{"id":490595,"date":"2023-04-09T01:07:01","date_gmt":"2023-04-09T08:07:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/?p=490595"},"modified":"2026-02-12T17:18:41","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T01:18:41","slug":"mask-off-at-the-door-policies-undermine-our-rights-as-disabled-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/2023\/04\/09\/mask-off-at-the-door-policies-undermine-our-rights-as-disabled-people\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cMask off at the door\u201d policies undermine our rights as disabled people"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cMask off at the door\u201d policies undermine our rights as disabled people<\/strong><\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

Beatrice Adler-Bolton<\/strong><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

In early March, as the third anniversary of Covid-19 passed unnoticed by many, comments by New York City Mayor Eric Adams rang out like an ominous warning, signaling further erosion of our few remaining pandemic protections. \u201cWe are putting out a clear call to all of our shops,\u201d <\/span>Adams said<\/span><\/a> in a radio interview with <\/span>1010 WINS<\/span><\/i>, \u201cDo not allow people to enter the store without taking off their face mask.\u201d In follow up questions by journalists, Adams said that masks were not banned in stores but that he was recommending stores make showing your face on camera a requirement for entry. He also indicated that he planned to <\/span>coordinate with other Mayors<\/span><\/a> nationally to reproduce this as part of a broader initiative to \u201ctackle retail theft.\u201d The mayor\u2019s comments heralded one of the first concrete signs of what many disabled and immunocompromised people have feared was long coming: Could this be the beginning of the criminalization of masking in public places?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the media frenzy that followed his initial remarks, Mayor Adams gave further comments to local reporters expanding upon what I\u2019ve been calling his \u201cmask off at the door\u201d proposal. Adams explained that the goal of his proposal was to facilitate a process in which shop owners could better profile their customers. Violators who resisted mask removal or were uncomfortable with it, Adams explained, could act as a kind of early warning system for potential antisocial or criminal behavior. \u201cSome of these characters going into stores that are wearing their mask, they\u2019re not doing it because they\u2019re afraid of the pandemic,\u201d Adams said, \u201cthey\u2019re doing it because they\u2019re afraid of the police.\u201d The Mayor\u2019s proposal was echoed by NYPD Chief Jeffrey Maddrey who <\/span>said<\/span><\/a> \u201cmask off at the door\u201d policies should be thought of as<\/span> \u201ca peace offering\u201d and \u201ca sign of safety for store workers.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It is ironic that this proposal has been framed as an issue of worker safety, as the implementation of \u201cmask off at the door\u201d policies, would not only put workers at increased risk due to increased exposure to Covid-19, it would also put them at increased risk of altercations with the public over the policy itself. In public appearances, Adams has explained that the point of the suggestion was to both intimidate alleged would-be-shoplifters and to provide police with security footage necessary for arrests: \u201cWe need to stop allowing them to exploit the safety of the pandemic by wearing masks, committing crimes.\u201d As of this writing, Mayor Adams has yet to produce any satisfactory answers as to how exactly implementing \u201cmask off at the door\u201d policies would keep workers safer, instead trading on the false-panic that living through the ongoingness of Covid-19 has left our society broken and those who mask are seeking to exploit the pandemic for their own gain.<\/span><\/p>\n

Such fear-mongering about a \u201ccrime wave,\u201d or waves of \u201cunstoppable\u201d retail theft has been common throughout the pandemic, fueled by <\/span>viral videos<\/span><\/a> of \u201cbrazen daytime thefts\u201d that have made the rounds on social media accompanied by statements from major retailers that <\/span>blamed<\/span><\/a> crime and theft for store closures (<\/span>it turns out many already had been scheduled to close since 2019<\/span><\/a>). It is important to note that this narrative of a massive wave of coordinated retail theft has been largely <\/span>disproven<\/span><\/a>, both by local, state and national crime statistics, as well as in <\/span>earning reports<\/span><\/a> and comments from retailers themselves. As Christopher Robbins<\/span> reported<\/span><\/a> for the NYC-focused, worker-owned publication <\/span>Hell Gate<\/span><\/i>, recent wide-spread media reports that retailers, especially in New York City, were victims of \u201cOrganized Retail Crime\u201d seem to be mostly unfounded, and in an anonymous annual survey of retailers product losses were lower in 2021 than the five year average. The crime panic narrative is little but a distraction from the ongoing critiques of police budgets and behavior, organizing against the prison industrial complex, and against the ongoing pandemic we are pretending is over even as it still visibly rages on.<\/span><\/p>\n

Most importantly, Adams’ suggestion would further deny disabled and immunocompromised people access to public space, economic participation, and social life, while fueling chains of transmission in the ongoing Covid pandemic. And at worst, it could lead to the criminalization of masking itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

In our current moment, the Covid response (or lack thereof) is characterized by incoherence and abandonment as well as a marked antagonism towards those of us whose ongoing vulnerability breaks the suspension of disbelief, ruining the mirage that the pandemic is over.<\/span><\/p>\n

In truth, \u201cmask off at the door\u201d policies won\u2019t stop a crime wave (<\/span>real or imagined<\/span><\/i>)\u2014they will, however, quite certainly deny disabled and high risk people further access to public life while adding to the burden of Covid cases in the community.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At the time of this writing, over half the U.S. population lives in an area with <\/span>substantial or high transmission<\/span><\/a> of the virus. It is important to keep in mind that our current picture of pandemic data is incomplete due to numerous factors including reduced access to testing, processing and reporting delays, structural barriers, and lax, or halted, state reporting. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) themselves <\/span>stated<\/span><\/a> in a recent update, there are numerous counties for which \u201cCOVID-19 Community Transmission metrics may be underestimated and should be interpreted with caution.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

By official counts we are still seeing hundreds of deaths a day, millions more are still experiencing debility and chronic illness due to long covid, and our hospitals are still struggling with capacity and meeting the basic needs of all patients\u2014high risk or otherwise. And, as my <\/span>Health Communism <\/span><\/i>co-author, Artie Vierkant, and I <\/span>wrote<\/span><\/a> about for the April cover story of <\/span>In These Times<\/span><\/i>, the era of Covid-privatization is upon us; in the coming months we will see what little state-pandemic infrastructure remains be \u201cthrown to the maw of the private market.\u201d When the official declaration of a federal Public Health Emergency ends on May 11th (unless Congress <\/span>succeeds in ending it sooner<\/span><\/a>), <\/span>exactly 1200 days from the day it was first declared<\/span><\/a>, Covid testing coverage and cost-sharing will be left to insurance company discretion, further obscuring any kind of accurate measure of Covid\u2019s ongoing spread. Worse yet, Medicaid expansion ended April 1, bringing with it a wave of <\/span>eligibility redeterminations<\/span><\/a> that will see up to 15 million people lose their coverage\u2014as we <\/span>argued<\/span><\/a> on a recent episode of Death Panel, this is likely to be one of the most catastrophic events in the history of US healthcare.<\/span><\/p>\n

In this context of ongoing, unmitigated spread, the biology and physics of what Adams is suggesting are pretty simple. Covid infections are caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus entering the body, when the seal of a mask is broken even for the simple moment required to lower a mask upon entry, airborne virus could have both entered the body\u2019s mucus membranes and contaminated the inside of the mask.<\/span> If all customers were to remove their masks at the entrance of stores, and then put them back on in the store, that would still slowly but surely increase the amount of virus in the air, making public spaces yet more inaccessible to disabled, medically vulnerable, or immunocompromised people\u2014and exposing everyone to more SARS-CoV-2 virus without their knowledge or consent.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In this way, \u201cmask off at the door\u201d policies will further restrict access to public space directly for disabled, immunocompromised, and medically vulnerable\/high risk people by making the risk much higher than necessary. But Covid is not just a risk to those at high risk, as many people who have had Covid in the last three years can personally attest to. This underlines the crucial importance of thinking through the pandemic from the perspective of disabled people\u2014a fact that has been consistent (and consistently ignored) throughout the pandemic. Shoplifting and retail theft are not more important than the largest public health crisis many of us have ever lived through. <\/span>Masking does not need to be perfectly adhered to or universally enforced to be effective<\/span><\/a>, a simple rule to remember is that more mask wearing = less virus in the air. And, less virus in the air = fewer chains of transmission. That is what our pandemic response needs to aim for, and that is the opposite of what Adams\u2019 \u201cmask off at the door\u201d proposal accomplishes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Not to mention the fact that Adams\u2019 \u201cmask off at the door\u201d proposal directly contradicts messaging both by the CDC and the city and state of New York to vulnerable people about their ability, and requirement, to simply protect themselves in the face of such abandonment. As disabled movement journalist and abolitionist Reina Sultan <\/span>wrote<\/span><\/a> of the Mayor\u2019s remarks, \u201c…it\u2019s frustrating that [New York City] is simultaneously saying: \u2018we won\u2019t require masks even on MTA [or in] healthcare settings, but nothing’s stopping you from wearing your mask, sickie!\u2019 And, \u2018Take your mask off, we want to surveil you better.\u2019 So which is it?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It’s worth also noting that though \u201cone way masking works\u201d has become a common refrain throughout the pandemic, there is no evidence for this claim, while there is clear evidence that it contributes to making society inaccessible for high risk people and those wishing to avoid infection or participation in chains of infection. As public health researcher Abdullah Shihipar <\/span>wrote<\/span><\/a> last year in <\/span>Slate<\/span><\/i>, one-way masking seemed good on paper but was an alluring false promise that in practice made society much less safe for high risk people. \u201cThe strategy sounds like a way to keep everyone happy,\u201d Shihipar explains, \u201cUnfortunately, \u2026one-way masking places the burden entirely on the most vulnerable among us.\u201d In truth, it is up to us to keep each other safe. The fewer people who mask around you, the harder your mask has to work, and the more important it is that your mask be perfectly sealed and clean of virus on the inside. It\u2019s time again to not just mask for ourselves but for each other, even when it’s uncomfortable or inconvenient to do so. It\u2019s not too late to return to models of thinking through safety based on community care and interdependence.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

This is not the first time we\u2019ve seen the roll-back of Covid protections <\/span>result<\/span><\/a> in denial of social rights for disabled, high risk, and immunocompromised people. One-way masking, the end of mask mandates in healthcare settings, on transportation, and in schools have all done similar harm, gradually eroding the social rights that disabled people fought and died to win in the United States for over 50 years.<\/span><\/p>\n

Social rights are a particular and curious category of rights. These rights are highly variable and subject to a constantly shifting series of pressures which shape who is included in the body politic and how. Sociologist John Marshall, working in the 1950s, theorized \u201csocial rights\u201d as stemming from an individual\u2019s real-time access to society. Under capitalism, economic participation is what grants individuals access to and inclusion within society, and the social life which comes with it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If our membership in society is predicated on our ability to economically participate, then Adams\u2019 suggestion, which would make economic participation yet that much harder for high risk, disabled, poor, immunocompromised, and medically vulnerable people, is a textbook example of the denial of social rights stemming from an ignorance of and lack of interest in a society in which vulnerable people not only exist, but are supported and can flourish.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Many disabled people may be most familiar with the concept of social rights through the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which is a legal and administrative framework for granting disabled people these rights: one of the ADA\u2019s primary goals is greater accessibility in society through increasing disability inclusion via employment. As political scientist Nancy J. Hirschmann has argued, Marshall\u2019s work on social rights, while not disability specific, was a major influence on U.S. narratives regarding who deserves to be a part of the <\/span>We<\/span><\/i> in \u201cWe the people.\u201d This is not to say that the best way to make society accessible to all is through economic inclusion and participation\u2014rather it is to say that our society is set up such that inclusion is predicated on economic participation, and disabled people are denied access to many of the potential \u201cpathways to inclusion.\u201d Our social rights as a result become categorically inaccessible. Covid-19 has seen the slow wins made in this arena by the disability rights movement, and by current movements for Disability Justice, slowly eroded.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The forced-ending of the emergency state of exception, what we\u2019ve been calling on Death Panel podcast the \u201c<\/span>sociological production of the end of the pandemic<\/span><\/a>,\u201d has been driven by a shift from thinking through the pandemic in terms of risk at the population level to a hyper-individuated lens which presents a mirage of fully-customizable \u201cchoose your own risk.\u201d But what a disaster like Covid teaches us is that no one\u2019s health is ever theirs alone: We are interdependent, and our pandemic response is a failure as a direct result of our denial and refusal to accept this bare minimum fact. In her January 2022 essay, <\/span>You Are Not Entitled To Our Deaths, <\/span><\/i>Mia Mingus <\/span>warned<\/span><\/a> of how this hyper-individuated narrative of customizable risk was falsely pitting, \u201cstate and systemic change against individual and community change.\u201d As Mingus noted, \u201cBoth are necessary to get out of the pandemic mess we are in, just as both are necessary for any kind of liberation we are fighting for.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

To echo Mingus, <\/span>we need all of us<\/span><\/i>. Care for one another is a political act, and it’s not too late to return to a pandemic response that is based on shared values of safety, respect, collective responsibility, and liberation. As Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha <\/span>writes<\/span><\/a>, it was not too long ago that many of us shared a revolutionary dream, \u201cof a world where community care, mutual aid for collective survival and a refusal to obey are not just possible, they make up the bones of the new world.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The Covid-19 pandemic has been consistently characterized by what abolitionist and liberation geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls \u201c<\/span>organized abandonment<\/span><\/a>\u201d\u2014which is an idea helpful in <\/span>describing<\/span><\/a> \u201c…the way that people, households, communities, neighborhoods do not have equal levels of support and protection against the pandemic.\u201d When populations are abandoned, not only by the state but also by capital, the response leverages policing and criminalization as a means of resolving the problems of abandonment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As I have <\/span>written<\/span><\/a> in the past about other pandemic era retrenchments of social rights for the vulnerable: \u201cIt is a conversation about the value that our society wishes to place in protecting each other from sickness, about the value of recognizing or rejecting our interdependence, and about the worth of the people whose suffering may soon be minimized as \u2018deaths pulled from the future\u2019 or merely the \u2018cost\u2019 of reopening.\u201d We are seeing in Adams\u2019 \u201cmask off at the door\u201d suggestions an overt and obvious demonstration that protecting the right to mask needs to be a serious priority of our movements and demands going forward. Groups like <\/span>Mandate Masks NY<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Massachusetts Coalition for Health Equity<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Covid Safe Campus<\/span><\/a>, and <\/span>Senior and Disability Action<\/span><\/a> are already organizing around this, as are many groups across the country.<\/span><\/p>\n

As disabled people, we have a right to society codified into law which, regardless of what we think about the law, is being violated. Now is the time to make sure that everyone knows that the slow erosion of the very recent norms which have allowed us to mask not only represent a rejection of the vulnerable from society, but actively is undoing the narrow claim to the rights we have based only on our economic worth and participation. As many of us already know from years of navigating a system which treats you as worthless if you\u2019re seen as an \u201ceconomic burden,\u201d and as many have newly learned throughout the pandemic,<\/span> economic rights are not enough.<\/span><\/i> But they are what we have for now, and one step toward building a better world, where we do not accept the economic valuation of life, is resisting the erosion of these basic social rights occurring all around us in our prematurely unwinding pandemic response.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Disabled people have decades of knowledge and expertise at finding ways to both leverage social rights to our advantage and not let them define us. We know how to think through complex problems where we must balance the harms of existing systems we need to access now, with our desires for fundamentally different systems of mutual care and interdependence. We must never stop reminding ourselves and others that every broken chain of transmission matters. As organizer Becca E. <\/span>said to me in a recent interview for Death Panel<\/span><\/a> about the challenges of organizing in a society that devalues and discourages Covid protections: \u201cthe only way that we can even form a sort of collective resistance is to start where we’re at \u2026 every person that doesn’t get sick, that doesn’t lose that week of work, or doesn’t become disabled or die, from the minor-est of inconveniences to the greatest of losses, every single one of those things is valuable \u2026 even if that in itself is not enough to topple the whole problem, topple the whole regime, because you’re creating these little islands of safety. And the more of those islands of safety there are, the more that they interconnect and form a web of resilience.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The bottom line is that in our current moment, Covid is still very much a problem\u2014for everyone, but especially for high risk people. When so many universal pandemic protections have been abandoned for \u201c<\/span>you do you<\/span><\/a>\u201d individual protections, \u201cmask-off at the door\u201d policies <\/span>deny<\/span><\/a> disabled and immunocompromised people their social rights (<\/span>access to public space, economic participation, and social life<\/span><\/i>), all while fueling chains of transmission in the ongoing Covid pandemic. Mayor Adams\u2019 comments, in one ignorant swoop, both feed a manufactured <\/span>crime panic narrative<\/span><\/a> and further abandon high risk New Yorkers. Rhetoric which frames the risk of shoplifting as greater than that of Covid <\/span>only<\/span><\/i> benefits<\/span><\/a> the <\/span>budget priorities<\/span><\/a> of the NYPD, at the risk of our collective public health and mutual survival, thus further extending the harm police already leverage on our communities toward undermining decades of organizing by disabled people.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

About<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\"Color
Color photograph of Beatrice Adler-Bolton, simple portrait photo of a pale, freckled white woman with natural red to dyed orange long wavy hair, wearing round gold rimmed glasses and a black t-shirt in front of a white background.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

Beatrice Adler-Bolton<\/strong> is a blind\/low vision and chronically ill writer and independent researcher. She is the co-host of the <\/span>Death Panel podcast<\/span><\/a> about the political economy of health, and co-author of the book<\/span> Health Communism<\/span><\/i><\/a> (Verso, 2022).<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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\u201cMask off at the door\u201d policies undermine our rights as disabled people   Beatrice Adler-Bolton   In early March, as the third anniversary of Covid-19 passed unnoticed by many, comments … Continue Reading \u201cMask off at the door\u201d policies undermine our rights as disabled people<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":490593,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6701202],"tags":[3471,66130,587152853,168607,587153188,587152358],"class_list":["post-490595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-guest-blog-posts","tag-accessibility","tag-ada","tag-covid19","tag-disability-rights","tag-masking","tag-new-york-city","post-has-thumbnail"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/Beatrice-adler.png?fit=1600%2C900&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4H7t1-23CP","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490595\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/490593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}