Resisting Colonial Deaths Marginalized Black Populations and COVID-19 in Brazil and Kenya (original) (raw)

2021, Kalfou, Volume 8, Issues 1 and 2

The colonized sector, or at least the 'native' quarters, the shanty town, the medina, the reservation, is a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people. You are born anywhere, anyhow. You die anywhere from anything."-FRAN Tz FAN oN , The Wretched of the Earth S ince the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global health emergency in January 2020, the coronavirus has impacted people across the globe, at once decimating both lives and livelihoods. In addition, it has increased the number of forcibly displaced and stateless people: in 2020, this demographic surpassed 80 million persons. 1 Certainly, the pandemic-its socioeconomic impact along with its resultant amplification of policies of confinement and segregation-has had a much greater effect on communities of color across vulnerable groups, in both the Global South and North. 2 This article reflects on the experiences of the marginalized in Brazil and Kenya, in particular those who are living in historically poor and intentionally neglected urban spaces, migrants, deportees, and the internally displaced. In the first months of 2020, as COVID-19 crossed international borders, transcended class divides, and became a pandemic, its lethal capacity was touted as the equalizer of social and racial inequalities. It is not. In Brazil, aggressive transmission has killed, principally, poor Black and Brown people long imperiled by systemic social and racial inequities. In Kenya, as in Brazil, the virus has made violently clear domestic socioeconomic asymmetries, and the global disparities in access to the vaccine have demonstrated the ongoing colonial relations between countries in the "North" and "South." 3