White Suicide, Black Genocide: The Psychic Life of Labor and Freedom in Anti-Masking Movements
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In protest of the COVID-19 lockdowns, crowds gathered in downtown Chicago to “Re-Open Illinois” during May 2020. One sign in particular, held by a white woman in an American flag mask, drew particular attention: “ARBEIT MACHT FREI, JB,” invoking the German phrase hung above Nazi concentration camps to taunt the then governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker. Reactions to this anonymous woman were swift, but critics missed that “ARBEIT MACHT FREI, JB” merely represented the front of the sign. When flipped, the sign read “Nice Haircut, Lori,” an antiblack affront to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. In this paper, we think this semiotic elision to contend with the inextricability of the motives of these protests and the psychic life of labor. Mobilizing this sign as a vehicle to consider the racialization of work as a grammar of suffering, we ask what the deployment of “work makes you free” reveals about the relationship between American whiteness, labor and antiblackness? To answer this question, we excavate the libidinal investments undergirding the protestor’s sign and its reliance on work as a category that renders the slave unthought. We contend that it is this cathexis that subtends the announcement by some conservative commentators that they would rather end their lives than live in lockdown. We conclude by engaging the anti-police brutality protests that occurred concurrent to the lockdowns, querying how the libidinal drives animating anti-masking may also scaffold the popularity of those movements.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".