Pandemic solidarity rhetoric named groups previously demeaned as essential workers.

Evidence

With no warning, the message from much of our political and corporate classes changed diametrically. It turned out we were a society after all, that the young and healthy should make sacrifices for the old and ill; that we should wear masks as an act of solidarity with them, if not for ourselves; and that we all should applaud and thank the very people—many of them Black, many of them women, many of them born in poorer countries—whose lives and labor had been most systematically devalued, discounted, and demeaned before the pandemic. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 768

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The abrupt inversion of who counts as essential connects to the reader’s article on trees as infrastructure—here Klein describes a parallel infrastructure-of-care reversal, and the ‘made and unmade by one another’ framing resonates with the grafting/interdependence thread in ‘Grafting & Growth.’