Cultural AnthropologyOrin Starn, Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Anthropologists have spent much of their energy over the past few decades studying social inequality in its many forms. A terrific analysis in the New York Times lays out in a quite ethnographic way how the hierarchy of money and race in in America has shaped experiences of the pandemic. In a nutshell: the rich have often retreated to their vacation houses; the white collar middle classes are working from home, with restless children often underfoot; and the hourly working-class, disproportionately made up of people of color, is on the front lines delivering packages, bagging groceries, flipping burgers for little money with high exposure to the virus.
But what about working-class people who are undocumented? Millions of Latinx and other migrants without papers do vital service jobs, and, as an expanding body of anthropological work shows, face almost impossible challenges of many kinds. In my current research with Durham housecleaners, I've found the pandemic is creating enormous new difficulties for these mostly women workers. Fearful clients are cancelling housecleaning appointments, without thinking to offer to pay anyway as a form of leave. The vast majority of these women, despite having in many cases lived in Durham for decades, will not receive forthcoming government payouts and other aid, because they are not citizens.
Hannah Arendt famously describe stateless people as "without the right to have rights." This is exactly the situation of millions of people in this new state of emergency, despite the fact that their labor is so vital in the life of the country.