COVID “death pits”: US nursing homes, racial capitalism, and the urgency of antiracist eldercare

Abstract

Rampant COVID-19 outbreaks in US nursing homes have presented a massive biosecurity problem for the nation, bringing into stark relief the racialized stratification of eldercare administration and long-term care. This paper, by foregrounding the ways racial capitalism drives the chronic devaluation of nursing home residents and staff, provides an overview of how racism and ageism operate geographically through political ecologies of COVID in relation to the organization of the nursing home industry, medical scarcity, long-term care labor, and pandemic response to elderly populations. The inventory tracks some of the ways nursing homes condition race-based futures by arranging eldercare populations, workers, and spaces for extraction, abandonment, and blame for the pandemic. In doing so, it demonstrates the need for more equitable forms of aging and more just institutions of eldercare that put the social welfare of the aged, especially that of BIPOC elders and caregivers, above corporate compliance and financial performance that reproduce racial hierarchy and white supremacy in US healthcare. The article concludes by engaging with Black feminist data analytics and several policy efforts that challenge the structurally racist conditions of caregiving, pandemic response, and securitized segregation of the aged.