Wake Work and the Coronavirus Pandemic

  • Beverly Bain

Black people everywhere and anywhere we are, still
produce in, into, and through the wake an insistence
on existing: we insist Black being into the wake.
—Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being1

Christina Sharpe, in her seminal text, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, engages wake work—which she describes as a mode of inhabiting and imagining life in the wake of slavery—as a form of consciousness. Sharpe wants us to be fully aware of Black life as liveable and breathable, even as it is bound up with Black death. She wants us to track the “phenomena that disproportionately and devastatingly affect Black peoples” and reveal, in the face of Black immanent and imminent death, “the ways we resist, rupture and disrupt that immanence and imminence aesthetically and materially.”2

The coronavirus pandemic lays bare the corrosive effects of the racist, gendered neoliberal capitalist state on Black, racialized, and Indigenous bodies. In majority-Black US counties, the Washington Post reported in April, Blacks have three times the rate of infection and almost six times the rate of death, compared to majority-white counties.3

In Canada—a nation that bolsters whiteness in times of crises—Black workers (especially Black women), make up a disproportionate number of those in low-paying, frontline, and now-deemed essential jobs.4 These include roles as personal support workers (PSWs), registered practical nurses (RPNs), nursing assistants, orderlies, janitorial staff, and grocery clerks. In nursing homes and long term care facilities (workplaces where COVID-19 infection and death rates have been extremely high) Black and racialized women make up a significant percentage of population working in these jobs—25% of workers in nursing and residential care facilities and 27% of home healthcare workers.5

Black health and feminist advocates, researchers, and frontline workers have been “keeping watch” since the onset of the pandemic, taking notes, and listening to Black and racialized people on the frontline who are forced to work without adequate protection from the virus. They have heard from Black families who have been told to pay $500 to receive care in Ontario emergency departments6 and they have documented daily threats of eviction and harassment by landlords.7

Defenders of Black life have also noted the effects of ongoing cuts to health care and affordable housing; rising incarceration rates; high unemployment; poverty, racism, and gender discrimination; and intensified policing that has led to Black people being carded, beaten, arrested, and fined. Black people living in the afterlife of slavery and Indigenous people under white settler colonialism are “constituted through and by a continued vulnerability”8 to interminable violence and death. Recently, the Canadian government confirmed 164 people on First Nations reserves were infected with the coronavirus, with seventeen hospitalized and two dead.9

These stories and statistics approach a representation of contemporary conditions for Black and racialized people under COVID-19—but they only begin to reveal the historical contours of Black life against Black death. Tiffany Lethabo King tells us that while genocide and slavery have “distinct feelings at the stress points and instantiations of Black fungibility and Native genocide, the violence moves as one.”10 Achille Mbembe, in his work on necropolitics, argues that what we have witnessed over the course of history is how particular nation states have exercised their ultimate will over who shall live and who shall die. He argues that racism facilitates the expansion of necropolitics and a necroeconomy, both of which precisely manage and subjugate bodies through exposure to deadly dangers and risks.11

In this time when the nation chooses to refer to the pandemic as the “great equalizer,” vast populations of Black, Indigenous, and racialized people globally have already been managed through death across decades of racist, white, settler-colonial, and neoliberal capitalist policies and practices.

Those who have been witnessing, accounting, and writing of Black lives in peril here in Canada during this pandemic are performing a form of wake work, care for those on the frontlines, at risk and/or left to die. This form of care insists on revealing Black and racialized resistance to this enforced death as well. This resistance takes form in Black and racialized women refusing to work without Personal Protective Equipment (PPE);12 racialized PSWs publicly demanding that they not be scapegoated for staffing shortages in long-term care;13 Black men in immigration detention centres and prisons initiating hunger strikes to call attention to lack of safety conditions.14 All of them insist on visible, liveable, and breathable lives.

So living in and through this disaster that is COVID-19 there is the possibility of life even as death may be imminent for many Black, Indigenous, and racialized people. In as much as we remain vulnerable to that overwhelming force which is death, “we are not only known to ourselves and each other by that force.”15


Beverly Bain teaches at the University of Toronto. She volunteered this text in solidarity with TILTING contributors and the Blackwood.


Beverly Bain is a Black queer feminist scholar who teaches in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. She teaches and researches in the area of Black and Caribbean diasporic sexualities, violence against women and the Black queer radical feminist tradition in Canada.

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