The American Virus: COVID-19 and Carceral Liberalism

The American Virus: COVID-19 and Carceral Liberalism Jennie Lightweis-Goff Prisons are ubiquitous. They’re everywhere and nowhere. —Thomas Reem Cotton, returning citizen Almost all the media coverage . . . has been aimed at the . . . groups now minimally at risk, as if the high-risk groups were not part of the audience. And in a sense . . . they’re not. —Leo Bersani, 203 I. A Sense of Place If you walk between the Mississippi River and the Bayou Saint John in New Orleans on Mardi Gras morning, you will pass through the twentieth century.1 The two previous centuries dominate the tourist’s imagination, but the cracking of sidewalks, the closure of pedestrian routes, and the rise and fall and rise again of housing values provide a panorama of “the bulldozer revolution” (Brundage 227–69). Those are the decades in which preservationists protected the nineteenth-century mansion at the expense of the nineteenth-century slum. The priorities of preservation are visible on Rampart Street, the French Quarter’s northern boundary. There, you will find the entry to Louis Armstrong Park and, beyond it, the “million dollar-blocks” from which [End Page 31] urban residents are removed to be housed in rural maximum-security prisons.2 The city itself is a capital of mass incarceration. Had the slum clearance of the 1950s and 1960s not happened, had it not shoved Armstrong Park and the Municipal Auditorium as a border between the tourist quarter and Black neighborhoods, had it not cut roads in half and chained closed park gates, one could walk a straight line between the River and Tremé. It would benefit not only me, a precariously-employed white professional, but my neighbors who work in the service industry in a tourist city with low car ownership and stagnant wages. As it stands, their pedestrian commute takes them through the shell of the Claiborne Avenue Corridor. Fifty years ago, this grand boulevard rivaled St. Charles Avenue for tree-lined grandeur. Now it is a concrete overpass for I-10 with massive supports painted with murals of the trees mowed down to build it. Black New Orleanians could once rely on this street for employment, full-service stores, and green space in a city with segregated city parks. People blame its current state on the segregation that devalued its property and the integration that forced it to compete with prestigious white-owned businesses (Crutcher). Few disagree that it was destroyed to preserve Decatur Street, the southern border of the French Quarter slated as the original route of I-10. When I walked the Mississippi River five days before Carnival 2021 with a beloved friend taking refuge from locked-down New York, we navigated around cops erecting gates between the riverfront and the road. Walking shoulder-to-shoulder, an immigrant and the daughter of an immigrant were knocked off course by the chain link fences crawling right up to the Carrara marble feet of the Sicilian child carved in the Monument to the Immigrant in Woldenberg Park. By the time we crossed the mile of the Quarter toward Tremé, the temporary gates erected by a putatively progressive mayor to prevent Mardi Gras revelry were nearly to my doorstep. The barriers menaced Bourbon Street, [End Page 32] too. The difference between Bourbon’s gates and Claiborne’s? The former came down minutes into Ash Wednesday. The latter placed COVID restrictions in the rut dug by carceral surveillance and urban apartheid. They were my neighborhood’s constant company for the next six weeks. Video gamers and game theorists alike joke about “minmaxing,” hyper-cultivating only one skill while others atrophy. For the New Orleans Police Department, that skill is crowd control. Stronger metal and higher walls corralled businesses and residents on what remains of the Claiborne Corridor, where African American families displaced by the overpass gather with portable grills and music on Mardi Gras and the “39 Sundays” of the second-line parade season.3 These enclosed, criminalized, and forbidden sites were entirely outdoors long after collective acknowledgment of the vanishingly rare chance of outdoor transmission; their closure pushed pedestrians from wide-open public space to narrower streets with closer physical contact...

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