On White Identity Politics and Covid: Catherine Clune-Taylor at Dartmouth

On Saturday, April 9, the Department of Philosophy hosted a lecture by the Black womxn Catherine Clune-Taylor. Serving as an Assistant Professor of Feminist Science and Technology Studies at San Diego State University, Clune-Taylor holds a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University. Her lecture, titled “Covid-19 Anti-Vaxxers, White Supremacist Suicidality and Racialized Risk,” was given because the department, “as part of… [its] commitment to social justice…is developing a 5-year series of public lectures on Race, Gender and Justice.” Every other word in the talk was indecipherable jargon such as “thanatopolitics,” “hyperheteropatriarchal,” and “virus qua virus,” on top of the typical repertoire of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) puritans like “heteronormative,” “transphobia,” and “BIPOC [black, indigenous, or people of color].” Worse still, Clune-Taylor’s basic ideas were poorly organized and presented, with little effort given to minor details such as coherence or logical presentation. 

Clune-Taylor’s basic thesis was that vaccine refusal among white Americans is driven by racial resentment against black people. By refusing the vaccine, white people can continue to make themselves sick, and thereby further spread the disease to others, including black people. The cost of sickness is worth the potential “reward” of harming black individuals. Furthermore, according to Clune-Taylor, a huge proportion of white Americans possess this profoundly twisted mindset. Her fantasies concerning the existence of this mindset, its supposed attractiveness to huge numbers of Americans, and how it has shaped American society comprised the rest of the lecture.

To explain how white Americans became obsessed with spreading Covid to black people, Clune-Taylor blamed Christianity: “Heteronormativity, heteropatriarchy, and transphobia, the combination of which is called Christianity by white men, blends with other militant beliefs into a psychotic form of white identity politics.” Requests for her to elaborate on this point only yielded the claim that Christianity as practiced by white men was not “real Christianity.” What exactly defined real Christianity was never made clear. As only became apparent later, the main purpose of this portion of the talk was not to provide an explanation of where the murderous mania of white American originated. Rather, the point was simply to provide Clune-Taylor with a short phrase to use in her talk—“white identity politics”—in place of “Heteronormativity, heteropatriarchy, and transphobia…and other militant beliefs.” Therefore, Clune-Taylor moved on as quickly as possible, so that she could begin describing who believes in white identity politics and how this political movement has shaped American society.

 Clune-Taylor explained that white identity politics—this “cissexist, heteronormative, masculine supremacist form of whiteness,” in her words—was not limited to white men. Other adherents included white women, police officers, open carry activists, preppers, and Trump supporters. To her credit, Clune-Taylor acknowledged that there are many differences between these groups. For example, she explained that open carry activists, who carry long rifles such as AR-15s, tend to look down on police officers, who carry small pistols, as “having been emasculated by service to the state.” “I think size is very important here,” opined the professor of Feminist Science and Technology Studies, in case the metaphor with penis size was not clear enough. Remarkably, Clune-Taylor found a way to tie all these disparate groups together, despite the differing size of their tools. She believes that they share a desire to find ways to kill black people without being blamed for their deaths. During the pandemic, anti-mask protests have provided the perfect tool, since less mask wearing means more Covid, and more Covid means more deaths. A truly ingenious plan by any standard.

In fact, the cleverness and brutality of these ethnically and sexually diverse practitioners of white male identity politics are comparable only to the politics of Nazi Germany, the Princeton-trained philosopher said. The French philosopher Michel Foucault claimed that Nazi Germany was a “racist, murderous, suicidal state.” “Racist,” “murderous,” and “suicidal” are all epithets that could be applied to anyone willing to risk his own life by catching a deadly disease in order to have a chance to kill black people by infecting them in turn. Therefore, Foucault’s description of Nazi Germany obviously applies equally well to the fantasy of America that Clune-Taylor constructed in her presentation.

Having smeared over half of all Americans as Nazis, Clune-Taylor proceeded to accuse the United States government of being a fundamentally murderous and racist state. Her main evidence to support this claim (and to somehow tie her lecture back to its ostensible topic) was that, in 2020, US Surgeon General Jerome Adams came out against a federal nationwide mask mandate. Instead, he said, mask mandates should be imposed at the state and local level. This pragmatism, Clune-Taylor claimed, was evidence of the “white supremacy inherent within the nation state.” According to her, the US government’s refusal to implement a nationwide mask mandate demonstrated the government was intentionally setting policy to maximize the number of black people dying from Covid. The reason for this ghastly endeavor was that “black death is essential to the functioning of the American state.” In fact, the US government would collapse were it not constantly killing black people in some way. Sadly, the reasoning behind these explosive claims concerning the “casually murderous [nature of the American] state” was not explained. 

Clune-Taylor finished her talk with a series of assertions that followed immediately from the points she presented. First, the New Hampshire state motto, “Live Free or Die,” actually means “Live White or Die.” Second, a nationwide mask mandate, if imposed, would only have been enforced on black people, while white people would have been free not to wear a mask. Third, following the unrest against the criminal justice system caused by George Floyd’s very public death, the US government has turned to mechanisms like ICE detention centers, which allow the state to kill black people outside of public view and—in Clune-Taylor’s words—“enable the disappearing of BIPOC death.” Fourth, preppers, men’s rights activists, open carry activists, and Trump supporters share a desire for apocalypse, which will restore the proper role of white men in society, and thereby usher in a return to feudal lordship. Clune-Taylor felt that these propositions were clearly implied by her main thesis and so did not require any justification.

Funding for this lecture, part of a five-year series on Race, Gender, and Justice, came from the Mark J. Byrne 1985 Fund in Philosophy. The author is deeply grateful to the fund’s donors, for without them, he would not have had the opportunity to attend such an enlightening presentation on Covid, thanatopolitics, white supremacy, and the hyperheteropatriarchal nature of American society.