Safer Air / Covid Agreements
SHARED AIR GUIDELINES
- Please wear a well-fitting high-quality mask/respirator inside at all times.
- If you come in wearing a surgical or cloth mask please replace it with a provided high-quality mask/respirator.
- There are masks available for free at the door (please sanitize your hands before taking one).
- All food and drink must be consumed outside or taken to-go.
- If you have symptoms or feel sick, please call or knock instead of coming inside. If you need something, we will come to you!
COMPLETE AGREEMENTS
While we recognize that perfection is antithetical to liberatory practice, so too is inaction. This means we have to struggle the best we can to acknowledge and act upon the intersecting material consequences of the pandemic. Because we know how Covid and other airborne infections spread and harm people’s bodies, we have established the following Safer Air / Covid Agreements within the space:
- In order to respect the health autonomy of ourselves and each other, we agree to wear high-quality[1] masks/respirators at all times while indoors, as they are the easiest and cheapest tool for infection prevention. We agree masks/respirators should be freely available to anyone entering the space and agree it is our responsibility to make sure that we have a variety of these to offer. We will support any person who truly cannot mask in our space[2]. When we have a culture of everyone masking, those who cannot mask will be more protected by all of us.
- We agree to run air filters inside the space in order to clean the air of viral particles during open hours and programs. We agree to monitor CO2 levels indoors, and keep doors and windows open or regularly cycle fresh air into the space to ensure near-outdoor air-quality at all times. These are further steps to create a lower-risk environment for liberatory education and gathering.
- We agree to ask ourselves, our partners, our friends, and our neighbors using the space to self-evaluate their own current health status before entering. (“Am I feeling unwell? Am I sick? Am I sneezing, coughing, or running a fever?”) This isn’t to exclude any of us or shame anyone for being ill but to break chains of viral transmission. We remember that there is always another day or way to connect, and that in-person gathering while unwell is not worth potentially endangering each other. If anyone in our community becomes ill or sick, we agree to offer care, access, and resources safely within our capacity – for example: supplies or services offered by the space.
- We agree to maintain special outside pockets and spaces that are for maskless activities that we all need and/or want. These bubbles are clearly marked and communicated to guests and visitors. We agree to protect the integrity of mask-on and mask-off spaces.
- Blackbird and its stewards commit to maintaining an educational stance towards sharing Safer Air / Covid information with others. We have printed and digital resources to share with folks. This helps us affirm the space’s agreements and keep us all engaged in forming a militant and compassionate space.
Thank you for your support in helping make our dream of another world possible!
WHY WE CREATED THE BLACKBIRD SAFER AIR / COVID AGREEMENTS
Disability Justice
Many bodies are disabled now. All bodies eventually become disabled if they do not die first. Our understanding of disability justice rests on that knowledge. We are committed to shaping the world in a way that centers accessibility, equity, and expanding our consciousness. Making the air safer is part of our responsibility for actualizing disability justice.
Scientific Research
While we understand and often take a skeptical stance towards settler-capitalist institutions and medical expertise sponsored by multinational pharmaceutical companies, there is a broad body of evidence that shows the novel, puzzling[3], and debilitating[4] effects of Covid on the body. We refuse to deny this unfolding reality that is deeply affecting our communities. We believe it is our responsibility to act with regard to the evolving research and maintain clean air.
Interdependence
Covid is spread through shared air[5] – and so Covid precautions CANNOT be reduced to just a matter of personal choice. We recognize the intimate nature of sharing indoor air and the reality of airborne, viral transmission (such as aerosolized Covid and measles) and of pollution (such as wildfire/cigarette smoke and car exhaust). Our understanding of interdependence articulates an imperative to monitor and clean all shared air. All air on Earth is shared.
Militant Solidarity / Power Dynamics
Settler-capitalist-imperialism and its extractive and industrial systems poison the lungs and circulatory systems of the planet generally, and of Black, Indigenous, Brown, and Latinx[6] communities specifically – and disproportionately. Masks, access to dignified housing, remote work arrangements, respirators, air purifiers, vaccinations, and accessible tests are distributed to the most privileged residents of European and white colonizing states at the expense of the rest of the world and marginalized people everywhere[7]. The ongoing genocides in Gaza, Sudan, the Congo, and beyond are not only poisoning air, water, and land, but also systematically destroying health care infrastructure and denying access to vaccines, personal protective equipment, and respirators[8]. As housing costs and numbers of unhoused people continue to soar, many people are forced to congregate in high Covid transmission settings with less and less access to protection and treatment[9]. As borders are closed and militarized, the carceral colonial regime and its migrant detention apparatus confine migrants and refugees into high transmission settings[10]. These harms have especially hit queer, trans, and Two Spirit people[11] across other class identities, who are already targeted by violence and forced to the margins of capitalist society. Disabled, mad[12], and immunocompromised people are subjected to ableist physical infrastructures, inadequate health care, and involuntary congregate settings[13] where it is difficult to avoid contracting Covid[14]. The harm of Covid mirrors and multiplies along existing pathways, structures, and dynamics of state violence and domination. We are committed to creating a space where we share air on terms that care for one another and provide an alternative to and refute as best we can the settler-capitalist-imperialist hegemony and its concomitant structures of harm.
Additionally, the Blackbird Safer Air / Covid Agreements are informed by our Blackbird Principles of Unity[15] and by striving to create a space that is liberatory and care-centered in its practices. There has been a lot of social and economic pressure since 2022 for people and places to relax their use of precautions[16] in indoor spaces, even in leftist and anarchist spaces.
We understand this deescalation of care as inherently tied to a cultural forgetting/denial[17] created via the manufacturing of consent by the government of the so-called United States of America and this country’s capitalist class. We also understand there is a culture of normalized ableism that undermines the ability of our communities to defend themselves in the face of social pressure to capitulate to structures of harm.
Responsibility for the common reality that people share is a radical act of care and unequivocally antagonistic to capitalist modes of production and reproduction.
We believe that our beloveds can come to the realization that masking inside during open, public, community-based events and spaces makes the most sense not only to protect our most impacted friends and neighbors, but also to protect everyone in the shadow of an unpredictable and novel airborne pathogen.
While masking does have material costs and environmental impacts (that we are committed to addressing), these are dwarfed by the costs exacted upon those trying to protect each other by the superstructure of capitalism, the primacy of accumulation as an ethic, and a pervasive culture of individualism. Alienation and ostracism drive Covid-cautious people further to the margins of society, and businesses face an exodus of customers and even closure if they do not concede mask-requirements in favor of “normal” and “frictionless” transactions. We believe these forces of social and economic marginalization exemplify the violence of settler-capitalist hegemony, and must be resisted to the fullest of our ability.
BLACKBIRD SAFER AIR / COVID AGREEMENTS
As a society, we do not fully understand the long term impact[18] of a virus which has killed 1+ million people in the so-called US in the last 4 years (an official number and likely an undercount), and has caused millions of people to become chronically ill[19] and/or disabled with Long Covid[20] after numerous reinfections.
We believe there should be spaces that continue to acknowledge this reality of mass-death and disablement and protect against its ongoing violence. We have chosen to make Blackbird reflect this vision.
Thank you for your support in helping make our dream of another world possible.
RATIFIED BY THE BLACKBIRD COLLECTIVIZATION COMMITTEE ON
August 3, 2024
Footnotes and References:
[1] “High-quality” means well-fitting, KN95 or equivalent or better filtration.
[2] Examples of inability to mask include having a health condition that causes serious difficulty breathing while masking or experiencing severe anxiety/PTSD that is incompatible with masking.
We also recognize that in certain explicit health emergencies, such as in being dire need of food or experiencing dehydration, while also being at risk heat exhaustion/stroke or freezing/frostbite during a severe weather event, may cause someone to need to eat or drink indoors while pulling down their mask to take a bite or a sip, instead of eating or drinking outdoors. Additionally, acute trauma activation is most likely incompatible with masking.
[3] Covid and cancer risk: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10518417
[4] Covd and the heart, brain, and more: https://www.heart.org/en/news/2024/01/16/how-covid-19-affects-your-heart-brain-and-other-organs
[5] Covid and shared air: https://covid.ri.gov/prevent/ventilate
[6] We use the term “Latinx” in solidarity with those who use it for its expansiveness to represent queer identities, for its rejection of Afro-Latinx and Indigenous language erasure, and in intentional resistance to both the gender binary and to conformity to European settler colonial Spanish: “In Defense of Latinx” https://aflx.community/in-defense-of-latinx
[7] So-called US tries to deny masks to so-called Latin America: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52161032
A Letter of Resistance from the Magónista Women’s Commission of the Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca: A report from Magónistas on the impact of COVID-19 in Mexico" https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-a-letter-of-resistance-from-the-magonista-women-s-commission-of-the-popular-indigenou
Global disparities in Covid vaccination rates and resources allocation: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2049080121005707
Global inequity in Covid infection, care, and death: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(23)00054-8
Structural racism and Covid health outcomes for Black and Hispanic folks in the so-called US: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10147367
[8] The Zionist Entity destroying hospitals in Gaza: https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/01/1145317
Polio and Covid rates in Gaza, Sudan, and Congo: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2021/01/denying-covid19-vaccines-to-palestinians-exposes-israels-institutionalized-discrimination
[9] Covid rates among people who are unhoused: https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/migrated_legacy_files/195026/COVIDIB.pdf, https://endhomelessness.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Covid-Fact-Sheet-3.25.2020-2.pdf
Lack of access to treatment and general health disparities: https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12913-024-10971-8
[10] Covid in migrant detention centers: https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/72/1/153/5849328
[11] Long Covid and trans folks: https://www.transresearch.org.au/post/long-covid
[12] We use the term “mad” in solidarity with psychiatric survivors, psychiatric abolitionists, and others who have reclaimed it in refutation and rejection of the medicalization of distress, which is the foundation of the psychiatric system and the basis of its carceral approach: “Mad Activists: The Language We Use Reflects Our Desire for Change” https://www.madinamerica.com/2021/09/mad-activists-langauge
[13] "Mad Liberation Front: Madness, Disability, and Abolition” https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/madness-disability-and-abolition
[14] Disproportionate disabled Covid transmission: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7963443
[15] Blackbird Principles of Unity: https://blackbirdinfoshop.com/principles_of_unity
[16] Updated WHO Covid guidance “may encourage risky behavior”: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/updated-who-covid-prevention-guidance-may-endanger-rather-protect-some-experts-say
[17] Covid death rate undercounting: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/21/us-covid-death-rate-testing-reporting
[18] Risks associated with Covid reinfection: https://time.com/6553340/covid-19-reinfection-risk
[19] Effects of Long Covid: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00846-2
[20] Rates and impacts of Long Covid, including among marginalized people: https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/as-recommendations-for-isolation-end-how-common-is-long-covid