by Racial Justice Network and Yorkshire Resist

Police will now be able to access Track and Trace information on people instructed to self-isolate. Those who fail to self-isolate face fines between £1,000 to £10,000. This latest government action will have a disproportionate impact on Black and Brown communities and those from lower income backgrounds (in particular migrants) who have already been bearing the brunt of COVID-19.

The COVID-19 report released by Public Health England in June demonstrates that those in BAME groups (term used in the report) are more likely to die from the virus. Risk of dying is 4 times higher for Black people specifically, and this percentage is increased for people born outside of England. The report found that people from Central and West Africa are 4.5 times more likely to die of COVID-19 while in the UK. The numbers are equally alarming…

An Overview of Community Development Initiatives Engaging Indigenous People in Australia, New Zealand and the United States of America.

Community Development marks a foundationally novel approach to improving Indigenous communities. These diverse and locally-led activities provide a way for dynamic groups to assert ownership of their community through participation.
This approach changes the word Indigenous to mean “us”, instead of “them”. Indigenous community members can start asking “what are we doing”, instead of “what have they done to us”. This approach also leads people to begin to seek answers to profound questions at home, instead of relying on a formal needs assessment or counsel from some far-off bureaucratic organization. This paper does not devalue the great efforts that societies are making to help Indigenous people. The current state of Indigenous health and social problems impel everyone to action. The hope is that Indigenous communities will begin to access the tremendous…

Bruno Latour

The unforeseen coincidence between a general confinement and the period of Lent is still quite welcome for those who have been asked, out of solidarity, to do nothing and to remain at a distance from the battle front. This obligatory fast, this secular and republican Ramadan can be a good opportunity for them to reflect on what is important and what is derisory. . . . It is as though the intervention of the virus could serve as a dress rehearsal for the next crisis, the one in which the reorientation of living conditions is going to be posed as a challenge to all of us, as will all the details of daily existence that we will have to learn to sort out carefully. I am advancing the hypothesis, as have many others, that the health crisis prepares, induces, incites us to prepare for climate change. This hypothesis…

Achille Mbembe

Translated by Carolyn Shread

 

Already some people are talking about “post-Covid-19.” And why should they not? Even if, for most of us, especially those in parts of the world where health care systems have been devastated by years of organized neglect, the worst is yet to come. With no hospital beds, no respirators, no mass testing, no masks nor disinfectants nor arrangements for placing those who are infected in quarantine, unfortunately, many will not pass through the eye of the needle.

1.

It is one thing to worry about the death of others in a distant land and quite another to suddenly become aware of one’s own putrescence, to be forced to live intimately with one’s own death, contemplating it as a real possibility. Such is, for many, the terror triggered by confinement: having to finally answer for one’s own life, to one’s own name.

We must…