights.

Such a profound misunderstanding of the relationship between state powers and federal constitutional rights is understandable coming from seemingly undereducated people.  But their definition of freedom is perplexing-- first, because it seems to assume that other people should die for your individual liberties.  But secondly, that it presumes individuals have the right to harm, threaten, and even kill anyone who stands in the way of your exercising of the freedoms they demand.

These folks tend to forget that even our most prized freedoms have limits, with regard to speech, assembly, or weaponry. Those constraints are not generally something one shoots one’s way out of--  and simply insisting that your own rights are paramount because you super-duper want them doesn’t usually make it so.

A good number of these “protesters” and “pundits” represent fringe groups, financed by other fringe groups and amplified by a press that adores conflict. The data continues to show that the vast majority of Americans do not support fighting for the right to infect others for the sake of a McNugget.  It is not irrational in the least to fear a tyrannical government capitalizing on a pandemic; it’s happening around the world. But even for those who are genuinely suffering hardship and anxiety, it’s simply not the case that all freedoms are the same. And it’s certainly not the case that the federal Constitution protects everything you feel like doing, whenever you feel like doing it. 

As Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times points out, these anti-lockdown protests have a more insidious nature that shouldn't come as a surprise.  The vast majority of these protesters — like the vast majority of those who want to prematurely reopen the economy — are white. This is in stark contrast to the victims of Covid-19 (who are disproportionately black and brown), as well as those who have lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic (who are also disproportionately black and brown), as well as those who have been or will be forced to work — or work more — as a result of reopening (the service workers and laborers who are again disproportionately black and brown).

Legal scholar Cheryl Harris wrote in her 1993 Harvard Law Review article, “Whiteness as Property” that to be white was to have control over oneself and one’s labor. It was to be autonomous and subject to no one’s will but one’s own.  The tie between whiteness, freedom and autonomy would grow stronger in the 19th century, even after slavery was abolished.  Freedom from domination and control is one aspect of the meaning of whiteness. The other aspect, in a kind of ideological inversion, is the right to control the presence and the lives of nonwhites. To be white in antebellum America, for instance, was to be able to enslave Africans and expropriate native land.

This dynamic is present throughout American history, whether in westward expansion — understood as the extension of white control over native land, including the violent displacement of native peoples — or in the rise of lynchings at the turn of the 20th century, when ordinary white men claimed the right to inflict lethal violence on blacks (and others) who transgressed racial boundaries. You can see it in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the “sundown towns” that dotted the Midwest in the middle of the 20th century. 

You could even place the recent killing of Ahmaud Arbery — a young African-American man pursued by two white men while jogging through a middle-class neighborhood in Brunswick, Ga., and then shot to death by one of them — in this same context.  If whiteness has meant the right to control and to be free from control, then it is easy to see how racial identity might influence the reaction to the lockdowns among a certain subset of white Americans.

This perverse conception of freedom, meant to justify deprivation and inequality, has always been impoverished when compared with an expansive, inclusive vision of what it means to be free. And in the context of a deadly pandemic, the demand to be free of mutual obligation is, in essence, a demand to be free to die and threaten those around you with illness and death. Most Americans, including most white Americans, have rejected this freedom of the grave.