Emergency: COVID-19 and the Uneven Valuation of Life Claire Laurier Decoteau Univ. Chicago Press (2025)
In May 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic in full swing, George Floyd, a Black man, was murdered by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In response, US government and public-service officials promised marginalized communities that they would make real efforts to tackle racial injustice.
Yet, says sociologist Claire Laurier Decoteau, both the pandemic and those promises now seem long forgotten in her hometown of Chicago, Illinois.
In Emergency, Decoteau interviews 110 of the city’s residents and 65 officials to methodically dissect COVID-19’s impact on marginalized groups. Her analysis reveals how policies that intended to tackle racial injustice instead produced an endless cycle of inequality.
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At the time of Floyd’s death, Black Americans accounted for 60% of deaths caused by COVID-19 in Chicago, despite comprising only 30% of its population, a pattern mirrored in many other US cities and Western countries. The increased risk of death is attributable to what Decoteau calls “converging ‘demics’” — the confluence of structural injustices, including poor access to health care, housing and employment, that disproportionately affect Black, Latinx and immigrant Chicagoans.
Chicago’s initial response to the pandemic was poor, asserts the author. Instead of addressing systemic problems, public-health officials plugged the gap with short-term interventions, such as welfare payments to