22 GSCENE where GDP and healthcare systems are considered ‘poor’. We make excuses like vitamin D deficiency, or pre-disposing health factors, denser housing etc; anything we can grasp a hold of to avoid the obvious. It is structural racism, endemic in our country, which creates these inequalities in the first place, creating a perfect storm when the virus hit. It is systemic and institutional racism that hits the BAME frontline workers in healthcare delivery. Their deaths are disproportionate. The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis has sparked protest all over the world, and rightly so. Here we are, in the middle of a pandemic, watching a black man suffocate to death before our very eyes. He can’t breathe. The extent of both subtle and overt racist actions surrounding this death are to be seen for what they are. Gaslighting us with a misleading autopsy report, the use of oppressive weapons, tools and threats, further police brutality, even religious posturing from the White House as Trump attempts to corral his base in a barely concealed call to arms. This on a background of rising unemployment, disproportionate numbers of deaths among people with darker skin, and pressure to put those very same people back to work, knowing they are at greater risk, in order to save the economy; these are the reasons protests have to happen now.
FIGHTING FOR BREATH Dr Sam Hall, who is guest editing this trans-focused issue of Gscene, on how the pandemic and the death of George Floyd collided to point up the huge inequalities and injustices in societies worldwide, but also offer a glimmer of hope for a kinder, less oppressive future ) We live in a totally different world to the one we knew just a few months ago. I know that is stating the obvious, but sometimes I don’t think any of us realise how truly different it is. What monumental changes, what seismic shifts, have happened since the start of this year.
We have been overtaken by a virus. Perhaps a more intelligent and self-preservatory lifeform than a human being; its replicative capacity ripping around the planet at lightening speed, like a wild and uncontrollable highlighter pen showing up inequalities and human rights abuses as nothing ever before. In the first wave of a new pathogen, after it has jumped species, it is at its most deadly. But thereafter it is not in the interests of any
organism to annihilate itself by killing off its host. So over time this virus will mutate and learn to accommodate us, just as we will have to learn to accommodate it. Become friends with it. Learn to live alongside it as we do with sharks, scorpions, wasps, snakes and jellyfish. Made of the very same substance as us, the entire universe is reflected in the diversity of our planet, and our DNA has the same basic building blocks as all of life. We are connected. The lens of lockdown is a curious one. Looking at the sociodemographic impacts of the virus, we see it is affecting people of colour more in Western countries than would be expected. This is highlighted further when you look at the unfolding picture of much lower death rates in Africa and Asia, including countries
Now is the right time. If we doubt, we must ask ourselves why? Why is this happening now? People do not willingly put themselves in harm’s way unless they feel very, very strongly about something. The clue is in the powerful message, ‘Black Lives Matter’. This movement is zeitgeist. George Floyd, like many before him, couldn’t breathe. Covid-19 stops people from being able to breathe. BAME people cannot breathe in a racist society built on the spoils of their labour and their bodies. We, none of us, can breathe. Not until we are free of racism, capitalism, and misogyny. None of us can breathe until all of us can breathe. It’s important to protest, even if you do that from the safety of your home. This is the beginning of social change. The virus is here to teach us how to do this safely, respectfully, with compassion and kindness. If you look closely through this lens you will see much, much more. We know also that the elderly have been disproportionately affected. We knew this would be the case, long before the virus hit these shores. Yet we totally failed to consider how ‘shielding’ them could really look. And this failure was systemic. Because we shut our elderly and infirm family members away behind closed doors, in secret places with lino floors and no freedom. We cannot afford as a society to look after our frail predecessors until they die, because it stops us from living. The entire nursing and care home system is fractured, poorly
