Unmasking Mask Hate: The Racial-Criminal Pathologization of Dissent

Unmasking Mask Hate: The Racial-Criminal Pathologization of Dissent

 

Leah Harris and Liat Ben-Moshe  

Masking as a constitutional matter hit the news cycle once again on June 8 when Trump threatened anti-ICE protesters in Los Angeles for wearing face masks (“MASKS WILL NOT BE ALLOWED to be worn at protests,” he posted) and ordered their arrest. The hypocrisy and absurdity of this demand are clear to all, given that ICE agents themselves cover their faces. But a flurry of bipartisan anti-masking legislative efforts and propaganda aimed at Palestine solidarity protesters since October 7, 2023 has set the stage for the current assault on the mask rights of those trying to stop ICE kidnappings of their loved ones and neighbors.

Anti-masking efforts can be understood as a central facet of theracial criminal pathologization of dissent, a term Liat coined to describe how the state entwines racial criminalization and pathologization, especially sanism, for eugenicist, fascist, white supremacist ends. Racial criminal pathologization constructs both race, especially Blackness or “Arabness,” and disability (especially mental difference) as inextricably dangerous and irrational.

The question in Trump’s post, “What do these people have to hide, and why???” epitomizes this phenomenon in action: Mask-wearing is pathologized, criminalized, and used to justify further criminalization, confinement, and death. Of course, the state’s conflation of political difference, dissent, or resistance with madness/dangerousness is not a new phenomenon.

Last year, as student encampments across the country forced a global reckoning on Palestine, disturbing posts online showed Zionists intimidating students by demanding that they remove their face masks. At the University of Texas encampment, one student reported that members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), a designated hate group, were demanding that students remove their masks, calling them “terrorists” and asking if they were on “watch lists.” And last December, a student reportedthat a notorious Columbia University professor who’d been banned from campus for harassing and intimidating students had been standing in the street wearing a bodycam and shouting “SHOW YOUR FACE, UNMASK THE HATE!” as he filmed students passing by.

As mad and disabled anti-Zionist Jews, we write in furious refusal of these ableist, sanist, and cynical efforts at weaponizing masking, whether in the name of “Jewish safety” or other ends. Such policies make no one safe, and only serve to stigmatize and criminalize activists, communities of color, and immunocompromised and disabled people who wear masks to keep themselves and their communities safer from airborne viruses, state surveillance, as well as Zionist and other forms of white supremacist doxxing.

It is no coincidence to see mask bans being pushed in state legislatures and enacted into law after Palestine encampments were so widespread and effective. Mask bans are now on the books in 18 states, various cities, and counties. Since October 7, 2023 16 bills aiming to ban masks at protests were introduced in eight states, an effort which spread to college campuses.

As the world reeled in rage and disbelief last March after ICE kidnapped Mahmoud Khalil from Columbia student housing, the university administration announced that it would comply with Trump’s mask ban and other demands as a condition for receiving federal funding. These egregious concessions prompted over 1000 teachers and academics to call for a boycottof the university. Upon his release, Khalil, who spent 104 days in ICE custody, called out the “hypocrisy” of Columbia University for claiming to protect international students.

Tracing a Hateful Meme

Recent legislation introduced in New York and Maryland reveals a coordinated anti-masking legislative effort. The Unmask Hate Act (HB 1081), introduced into the Maryland General Assembly in February, is among the latest bipartisan legislative efforts designed to criminalize public mask-wearing in the name of “combating antisemitism—” in essence, marking the face mask as synonymous with a threat to public safety, and Jewish safety in particular.

The term “Unmask Hate” in Maryland’s anti-mask bill mirrors the terminology deployed by #UnmaskHateNY, an anti-masking campaign launched by a coalition of organizations including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which has a long history of surveilling left movements, promotes the Deadly Exchangeprogram between US law enforcement and Israel’s military, and in January famously twisted itself into a pretzel to rationalize and defend Elon Musk’s double Hitler salute at Trump’s inauguration rally.

The Unmask Hate NY campaign’s Twitter account dates to June 2024, and calls for a new version of the “masked intimidation” laws. These were first enacted in response to the Ku Klux Klan’s practice of wearing masks and hoods to hide their identities as they committed acts of violence and terror. Notably, these laws were not enacted to protect victims, but because the KKK’s open brutality embarrassed committed segregationists who wanted to project the image of a “progressive” South.

Also in June 2024, New York State lawmakers introduced their first mask ban bill, which would have broadly banned the use of masks in public spaces, unleashing an uproar from the disability community and civil liberties groups. Disabled and long Covid activists described the experience of testifying against the ban in New York as ““traumatic” and “volatile,” with supporters of the bill yelling obscenities at masked immunocompromised people who testified, calling them ”pro-Hamas thugs and terrorists.” That same month, the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think-tank, debuted their model anti-masking legislation, comparing “modern activists” in keffiyehs to “Ku Klux Klan members.”

NY lawmakers introduced a new version of the anti-mask bill in January that would create a new misdemeanor crime, “masked harassment,” defined in the bill as wearing a mask “for the primary purpose of menacing or threatening another person” and putting them “in reasonable fear for their physical safety.” This new version included a so-called “carve-out” for health or religious reasons, which would leave it up to the NYPD to intervene and enforce.

Maryland’s bill echoes that of New York. As one Redditor pointed out, “If you examine the text of MD HB1081—it mirrors the proposed anti-masking bill introduced in the NY legislature last month almost verbatim (NY Assembly Bill A3133), including the same seven exceptions listed in the same order?”

The sponsors of the Maryland bill, identifying as Black and Jewish, manipulate the history of U.S. Black-Jewish solidarity on civil rights to aim an anti-masking agenda at dissent on Palestine. One of the bill’s co-sponsors, Montgomery County state Sen. Jeff Waldstreicher said the bill “criminalizes utilizing masks to intimidate, menace, or harass folks, and it’s the same laws we had in place in the post-KKK era.” Co-sponsor Del. Adrian Boafo, who represents Prince George’s County, said, “Marylanders in general, not just Black Marylanders, but we turned our backs, even in silence, to our Jewish brothers and sisters [after Oct. 7]. That’s why this bill is so important. This is a law that says we’re trying to protect our communities and Marylanders.”

In The Baltimore Sun, Jewish organizers Rebecca Armendariz, Alison Cannon, and Nikki Morse wrote that the bill’s sponsors “do not speak for us or our allies in the Black community.” The Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), along with a multifaith coalition, issued a letter naming the bill’s intersecting harms, and the long history of the state targeting activists. “The police are not qualified to decide who needs to mask in public,” Morse said in a coalition statement. “This bill will chill free speech and expose people to unnecessary risks of doxxing, harassment, and respiratory illness.” After hearings in the House and Senate, the Maryland bill was referred to committee, and its fate remains uncertain.

Governor Hochul made a last-ditch effort this past spring to push the state’s proposed mask ban through the legislature, which passed in a narrower form. The new measure would make it a misdemeanor “for a person to ‘use a mask to conceal their identity when committing a Class A misdemeanor or higher crime or fleeing the scene immediately after committing such a crime.’”

Viewed through Critical Resistance’s reform vs. abolition lens, on one hand the victory for those disability activists fighting the NY bill is important to acknowledge and celebrate. Yet the victory remains partial, because the bill still legitimizes the criminalization of mask-wearing and leaves an on-ramp for future masking bans on protestors or others.

In an effort to use similar tactics against ICE, in June California legislators introduced SB627, the No Secret Police Act, which seeks to ban ICE agents from wearing masks to conceal their identities. While we agree to the “no secret police” part given that ICE is essentially white supremacy (barely masked), this move still legitimizes anti-masking legislation. And further, such legislation detracts from the aim of actually abolishing ICE, whose relationship with the Israeli military has been well documented by Deadly Exchange, once again connecting the struggle regarding masking bans (and fascism/white supremacy) back to Palestine’s liberation.

New Take, Old Tactic

The June 2024 Manhattan Institute report advocating for anti-masking legislation said: “Someone who wears a mask for health reasons probably should not be congregating in large groups of people.” This is effectively advocating for the disappearance of disabled, immunocompromised, and chronically ill people from public life, and erasing their right to protest.

Disability activist and writer Alice Wong calls anti-masking bills a form of eugenics and a “return to the ugly laws,” 19th-century city ordinances that often centered on begging, effectively preventing disabled and poor people from existing in public—especially those who appeared to be unsightly, physically disabled, or diseased. (In cities like Chicago that have recently attempted to pass anti-masking ordinances, the ugly laws were not repealed until the 1970s. Chicago was the last city in the US to repeal its ugly laws, in 1974.)

As Susan Schweik illustrates in her book The Ugly Laws, these laws targeted and disproportionately impacted people by race, gender, immigration status, and sexuality. The attitudes expressed by the Manhattan Institute above, and conveyed by these anti masking and anti COVID precautions, bills, and policies make the legacy of ugly laws abundantly clear.

As Wong writes, “We’re told such masked individuals threaten the moral order of society, and these bans are meant to keep the public “safe.” This includes New York, where the governor is using the pretext of ‘crime prevention’ to enact this and other forms of banishment or ugly laws, including New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ policy of “involuntary removals” of unhoused people who “appear mentally ill,” and the ultimate privatization and minimization of public space.

But who is the public, who needs to be protected, and from whom?

The first anti-mask law was passed in New York 1845 in the name of “public safety,” after disputes upstate between landlords and tenant farmers led to a revolt. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, over 20 states had anti-masking laws; they were lifted temporarily or repealed in 2020. These laws have been historically used against those expressing dissent—some of the more recent pre-pandemic efforts were leveled againstantifascists and Occupy Wall Street protesters.

The mask ban that passed in Nassau County, New York in August 2024 makes it a misdemeanor offense for someone to wear a mask or face covering. Breaking the law is punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. “The ban has some exceptions for people who mask for medical or religious reasons,” Kaitlyn Costello told STAT News, “But it is up to the police to determine whether someone has a medical reason for masking if they are out in public.”

And if people are engaging in protest and dissent ‘look’ Arab or Latinx or Black, then we need to understand the criminalization of masking as another form of “stop and frisk.” As activist Imani Barbarin warns: “The political climate creates this perfect storm where it’s going to further criminalize Black and Brown people who need masks to survive.”

Resisting Racial Criminal Pathologization

From mask blocs to grassroots mobilizations to statewide legislation, resistance to mask bans continues to mount. Mask blocs, which emerged from the pandemic, ended up on the front lines of opposition to anti-masking legislation. As noted in a three part interview series with mask bloc organizers in The Sick Times, as this wave of legislation came down in various states, “Mask blocs in impacted regions were sometimes the only groups poised or willing to respond — even though they are small mutual aid groups, not political action organizations.”

Everywhere the legislation was introduced, activists fought back. In New York, Jews for Mask Rights published an open letter signed by nearly 3,000. Maryland activists organized and created an action kit that could feasibly be replicated in other states wherever model anti-masking legislation is introduced. And in Nassau County, New York, where a no-mask ban is in effect, several No King’s Day protesters defied the law amidst a heavy police presence.

And in Illinois, a coalition of groups mobilized to develop model legislation to permanently ban mask bans, in an effort to “future-proof the right to mask for all Illinoisans.” While the bill, titled The Protective Medical Equipment Freedom Act, stalled in the most recent legislative session, the group will again try to move the bill this November, and is asking for the community’s help.

As organizing to protect mask rights hopefully continues to grow across movements, we can look for guidance to the principles and praxis of disability justice. For example, disability justice ethics center those most vulnerable to and captured by these systems and oppressions, including susceptibility to COVID and other airborne illnesses, as well as crackdowns on immigrants and political dissent. Dr. Ruth Gilmore’s definition of racism in Golden Gulag as “the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” clearly highlights these intersections.

Refusing and resisting racial criminal pathologization in the form of mask bans is also an anti-capitalist practice. As Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant argue in Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, “There exists a core relation of health to capitalism called extractive abandonment. And in the process of constructing, destroying, and reconstructing health, the state itself is made…” At the root of this praxis is a rejection of the politics of disposability. Writing in Blind Archive, Adler-Bolton notes, “The problem is also that it is impossible for any person under capitalism to be ‘healthy’—not just those already sick, ill, mad, or disabled. None of us are well, none of us are safe.”

And, simultaneously, “we keep us safe.” Pitting people and or campaigns against one another is a tried and true division strategy by state powers, as is the goal of political agendas like Project 2025 and Project Esther. Focusing on carve outs for “health exceptions” risks setting disability praxis and collective care and liberation against Palestine liberation, which is a false dichotomy.

Coalitional organizing against the politics of disposability can embrace interdependence and “recognizing wholeness beyond capitalism,” with the horizon of collective liberation embodied in the disability justice principles articulated by Sins Invalid. Through centering abolition and disability justice, we refuse any moral or legal opening for anti-masking policies, or any discourse that neutralizes the harm for some, and not others.

As disabled writers and activists have long pointed out, the liberation of Palestine is inextricable from disability justice. To resist mask bans is to resist imperialism and racial criminal pathologization through disability justice praxis, from Los Angeles to Gaza.

ABOUT

Liat Ben-Moshe is an activist-scholar working at the intersection of incarceration, abolition and disability/madness. She is an Associate Professor of Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago, author of DecarceratingDisability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (2020) and co-editor of Disability Incarcerated (2014). For more of her work: https://www.liatbenmoshe.com/

Leah Harris is a writer and journalist whose work focuses on madness and sanism, mental health law and policy, and psychiatric abolition. Their essays and journalism appear in Passengers Journal, Rooted in Rights, Disability Visibility Project, and the anthologies The Mad Studies Reader and We’ve Been too Patient.