AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We now bring you Part 2 of our conversation with Steven Thrasher, chair of social justice in reporting at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, author of The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide; his forthcoming book, The Overseer Class: Representation as Repression. Steven Thrasher is assistant professor of journalism at Northwestern, but Northwestern canceled his classes and suspended him when it put him under investigation after Republicans attacked him by name during congressional hearings about the Gaza protests on college campuses this past semester.

We talked about that in Part 1 of our conversation. In Part 2, we want to focus on Steven Thrasher’s work on COVID and The Viral Underclass, the name of his book, The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide.

So, we’re years into the pandemic, Professor Thrasher. On X, your handle is “Dr. Thrasher still cares about Covid & Gaza.” Thank you for staying with us. Explain.

STEVEN THRASHER: I have that my handle because we are losing focus in a lot of the mainstream media about these two issues. And so, I think it’s really important to keep taking COVID precautions. I just saw last week the national numbers, which I’m sure are an undercount, showed about 1,250 COVID deaths. We’ve had four or five weeks in the United States straight with more than a thousand deaths. So it’s important to remember that. And, of course, it’s important to keep remembering Gaza, because as the presidential election gears up, political news is moving more and more away from Gaza.

And these two things are connected. We see this massive outbreak of the viral underclass in Gaza, which, of course, has been going on for decades for various reasons. But right now we’re seeing really acute outbreaks of polio, of hepatitis, of various different kinds of infectious disease.

And there’s also this really disturbing connection between preventive measures, because there’s been such a strong backlash around the use of masks because they were used in protests at places like Columbia University or my university, Northwestern. That has led to a much more vicious backlash against masks broadly. And so, you see here in New York City that Kathy Hochul is calling for mask bans. Out on Long Island, one of the counties had a mask ban. Eric Adams is also calling for mask bans.

And so, there’s this real connection between the tactics for preventing both being doxxed by protesters, but also — which a lot of protesters I’ve seen — I’ve been in five or six of these different Gaza solidarity camps — they really do care about communal care, and they think about: How do we take care of our communities? So, part of that is masking. And the failure to learn the lessons from COVID, to act with a communal mindset, is also having an effect with the explosions of violence and backlash happening around those who are protesting for an end to the genocide in Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: And I should say, Professor Thrasher, that you are in a separate studio from me. You came in wearing a mask, only took it off when you’re in a room without other people. You’re talking about Nassau County in Long Island that just passed a law that said people can no longer mask unless it’s for religious or health reasons. And groups like the New York Civil Liberties Union and others are saying this is discriminatory, and disability rights groups. Explain what this means to you. I mean, just a year ago we were being told we had to mask.

STEVEN THRASHER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: People are still, some of us, including me — on the subways, I always wear a mask — are afraid that we’ll soon be told we’re not allowed to wear a mask?

STEVEN THRASHER: It’s really disturbing and scary. And what some of these entities are doing is they’ll put in some kind of health exemption and say, “Well, you can have it if you need it.” But who’s going to define that? The Democrats — the DNC, I think, said that people could wear masks if they had a disability. So, who’s going to enforce that?

So, the problems with this are multifold. First, it discourages people from masking in the first place. It makes them scared. I was wearing a mask. I was flying yesterday, coming through customs, and I had this thought process as I was going through it. You know, is the customs officer going to think I’m suspicious because I’m wearing a mask and not taking it down until he tells me I have to? So, there are ways that it will —

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, what you’re doing is protecting him.

STEVEN THRASHER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: I think, I mean, for you, you’re exposed to a number of people. But for him, he’s exposed to thousands of people every day.

STEVEN THRASHER: Exactly. And so, the Nassau County, I think it’s controlled by Republicans, but many of these entities are controlled by Democrats. And it’s happening at universities. The head of the University of California, which I think is the largest university system in the country, they’ve said no masks on campus unless you have — unless you have a disability. So, who’s going to decide that? The same cops that are beating up students? And so, this is a really, really dangerous situation because it’s dissuading people from being able to mask, but it’s also putting the power of what public health is into the hands of police officers, and that’s a really dangerous place for it to be.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about why you went to Greece this summer?

STEVEN THRASHER: I started going when I was a graduate student. I ended up, in The Viral — going back to write a chapter of The Viral Underclass about Zak Kostopoulos, who was an HIV activist who was killed in a very violent mob killing including several police officers, and, unfortunately, whose life really illustrated a lot of what I was writing about in The Viral Underclass because he was someone who was subjected to state violence, addiction, homophobia and, of course, was also affected by HIV.

And so, I was going this summer to work on my next book. I also find that, like James Baldwin and others, it really helps me just to get outside of the United States to not think about all of the horrible things that are happening here. But it’s also — it’s interesting being in a different society and seeing some of the ways that they have some of the same problems and some that are very different.

So, I’m a very social person. I don’t eat inside in restaurants because I mask. And so, Greece is actually a place where almost everything happens outside, so I’m actually able to have a social life by being able to eat outside and socialize outside with other people. But then it’s also interesting to see that there are some very different approaches to public healthing. Lots of people still in Athens are masking on the Metro. Almost all social activity happens outside. So there’s a very, very different way of engaging with viral risk. And then it’s interesting seeing how, on the public health side of my life, how people are dealing with sterile syringes, with harm reduction campaigns, how they’re continuing to deal with COVID, how they’re dealing with MPX, or monkeypox, which is something that I look at because it affects men who have sex with men and the LGBTQ research side of my life. So it’s helpful to see how different things like that are dealt with there.

But for the most part, it’s a really good place for me to write and also to feel safer socializing because everything is happening outside. And then, when you come back to the United States, you’re being told that you might be, you know, arrested or detained or kicked out of your classroom if you’re wearing a mask or trying to engage in very basic harm reduction techniques.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you could talk more about how Europe deals with COVID right now? And do you say we’re still in the pandemic?

STEVEN THRASHER: Oh yeah, we’re definitely in a pandemic. To give some historical sense to it, there are about 40, I think, the last time I looked, 40 ongoing pandemics that are happening as classified by the World Health Organization and the United Nations. And pandemics go on for a really long time. We’re still in the HIV/AIDS pandemic. It was first declared about 40 years ago, and there’s been medication to deal with it for about 30 years, but there’s still about a million — the better part of a million deaths every year. So, various different kinds of viruses, MPX, monkeypox, different types of hepatitis, H1N1 — there are lots of pandemics going on. And I think that our broad perception as a public, of course, is, understandably, very influenced by COVID. And so, I think people will say, “Oh, you know, there were a million deaths over the first two years, and then things dropped down a fair amount after vaccination.” They think that the pandemic isn’t still there. But to give some historical context to it, as I said, AIDS is still a pandemic. Pandemics can go on for decades. Whenever a infectious disease is moving without being contained and controlled in endemic fashion, then it is continuing to go on.

Different European countries are dealing with it in different ways. Where I was in Greece, I felt like I saw a lot more masks in the subway. But it’s really quite different from just a couple years ago, when you were being asked about things and you had to show that you had been vaccinated and tested. A lot of that, of course, is very similar to how things are playing out here in the United States.

But I continuously feel that whenever I have the chance to leave the United States, I continue to keep seeing how a couple of American phenomenon really shape our effects — really shape our approach to public health that we don’t deal with. One of the biggest of course, is incarceration. Incarceration is one of the biggest drivers of a host of different kinds of infectious diseases, including COVID. Because the U.S. incarcerates so much more than everyone else, they’re creating very — we are creating a lot of vectors for the transmission of disease. And when you leave the United States, you get a little bit of sense about that and how much it affects us.

So, for instance, you have, you know, a very pro-incarceration candidate in Kamala Harris. You have a very pro-incarceration candidate in Donald Trump. And that lack of difference between them is one of the reasons why you don’t see a big difference in lots of kinds of infectious diseases, including COVID, because at that level, they’re not doing the root change work that needs to happen to lower things.

There was a page of The Viral Underclass that’s been going viral online the past week or so on Twitter and Instagram where I write about, when Kamala Harris was the attorney general of California, she fought against the early release of incarcerated firefighters because they said that that was going to cost the state too much money if they actually had to go hire firefighters rather than have incarcerated and imprisoned firefighters to deal with California wildfires.

AMY GOODMAN: Because they got paid so little.

STEVEN THRASHER: They get paid so little. They said that the state of California was saving $100 million a year by having enslaved incarcerated firefighters. And if they had to release them early — because all those firefighters are actually people who have had good behavior. You know, they’ve been moved into that job because they are quite trustworthy. But her office was arguing that this wouldn’t be — this would make California very unsafe, not because the firefighters were a danger to their community, but because they didn’t have the money, the $100 million, to actually pay other firefighters to do this work.

AMY GOODMAN: She would later say that that was her office, and she wasn’t aware of what they were arguing.

STEVEN THRASHER: That’s correct, although I think that if it had been something good, she probably would have taken credit for it. But that is correct. You know, but the point stands that this is inside — you know, whether or not she knew about it personally, she was a democratically elected member of the Democratic Party in that job. She’s now running to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for the presidency of the United States. And so, at a policy level, whether or not they’re talking about vibes or their feelings or whatever, at a policy level, the Democrats’ propensity for incarcerating people, at the border, in the incarceration process, you know, as firefighters, at the state level, at the federal level, those create the conditions for ongoing viral transmission. And as long as neither party is dealing with those in the United States, one of our major engines of disease transmission is going to continue to outpace much of the rest of the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, speaking of going viral, I’m going to talk about viral in a very different way. The last time we talked to you was a picture that went viral. And it was the picture — I think the heading was — header was, “What Is Violet Affleck Trying to Tell Us?” She’s the daughter of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner. She was photographed with some very pointed reading material. It was your book, The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide. But you have just finished another book, your forthcoming book, that has not yet been published, which is going to be called The Overseer Class: Representation as Repression. Can you give us a sneak peek, a sneak summary of what you’re arguing?

STEVEN THRASHER: Sure. So, The Overseer Class began when I started noticing — after I was working in Ferguson, and I started noticing Black cops everywhere, in politics, on television and in movies. And I started realizing that the figure of the Black cop was being used to legitimize policing as a project, the more America was getting critical of this. I saw this a lot in 2014 and then in 2020 with the George Floyd uprising. Again, America was very open to the idea of, if not completely abolishing the police, then certainly defunding the police or taking power away from it. And as policing itself was on the ropes, the Black cop figure was everywhere.

So, The Overseer Class is about when people from marginalized communities amass power by cracking the skulls of their own. And so, even though it was not physically pleasant at times, the events of the past year have actually been very informative to me as I’ve written this book. For instance, while I was at North — when I was at Northwestern stepping between the police and our students, it was the Black chief of police, who’s also a vice president of the university, who physically attacked me personally. And I started noticing there are a lot of Black police chiefs at these universities. Their percentage far, you know, goes above the percentage of Black faculty or Black students.

And so, I’m thinking in this book about what is the work of people who were called overseers on plantations who kept the plantation from revolting or rebelling. You know, how is that a useful analogy to think about the role of Black police officers, to think about people in government who really make their power from trying to keep their particular group down? How does this operate in higher education? How does this operate in kind of the media we see and the media we consume?

So, yeah, I turned in a draft. And the last year, unfortunately, has been very informative by seeing how identity is often used to try to keep down different kinds of groups, Jewish students, Muslim students, African American students, LGBTQ students, but often people from their group, that shared identity, is weaponized to suppress their dissent, whenever their dissent has something to do with the war machine and violence against Palestinians, but actually violence against all kinds of people around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, with your current book, The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide, that examines the ways HIV/AIDS and other viruses strike people in communities with deliberate intention, coming now through COVID — and I didn’t say at the end of COVID — what are your observations since you published this book?

STEVEN THRASHER: The most central thing I’ve seen is that care work is the most important work of our times. And I feel like there were two roads that we could have taken broadly as a society after COVID. There was this incredibly powerful opportunity in which all, you know, the 7, 8 billion people on this planet were having some version of a shared experience at the same time and responding to it not in exactly the same ways, but similar ways. And it was quite obvious that our fates were connected to each other. The idea that, you know, I’m an individual and you’re an individual and our fates don’t intersect is completely blown out of the water when the air that we breathe can kill one of us or kill the other, and we realize we have to share resources and we have to work together.

And so, that really could have laid the groundwork for a different kind of societal approach to how we looked at health broadly, particularly around infectious disease, but also, you know, we can think about situations like the suffering in Gaza, because I was raised and trained by and educated by gay activists who — gay activists who were very active with HIV/AIDS, and their work around HIV and AIDS convinced gay people in New York City, San Francisco, other places, that we had to work — that they had to work together to make sure that the viral load stayed low, that it wasn’t just about whether one person or another person uses a condom, but we need to, like, make sure the viral load is low for the whole community, and that also means that we have to make sure everyone has healthcare, they have a safe place to live, that they’re able to, you know, live lives of dignity. And you can — I can really feel that ethos whenever I interact with ACT UP activists and gay activists. And so, I thought that could have a similar effect on the whole society when the whole society was being affected by COVID. And indeed, I do think that a lot more people were radicalized to understand how connected we are to each other, and that we’re going to see the fruit from that over decades, over how teenagers or college students or whatever were affected by this process, how it influences how they do politics and live their lives for the rest of their lives.

Unfortunately, there’s been a really, really swift backlash, which I think in some ways is about people just feeling so uncomfortable and sad and despondent about what the past few years have been that they want to put it completely out of sight and out of mind to the best of their ability. And so, in so doing, they’re like, “We don’t want to see masks. We don’t want to think about masks. We just don’t want to think about any of this.” And that’s having a bad effect on other things. It seems to be leading to lower rates of vaccination for various different kinds of things for children, from their parents. It seems also to be making a lot of people just say, “I don’t want to think about that, and I’m not going to deal with it at all.” And that creates worse public health outcomes for people.

So, I didn’t expect the denial to be as swift. As I said, like, having been brought up by ACT UP activists, I thought that this is going to really inspire people. And instead, there’s a lot of discomfort of “Now I don’t want to think about any public health stuff. Everyone is an individual. And I don’t to have — I don’t want to be responsible for anyone else, so I’m just going to make my own decisions.” So, that’s been a really sad and difficult thing to see.

But it’s not over. And Gaza has shown, with these student camps, that there’s a lot of interest in young people in thinking about collective care. And if we’re going to address Israel and Palestine, climate change, you know, any number of things in the world, there has to be an ethos of communal care. And I hope in my heart of hearts that the communal care that a lot of people tapped into in the COVID years is going to influence how they can approach these various things that we deal with around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Steven Thrasher, I want to thank you so much for being with us, the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg chair of social justice in reporting, with an emphasis on issues relevant to the LGBTQ+ community, author of The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide; his forthcoming book, The Overseer Class: Representation as Repression.