Writing in The New Yorker in April 2020, the Princeton historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor called Covid-19 “the Black Plague,” noting, “Thousands of white Americans have also died from the virus, but the pace at which African-Americans are dying has transformed this public health crisis into an object lesson in racial and class inequality.” That is not the lesson that many conspiratualist health influencers took away, however. On the contrary, the lesson they seem to have extracted from the race and class disparities of Covid’s early death toll was “This virus is going to kill people who do not look like me.”

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of conspiratorial readings of statistical disparities, and to racialized conspiracy theories generally. QUESTION: Worth pinning down exactly how influencers inverted Taylor's inequality framing into a threat narrative.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 611