Originally published at TRUTHOUT, 23 January 2022
Keith Rosenthal interviewed by Danny Katch
The
COVID pandemic has been a traumatic and revelatory historic experience for
everyone, but especially so for disabled communities. On one hand, the virus
appears to have had a disproportionately deadly impact on disabled people, and
the government’s relentless push to restore “normal” business activities —
already oppressive for disabled people — is cruelly discriminatory for those
with immunocompromising conditions.
At
the same time, governments and businesses have responded to the pandemic with
flexible schedules and remote meetings that offer a glimpse into how readily
society could provide accommodations to meet the needs of disabled workers and
students. And as millions of previously nondisabled people find themselves
applying for Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) remote work accommodations
or disability benefits due to “long COVID” symptoms, there is potential for
building unprecedented levels of support for disability rights and justice.
Keith
Rosenthal, editor of Capitalism
and Disability: Selected Writings of Marta Russell, argues that the
pandemic has forced all of society to suddenly confront the questions of
accessibility and access that disabled people had previously struggled with on
their own. In this interview, he talks about how the condition of disability is
created less by people’s bodily limitations than capitalism’s cruel
unwillingness to accommodate them — and why disability politics are relevant to
anyone engaged in fighting for a more humane response to COVID and future
public health crises.
Danny
Katch: Government leaders across the country have pushed to get employees back
in offices and keep students in school buildings even as COVID cases have
spiked because of the highly contagious Omicron variant. What does this push to
“return to normal” mean for immunocompromised people and others who remain
especially vulnerable to serious illness and death from COVID even if they are
vaccinated?
Keith
Rosenthal: The director of the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention has been widely
criticized by disabled people for recently saying that she was “really
encouraged” that most deaths from Omicron seem to have occurred in “people who
were unwell to begin with.” This statement may be written off as an individual
gaffe. But the logic behind it is something that disabled
people have been documenting and criticizing throughout
the pandemic — ever since CEOs, financiers and politicians first floated the
idea that some
people might have to die in order for the economy to get back to a
profitable place.
Whether
stated openly or not, the implicit reality of what has been called “disaster
capitalism” or “COVID capitalism” is
that marginalized, vulnerable and so-called superfluous populations are being
callously sacrificed by those who ruled over the pre-pandemic status quo to
which they seek a return.
It
is worth recalling that as of last June, over
a third of all COVID deaths occurred in the nation’s nursing homes —
over 180,000 elderly and younger disabled individuals. What’s worse, snap
legislation was passed in New York and many other states that granted
immunity to nursing home executives from any liability.
As
for the return to school, firstly, it is simply
not true that children cannot get sick from COVID. Second, the logic
that COVID is not severe for most children ignores the significant number of
immunocompromised or disabled children for whom COVID does remain a serious
threat. If these children are not offered a remote learning option, they will
also soon be counted among the numbers sacrificed in the name of a return to
the “normal.” Or they will have to remain home, in a regressive turn to the
educational conditions that prevailed over 50 years ago in which disabled
children were segregated from the rest of their nondisabled peers and excluded
from the public school system.
You
recently wrote that one impact of the pandemic has been that society
itself has become disabled. Can you elaborate on this point?
The
implicit reality of what has been called “disaster capitalism” or “COVID
capitalism” is that marginalized, vulnerable and so-called superfluous
populations are being callously sacrificed.
The
widespread character of COVID merely generalized what many disabled people
experience as a regular feature of life under American capitalism. To put it in
ADA terms, most people’s “major life activities” have been “substantially
limited” by the pandemic — earning an income, taking care of family, eating,
hygiene, leisure and recreation, etc.
In
a physical or deficit-oriented sense, the ability of people to do all sorts of
things has become substantially impaired. In another sense, however, disability
is a social phenomenon, arising from conditions obtaining in the external
world. We experience disablement as a function of not only the biology of the
virus itself but also prevailing political and workplace policies, health care
and social service infrastructures, community networks of solidarity, as well
as racism, sexism, class inequality, poverty, homelessness, etc.
The
United States is constituted in a way that makes it particularly disabling to
those who become affected by such crises. With COVID, that crisis and
consequent disablement was experienced by broad swathes of the population. Most
of the people so affected would probably not think of themselves as
experiencing a form of disability oppression. But that is in fact essentially
what disablement is.