By Robeyonce Lima (unofficial translation from the Spanish)

The narrative of a pandemic demands a fast response and emergency mechanisms that end up upsetting human dignity. This means that systemic faults are explicitly manifested and expose serious, long-standing social challenges.

The crisis does not affect everyone equally. In many cases, the manifestation of the pandemic has an exacerbated impact on vulnerable people who already live in difficult situations.

What happened to George Floyd and the protests in the United States reveal the negative experience of the racist and capitalist model. The century-long history of slavery in the Americas exposes multiple social mistakes at many levels.

With the crisis, the policy of death which already existed, is radicalized: Who must die? Who is useful to capitalism and who is not? Life and death become simple numbers with no importance attached. When you die, so promptly and in such haste, it feels as if the soil already covers you. There is no weeping or farewell.

HIV has affected humanity for the past 40 years, but until today, HIV has not been considered a global crisis because the bodies that it touches are not seen as human. What happens is that the people who died, are those being killed anyway just in different circumstances. It does not matter if it is COVID-19 that kills you, or a knee pushed against your neck, you will gasp for air as you try to breathe.

Today, Darnella Frazier, the young, black woman who recorded the tragic scene of George Floyd’s death, has to deal with people in social media calling her guilty for not intervening. LGBTI people have been blamed for HIV, while communist China is blamed for COVID-19. This is similar to what happened to Darnella.

Aside from the protests, confinement policies have become a global rule. These have exacerbated violence against women. More than 70 countries already criminalize, in various forms, LGBTI diversity. Isolation has increased family problems exposing all the emotional issues that were already there. A majority of the LGBTI population suffers domestic and family violence not limited to the “stay at home” order.

In this context, the pandemic reveals the negative traits of this type of nuclear family, which was established by a cis/hetero machista rule in another century (while husbands work, women cook and LGBTI youth prefer to stay with friends since they suffer discrimination in their own homes). This contributes to the creation of other experiences in relation to safety for LGBTI persons and women, and to the creation of other types of family arrangements.

However, these changes in family dynamics require financial autonomy. In general, vulnerable people’s livelihoods depend on informal employment: LGBTI people, afro-descendants, indigenous peoples, migrants, youth, women and sex workers (cis and trans). With this pandemic, hunger is stalking all these people. The confinement rule is thus, unequal: if they stay home, they suffer domestic violence; if they don’t go out to sell something (even sexual services), they know they will die of hunger.

During the pandemic, we have also seen a gender-based quarantine policy that even when introduced as a neutral measure, has had no respect for LGBTI people. This policy, implemented in several Latin American countries, replicated the transphobic logic that upsets people who do not identify as women or men and did not know whether to go out or not.

The isolation policy has produced grave concern on gender issues and police abuse during curfews. In many places, there is a tendency to use the State’s power and the emergency situation to get full surveillance and control of the population.

The coronavirus has also affected the way in which we interact with each other. Being with other activists became life-threatening as the virus can kill.

In 2019, before the pandemic, we lived through many protests in Latin America, and now, in this moment, there is a need to think about how activist politics and movements are going to work in a context of safe distancing.

It is possible to think that the pandemic will linger with us for a long time and this will become everyday nature. We don’t want to go back to the previous context, before the crisis, that has been called ‘normality.’ It is more urgent than ever to think of sustainable actions that strengthen interpersonal networks of LGBTI people, afro-descendants and other vulnerable populations.

In some places, access to the Internet is still not possible. It is necessary to find a new way to organize and share knowledge so that people know how to defend their rights during this pandemic: from access to water to wash their hands to their right not to die.

It is necessary to find ways of safe activism to maintain visibility of the many instances of discrimination, including in faraway cities and towns, because the quarantine does not mean silencing, and staying home does not mean to remain silent.

The people who are marching across the United States have found a way to break the silence and fight, because they know the capitalist system, even in crisis, cannot change itself (or wants to change).