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Race, Resistance, and the Rona

Part I

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic unfolding in the US, rumors of black immunity to the virus began to circulate on social media. After testing positive for COVID-19, Idris Elba even made a statement about why rumors of black immunity were dangerous. Even, public health officials concerted efforts to dispel these rumors. New data revealed that black people are disproportionately suffering from the pandemic because they are denied access to testing as well as a lack of access to health care and structural inequality. However, it is important to point out that myths of black immunity more than just spurious rumors, misinformation, or bad science. They can be situated in a broader context of black folks theorizing about blackness as biological and embodied. The presence of such rumors and sentiments are evidence of a long history of scientific racism and medical mistrust. More importantly, these rumors and beliefs function as a resistive practice against scientific racism.

Theorizing about the immunity and/or susceptibility of black bodies emerged from more than a century of discourses on racial science and heredity. At their core, these discourses focused primarily on understanding which aspects of human difference were innate and which were the result of environmental conditions: the question of nature vs. nurture. African Americans engaged these questions as part of a multi-faceted approach to racial uplift and improvement. They became invested in studying and analyzing racial characteristics to determine which were due to nature, nurture, or some combination thereof.

As early as the eighteenth century, African Americans resisted racist discourses about black bodies. During the 1793 outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia, Dr. Benjamin Rush, American physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, argued that African Americans were not susceptible to the disease. City leaders called upon Philadelphia’s black population to assist in fighting the pandemic including ministers Richard Allen and Absalom Jones. However, Rush’s theory proved to be wrong, and African Americans contracted and died from yellow fever at the same rates as the white population. On top of that, members of Philadelphia’s white population accused African Americans of profiting from their services during the epidemic. In response, Allen and Jones published a pamphlet entitled, A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia in the Year 1793; And a Refutation of Some Censures Thrown upon Them in Some Late Publications. For these black religious leaders, the accusations were baseless for many reasons, including the fact that many provided assistance because they believed Rush’s initial claim of their immunity to yellow fever.

This is one example of the ways that African Americans navigated racial science. African Americans reinterpreted and resisted racial science to argue against scientific racism. They engaged and disrupted fields embedded with racist discourses and mobilized their rhetoric to argue for racial equality. Though it appears paradoxical, African Americans used racial science to challenge racial science throughout the twentieth century.




— A. Nuriddin

Electric Marronage