ABSTRACT
This article examines abolitionist strategies for COVID safety that present alternatives to the logic of racial profiling and risk management that are at the basis of the state's COVID regulations. As in previous crises, queer, antiracist, and other self-organized movements are leading the transformation of safety and the development of new societal visions. This article is grounded in interviews with activists in Berlin who critique a necropolitical COVID policy that treats Black people, migrants, and people of color as infectious rulebreakers—as risks rather than risk groups. This is explored with regard to three media and political debates: The so-called taboo regarding the high number of migrant COVID patients in German ICUs, the vaccination campaign in the so-called hotspots, and the protests against anti-Black racism and the commemoration of victims of the racist mass murder in Hanau (Hesse)—which politicians and journalists declared to be superspreader events. Nevertheless, it is in the conjuncture of pandemic and protest that new possibilities of care and collectivity are arising that open up worlds beyond racial capitalism.
