Can racism help inform us about Covid hysteria?

I recently wrote a piece on racism about how I think our experience with Covid mass hysteria can help us better appreciate racism itself, as well as an inkling of the experience of it. See also a Moment about it.

Racism as unwearable virtue signals

But I also think the help goes the other way around.

What might racism — understood as a special case of mass hysteria or mass psychosis — tell us about the Great Covid Hysteria we’ve been dealing with since March of 2020?

(1) ON AND ON

A first observation is simply that it does not go away easily. …which is a radical understatement.

Racism has been hanging on for centuries. Millennia even. Even in a country with explicitly stated liberal origins, slavery became the norm. And we’re approaching two centuries beyond that and the shadows of it are still with us.

(2) “SCIENCE”

Team Apocalypse’s beliefs about Covid are irrational, but arguably less irrational and more seemingly “scientific” than the beliefs of racist oppressors for centuries. The pronouncements for Covid emanate from scientific institutions and communities with tremendous scientific accomplishments (in other respects) under their belt, whereas I’d imagine the “science” historically justifying racism had a relatively meager prior resume.

In this respect Covid hysteria would seem to be even harder to dissipate.

(3) SHEEP

One thing making racism much more nightmarish than Covid hysteria is, as I mentioned in the earlier piece, that the “unclean” can’t even possibly wear the virtue signal of the Clean Club. …whereas those on Team Rationality can always choose to submit — wear a mask, get jabbed, and thereby fit in.

But a corollary of this would seem to be that the Clean Club swells in rank (with all the added “sheep” non-believers-but-submitters), and appears to be even stronger and with more momentum.

It would be, for racism, as if half the minority population had the secret ability to magically transform their ethnic identity, leaving behind an even smaller, less powerful band of “unclean” being the target of racial discrimination.

Because of this difference, one might expect the Covid mass psychosis to last even longer.

(4) SOLIDARITY

One clear advantage for fighting Covid hysteria is that folks who wish to be vaccinated can choose, if they wish, to wear an anti-virtue. For example, they can keep their vaccination a secret, and march against vax mandates.

But it’s not generally possible for those of the majority ethnicity who are against racism to wear the minority’s core anti-virtue signal, i .e., to make themselves look like the “unclean” ethnicity so as to fight the very notion that it’s unclean.

This point would seem to an optimistic one for Covid hysteria (relative to racism).

(5) NON-COMPLIANCE

Thinking about racism in this way also makes me pessimistic about mass non-compliance.

For example, had we “skeptics” all refused to comply during the first mandates, would that have better slowed the hysteria?

If we were instead to have showed up to restaurants and shops signaling our anti-virtue signals — ahem, our bare faces — might that have helped?

Well, for race, they basically have no choice but to be non-compliant.

But what good has it gotten them?!

This observation makes it much less clear to me that the mainstream mask narrative would have buckled or even weakened if the skeptics had been more non-compliant.