Death Has Become a Political Prop

After so many months of casualties, the only deaths we talk about are the ones that carry a message. In the early months of the pandemic, in an effort to pace myself when consuming the torrent of news, I allowed myself to read the charts only once a day.

Every night before bed, I would dive in, studying the latest case counts and death tolls. I would spend nearly an hour building small curves inside my head, trying to prepare myself for what might be coming to Ohio. I was trying, as so many did in the beginning months, to take control over a virus that had (and still has) no interest in our desires. Looking at a tally made the pandemic into an equation — a deadly one, but also one that felt less than human.

About four months into the pandemic, I stopped. It wasn’t healthy to gorge myself on awful news before trying to fall asleep, and it left me with a sense of dread even in the morning. I also watched friends get sick. Old teachers and coaches died. My friends who worked in the service industry found themselves out of work and anxious. Then our summer of protest began, and all of a sudden, mutual aid networks and on-the-ground protest actions demanded my attention. I threw myself furiously into attempting to uplift the living.

But I haven’t stopped thinking about death, which has remained the most tangible measure of the pandemic and much of the news surrounding it. Death is everywhere, in the lives of almost everyone I know and those I don’t. For a time, states were measuring actions or inactions based on the number of cases and the number of dead people.

Of the many things I am careful not to be self-righteous about, my relationship to loss is near the top of the list. I arrived at that relationship through a lot of difficulty and anguish; I wouldn’t want to wish that on anyone. But from my small corner of feeling, I am worried about the potential this era might have on not just collective mourning, but interpersonal grief as well. I am worried about that for myself and for the people I know. Many of us have been staring into death for so long that it has lost some of its potency; I fear we’re losing our reverence for it. In a moment when deaths from the pandemic are rising again to nearly 1,000 per day, death itself is once again baked into many of our lives. It is abundant, taking up more space than any of us would like it to. And so, a part of the exercise of living, right now, is to move our anxieties around. To project them elsewhere so that we might survive another day. I understand this, and still I worry about whatever future emotional consequences there might be.

Perhaps owing to this impersonality, those deaths we have clung to — the celebrities, the aggrieved — are made to be agitprop martyrs, vessels for our suffering. In early September, at the height of debate around what college football conferences should or shouldn’t do with regard to their upcoming seasons, Jamain Stephens died. He was a defensive lineman at California University of Pennsylvania, a Division II school near Pittsburgh. Initial reports stated that Stephens died of complications from Covid-19. The school walked back this statement, stressing that a cause of death had yet to be identified. Incidentally, the school wasn’t practicing or playing football at the time — it had canceled the season due to the pandemic.

It is all too convenient to attach some satisfying lesson to someone’s demise.

Still, for at least a few hours online, Stephens was used as a vehicle for people to make a larger point. His death became an opportunity to make a statement, even if the facts didn’t entirely match up with the statements being made. Another chance to throw death into the faces of those who (foolishly, of course) still make light of the virus or still mock those who are concerned about its reach. Not many people read beyond the Stephens headlines to get the full story of his death or to hear what his coaches, friends, and teammates had to say about his life.

The pandemic and political climate have made it increasingly easy to use the sick or the dead as props, because it is all too convenient to attach some satisfying lesson to someone’s demise, like in the case of Ohioan Rick Rose. His was one of the relatively few cases where someone publicly denied the reach and impact of the virus, only to catch it and die a short time later. Even while hoping his loss might signal something outward, and even as I was a little too smug about the news of his passing, I felt frustration with myself for feeding into this cycle of behavior.

A bigger and more visible instance of the death-as-sociopolitical-tool phenomenon came in late August, when Chadwick Boseman died of colon cancer. He’d kept his diagnosis private and fought it privately, so many people did not know he was fighting it until he was gone. His death was particularly jarring for Black people, who, in the immediate moments after Boseman’s death, shared reflections on how he strived to portray Black people throughout history. And, of course, reminiscing on his role as Black Panther. Black parents shared photos of their Black children, adorned in Black Panther costumes, striking poses, their tiny fists aloft and prepared for their imaginary foes.

Boseman’s final tweet came about two weeks before he passed. It was a picture of him with Sen. Kamala Harris. In celebration of the day she was confirmed as the VP pick, Boseman tweeted, along with the photo, “YES @KamalaHarris #WhenWeAllVote #Vote2020”

There was another movement in the immediate aftermath of Boseman’s death, helmed largely by non-Black people, highlighting this tweet in an attempt to urge or convince people to vote. As if it were Boseman’s dying wish, and not just the final thing the public saw from him on Twitter before his passing. When Black people tried to explain that this felt like using a recently deceased Black man as a prop, it proved to be difficult for people to understand why anyone might feel this way. There was an election to be won, after all. And here’s motivation to get people to vote. Why wouldn’t anyone share it?

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