Commemorating Lives Lost in Times of Pandemic and Protest

Angela C. Carmella is Professor of Law at Seton Hall University School of Law and the James B. and Anita L. Ventantonio Board of Visitors Research Scholar

Since the winter of 2020, COVID-19 has infected 7 million and killed 200,000 people in the United States. This public health tragedy, as well as its accompanying economic devastation, has fallen disproportionately on people of color. Additionally, more police brutality against African Americans in early summer has resulted in millions marching in Black Lives Matter protests. Further, more deaths and shattered lives result from surges in urban violence, armed militia movements, mental health crises, domestic violence, and substance abuse, as well as severe climate-related natural disasters—fires in the west, more frequent hurricanes in the southeast. Polarized politics make it more difficult to address these interconnected crises.

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Slaughterhouses as Sites of Exception

Joanna Smith is PhD Candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

 

Beginning inthe earliest weeks of the pandemic, America’s slaughterhouses have been a flash-point both for outbreaks of the coronavirus and for public anxiety. Industry leaders offered dire warnings of meat shortages as, predictably, COVID-19 clusters began to erupt at slaughterhouses around the country. The working conditions in meat plants were ripe for disease to spread rapidly: thousands of workers standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the disassembly line; crowded locker rooms, dining halls, and bathrooms; windowless buildings. Yet when the first slaughterhouse was shut down because of an outbreak – a Smithfield pork plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota – cries for meat plants to stay open grew louder. Although there were slowdowns across the food system, with shortages of eggs, milk, produce, and canned goods, none seemed to evoke such an emotional response from the public as the threat of meat shortage.

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