The Shape of Fear: Race and the Novel Coronavirus (A Report from Rural Georgia, USA)

by Mark Auslander and Avis Williams

John Sims, The Shape of  a Breath Blocker, 2020

John Sims and David A. Love's March 10, 2020 co-authored essay in The Grio, "Should Black America be worried about Coronavirus?" and John Sims' accompanying digital art image, inspire us to reflect on how the COVID-19 crisis is impacting persons of color in Putnam and Greene counties, Georgia, home of some of the lowest-income rural black communities in the United States.

Sims' haunting image, entitled "The Shape of a Breath Blocker," features a digital simulation of the novel coronavirus SARS-COV-2, the cause of COVID-19, resting ominously on old wooden floorboards painted with the classic colors of Pan-Africanism, Red, Black, and Green. The spike-like crowns which give the coronavirus family its name, and which allow the virus to bind to a human cell's receptors, are colored with an ominous deep red, evocative of the blood coughed up by patients suffering from advanced COVID-19 disease. Much of the underlying sphere is colored gray, perhaps signaling the virus’ tendency to hijack and ultimately kill the cells of its human host deep in the respiratory tract.

The Shape of our Moment?

We read the title of Sims’ haunting apparition, "The Shape of a Breath Blocker," as echoing W.E.B. DuBois' brilliant 1926 analysis of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, "The Shape of Fear," in the North American Review. DuBois presciently analyses the rise of the second Klan and renewed violent white supremacy in the American heartland as a counter-reaction to the political and economic dislocations of the Great War, which had unleashed global waves of xenophobia. Anglo-American white economic supremacy, he argues, is threatened by the upward trajectory of people of color, and this unleashes the "shape of fear" that fuels the Klan's exponential growth, allowing it to invade and hijack American democracy from within.

Although DuBois does not make explicit reference to the 1918 global influenza pandemic, his analysis retains much relevance to the current predicament, in which anxiety over the novel coronavirus intersects with local and global patterns of ethno-nationalism, placing internal Others (including African Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans) at particular risk. The virus in effect presses down not only on the lungs' capacity to draw breath, but weighs disproportionately on low-income communities of color, already afflicted by social and economic structural deficits.

Such is certainly the case in communities of color, primarily African American and Latino, in Putnam and Greene counties, Georgia. As of this writing, there is one positive result in Greene county, and  no reported cases in Putnam, but everyone knows that hospital and ICU beds in both counties are extremely limited. A great number of uninsured or under-insured individuals haven't seen a healthcare provider in years, and are particularly at risk for underlying conditions, including Type II diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and COPD.  Local households, already on the economic margins, are even more precarious as local "non-essential" employers have closed their doors under shelter in place policies.

Food insecurity

In areas where something like 80 percent of public schoolchildren are on free or reduced lunch, the public school system is a vital source of nutrition. To date during the emergency, the school systems have been able to maintain weekday food distribution to schoolchildren of hot meals through scattered sites, but this may not be long sustainable.  Non profits are doing what they can. (There is no food pantry in Putnam County but there is one in Greene County. ) The Rotary Club has recently facilitated obtaining food for distribution at the Greene pantry for distribution, as they do each month. Yet the Greene County distribution is usually held at the High School, which is now challenging  given the closure of schools.  Activists are working on assembling nonperishable food items for distribution to Putnam County families sometime in April.


Tests of Faith? 

As we think about  food security and the imperative to feed the hungry, a reading from Genesis occurs to us of John Sims' image of the prickly, spherical virus: might we behold, crouching on the tri-colored Pan-African floorboards,  the fruit of temptation?  Will we, when isolated physically from one another, succumb to the allure of selfishness, narrow individualism, and xenophobia? Will we give way to the "shape of fear" that DuBois so long ago denounced?  Or will we instead commit to deep fellowship with one another,  to generosity and compassion, opening ourselves up to the boundless gifts of Grace?  Can we find in the silence imposed by quarantine not descent into terror and anxiety, but new opportunitise to honor our better selves. Can we effect, hear the words of Howard Thurman:  "In the stillness of the quiet, if we listen, we can hear the whisper of the heart giving strength to weakness, courage to fear, hope to despair." (Thurman, For the Inward Journey)

For generations, the community has been comforted and strengthened by Scripture, including Jehoshaphat's prayer in the face of supreme peril: "If disaster comes upon us, the sword, judgment, or pestilence, or famine, we will stand before this house, and before you, for your name is in this house, and cry to you in our distress, and you will hear and save"  (2 Chronicles 20:9. New Revised Standard Version), Yet how, many ask, do we stand before the House of the Lord--and how are we to be heard--when we are so isolated from one another?

In the local African American community, many fear the Black Church, for centuries the foundation of resilience and mobilization in the face of oppression and crisis, has been largely stymied. This seems in part due to the public health restrictions on large gatherings in worship or at funeral "Home-going" celebrations: the community's capacity to see itself and its own potential strength through face to face encounters with one another, may be paralyzed. By and large, sermons delivered through social media platforms (in any event, inaccessible to many lower income households) have not been able to articulate an effective social justice diagnosis of the crisis, and have failed to bind together an imagined community of the faithful that might effectively challenge current injustices.


The Road Ahead

Sims' image of a single crouching novel coronavirus on aged floorboards thus effectively captures the current predicament. We suspect the virus is lying seemingly dormant, perhaps spread among asymptomatic carriers, waiting to flare up and reproduce exponentially, with fatal consequences for vulnerable populations in these low income communities. For the moment, anxiety over the anticipated waves of illness induces paralysis, blocking the body politic's capacity to mobilize and respond in solidarity. Even before the full pandemic hits locally, the virus truly exhibits, in Sims' evocative phrase, "The Shape of a Breath Blocker." Stony the road we tread.


Rev. Dr. Avis Williams, DM  a Baptist pastor and community organizer living in Covington, GA, received her Doctor of Ministry from Emory University's Candler School of Theology in 2018. Mark Auslander, an anthropologist now based in Michigan, writes about race and power in east-central Georgia. Mark and Avis have collaborated extensively across the years in community-based research and social justice projects in the region. Special thanks to John Sims for allowing us to reproduce “The Shape of a Breath Blocker.” 

UPDATE: Since posting this piece, we've learned from Cara Giaimo's report in the New York Times that the digital image of the virus used in the above illustration was created by two medical illustrators at the CDC. See Mark Auslander's commentary on this image.