COVID-19 and Childhood Inequality

Nazneen Khan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000552782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Children's Studies in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The COVID-19 pandemic and the global response to it have disrupted the daily lives of children in innumerable ways. These impacts have unfolded unevenly, as nation, race, class, sexuality, citizenship status, disability, housing stability, and other dimensions of power have shaped the ways in which children and youth have experienced the pandemic. COVID-19 and Childhood Inequality brings together a multidisciplinary group of child and youth scholars and practitioners who highlight the mechanisms and practices through which the COVID-19 pandemic has both further marginalized children and exacerbated childhood disparities.

Featuring an introduction and ten chapters, the volume "unmasks" childhood inequalities through innovative, real-time research on children's pandemic lives and experiences, situating that research within established child and youth literatures. Using multiple methods and theoretical perspectives, the work provides a robust, multidisciplinary, and holistic approach to understanding childhood inequality as it intersects with the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the USA. The chapters also ask us to consider pathways toward resilience, offering recommendations and practices for challenging the inequities that have deepened since the entrée of SARS-CoV-2 onto the global stage.

Ultimately, the work provides a timely and vital resource for childhood and youth educators, practitioners, organizers, policymakers, and researchers. An illuminating volume, each chapter brings a much-needed focus on the varied and exponential impacts of COVID-19 on the lives of children and youth.

Part 1 Unmasking Childhood Inequality

doi: 10.4324/9781003250937-2

1 Pandemic EugenicsReproductive Justice and Racial Inequality in Childhood

Nazneen Khan and Amaya Boswell

DOI: 10.4324/9781003250937-3

It has been well established by social science research that the impacts of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic have laid bare and exacerbated social inequality (Ryan 2021a and 2021b). In particular, research demonstrates that the pandemic is heightening racial inequalities in child well-being and outcomes across numerous domains, including education, economics and welfare, physical and mental health, and the juvenile justice system (Parolin 2021). This chapter provides a critical synthesis of emergent research on childhood racial inequality in the United States of America (USA), highlighting core patterns of inequality as both revealed and intensified by the impacts of, and societal responses to, COVID-19. Our analysis highlights three domains of inequality: health, economics, and education. We frame our analysis through a reproductive justice (RJ) paradigm, which enables us to situate real-time pandemic patterns of racial inequality in their historical and ideological context and to highlight the ways in which historical patterns of injustice are reformulated in contemporary society. We begin the chapter with a discussion of our conceptual framework; understanding the field of eugenics as practiced in the early 20th century is vital to understanding the patterns of pandemic racial inequality presented in this chapter.

Eugenics versus Reproductive Justice

Eugenics

In 1883, Francis Galton coined the term “eugenics” which aimed at “racial betterment” largely through the selective regulation of marriage and sexual partners as a mechanism for controlling fertility along racial lines (McCann 1994). In the 1920s, the eugenics movement gained social and political influence in the USA. Proponents of eugenics advocated for “race uplift” through measures designed to control reproduction. While positive eugenics aimed to increase the fertility rate among middle and upper status White women, negative eugenics was designed to eliminate the childbearing of women of color and poor women (McCann 1994). Negative eugenics, a crucial and central dimension of these campaigns in the USA, was advanced largely through state-sanctioned compulsory sterilization programs that targeted Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and other women of color as well as poor White women and women with disabilities and criminal records (Solinger 2013). Not only were these women viewed as “unfit” by social progressives and conservatives alike, but their reproduction was also viewed as antithetical to the vitality of the nation. The formulation of social policies that curbed, controlled, and inevitably sought to contain the fertility rates of those deemed “unfit” (McCann 1994, 103) was furthered by proponents of the field of eugenics and sterilization laws spread throughout the USA as its ideological underpinnings intertwined with nationalist aspirations (Solinger 2013). In the early to mid-twentieth century, nationalist aspirations were also Progressive-era capitalist aspirations that pursued “racial directions,” a system that Cedric Robinson ([1983] 2020, 2) defines as racial capitalism. Eugenics served as a core tool to advance racial capitalism as it justified an array of discriminatory practices carried out by industrial capitalists and their state sympathizers including exploitative working conditions and wages, withholding of labor rights and benefits, and exclusions from welfare-oriented reforms (Leonard 2016).

Children of color and other groups of “unfit” children were also excluded from the child-saving efforts of the Progressive Era. The field of eugenics utilized predominant biological definitions of race to hierarchically rank and sort children and energized animosity and disdain toward those groups of children who were low-ranking. This disdain was exemplified in Tomorrow’s Children, a widely read monograph written by Ellsworth Huntington in collaboration with the American Eugenics Society (1935). In the monograph they purport that children of “poor biological inheritance” are incompetent, spawn social evils, and are the cause of illness. This derogatory view drove new forms of institutionalized discrimination toward groups of children deemed inferior, including withholding of aid and social services, substandard education and medical care, and systemic barriers to parental care including the removal of children from their families, quintessentially exemplified by federally mandated boarding schools for American-Indian children (Ross and Solinger 2017) and early child welfare systems (see Roberts 2002). Systems of state-sanctioned child mistreatment both undermined parents’ ability to care for and raise their children in safe and dignified ways and extended eugenics practices beyond the regulation of fertility and into other forms of reproduction including the disruption of core aspects of childrearing.

Along these lines, Ross and Solinger (2017) specify that reproduction encompasses the caretaking practices that enable the well-being and survival of children. These caretaking practices are socially dependent and as such the ability to access the resources needed to adequately care for children is differentially distributed across populations and is shaped by global and national policies and processes (Ginsburg and Rapp 1995). The field of eugenics was impactful as it impelled and produced systemic barriers to caretaking, thereby contributing to the production of differential outcomes along core indices of child well-being, including health, economic well-being, and educational attainment. Poor economic and social outcomes, an outgrowth of inequality, then became the further justification for coerced sterilization, caretaking obstacles, and other forms of reproductive injustice. In this way, systemic forms of discrimination also served to further advance eugenics sensibilities. This circular process aimed to render undesirable populations obsolete and/or unable to fully participate in societal institutions. In this way, eugenics can be understood as both disrupting the ability of “undesirable” children to survive and thrive.

The COVID-19 pandemic response in the USA unambiguously manifests the ways in which reproductive practices and policies are globally and nationally stratified and operate according to the logic of eugenics by impeding the survival and prosperity of disadvantaged groups of children. Stratified reproduction, defined by Colen (1995) as the ways in which “social reproductive tasks are accomplished differentially according to inequalities,” is structured by broader systems of power such as race and class. In many ways, societal responses to COVID-19 are shaped by such systems of power and, like the treatment of marginalized children during the Progressive era who were under-prioritized and excluded from social benefits and supports, marginalized children today are often excluded from COVID-19-related benefits, reforms, policies, and practices. These exclusions both advance eugenics, albeit through contemporary logics, and are a violation of RJ.

Reproductive Justice

RJ is an intersectional theoretical and methodological framework that was first mapped out in 1994 by an alliance of Black women, including the well-known scholar-activist Loretta Ross. The framework is guided by three core values: the right to have a child, the right to not have a child, and the right to safe and dignified parenting (Ross and Solinger 2017, 9). The field of eugenics undermines RJ in at least two ways: first, by coercing women to have (positive eugenics) or not have children (negative eugenics) based on ascribed characteristics such as race, class, disability, and nationality, and, second, by undermining safe and dignified parenting (exposing certain groups of children to risk and harm through institutionalized discrimination). This chapter centers COVID-19 as a case study for further investigating the ongoing tensions between eugenics and RJ.

The RJ framework provides vital tools and an analytic lens for exploring the impact of COVID-19 responses and policies on children and on childhood inequality. It enables an exploration of the ways in which institutional responses impact the right to safe and dignified childrearing, a core component of RJ. While our analysis of the literature revealed a wide range of racial inequalities across many social institutions, our core findings gravitated around three childhood institutions: health, economics, and education. In the following section, we analyze our findings with respect to these institutions and highlight two observations. First, the US pandemic response has energized the ideology and practice of eugenics by stratifying children’s ability to survive and thrive throughout the pandemic according to racial and class logics. Second, this advancement of eugenics undermines RJ, particularly the third component of RJ which emphasizes the right of caregivers to access the resources needed to protect their children from harm and to ensure optimal child well-being.

Findings: Eugenics, Stratified Reproduction, and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Our analysis of emergent literature at the intersection of COVID-19 and childhood racial inequality revealed an array of intensifying racial disparities impacting the lives of US children. We grouped these inequalities into three key thematic areas around which the literature gravitated—health inequality, economic inequality, and educational inequality. While we discuss these successively in sections for organizational purposes, we recognize the overlapping and interconnected nature of these inequalities (i.e., health disparities impede educational attainment).

Health Inequality

In Race After Technology, Ruha Benjamin (2019) writes that,

In fact the most common euphemism for eugenics was racial hygiene: ridding the body politic of unwanted populations would be akin to ridding the body of unwanted germs … The ancient Greek etymon eugeneia meant good birth and this etymological association should remind us how promises of goodness often hide harmful practices.

(67)

Indeed, as COVID-19 responses rollout, ostensibly in service to public health, devalued populations are at higher risk of disease and death and are excluded from many of the “promises of goodness.” The most immediate responses to COVID-19 in the USA egregiously highlight the ways in which societal sorting and ranking of children continues to shape their material lives. Latinx and Black children were socially positioned in proximity to COVID-19 as their caregivers continued to work in industries deemed essential. Their parents were framed as courageous heroes, but most often without wage compensation and/or personal protective equipment to match their heightened risk and elevated hero status. Beaman and Taylor (2020) write, “we cannot miss the role of white supremacy and racial capitalism in providing only gestures to these essential workers, and not actual structural and material resources.” The disposability of pandemic “heroes,” and the lack of care and consideration for their children is reminiscent of early 20th-century practices that aimed to, as Benjamin states, “rid the body politic of unwanted populations.” Early COVID-19 responses in many ways hid harmful practices that put children in danger and framed these practices in the terms of altruistic nationalism. In this way, COVID-19 has been opportunistically appropriated to advance neoconservatism, nationalism, and neoliberal ideologies (Ryan 2021c). And while it is true...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: Unmasking Childhood Inequality
• Part 1 Unmasking Childhood Inequality
• Part 2 Unmasking Institutional Entanglements
• Part 3 Unmasking Pandemic Agency
• Index