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Public Masking
A perspective from T. H. M. Gellar-Goad
This week, the state legislature passed a bill to modify a public-health exemption from North Carolina’s anti-masking law, replacing the pandemic-era wording “the physical health or safety of the wearer or others” with a more narrow allowance of “medical and surgical grade” for “preventing the spread of contagious disease.” Democratic Governor Roy Cooper is expected to veto, and it’s unclear whether Republicans, although they’ve gerrymandered themselves a veto-proof majority in both chambers, will manage to override. If they do, there will soon be escalated punishments in North Carolina for, e.g., wearing a COVID mask while blocking traffic as part of a protest. The original version of the legislation simply eliminated the public-health exemption, which would have made it illegal for immunocompromised people to protect themselves by wearing masks in public places.
You might not realize it, but it’s already illegal to wear a mask in public in this state, with a few exceptions: for a seasonal holiday, for a theatrical production (including Mardi Gras and masquerade balls), for work, for government-registered secret societies, and for health and safety reasons. Advocates for the bill aren’t hiding their motives. They’re reacting to student protesters on university campuses who have used COVID masks not only to avoid contagion but also to shield their identity from police surveillance. Yet the Republicans in the Senate initially rejected several attempts by Democrats to modify the bill to allow immunocompromised people to continue wearing masks in public without fear of arrest.
The state legislature’s action on masks is just the latest front in an ongoing culture war over masks, one that extends back way farther than the maskers and anti-maskers of the early COVID era. Why, after all, is public masking illegal?
It’s not just in our state; mask bans are on the books in eleven other U.S. states, in Washington, D.C., and in at least a dozen other countries in one form or another. In recent pre-pandemic memory, Guy Fawkes masks were all over the place in pro-democracy protests as part of the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movement, and led to bans of those particular masks in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
As I discuss in my recently published book Masks — available for free download at tinyurl.com/masksbook — the North Carolina law was made in 1953 specifically to combat the influence of the Ku Klux Klan. (Back then, it wasn’t surgical masks and N-95s that were exempted for public health, but rather gas masks, because of the Cold War.) The government hoped that, if secret societies were required to register in order to wear masks in public, it would be easier for law enforcement to track KKK membership and reduce the Klan’s racist terrorism.
What’s different now from 1953 is the development of facial-recognition technology, a massive leap in the capacity for state surveillance. Our faces, caught on screen and processed by algorithms, have themselves become a kind of mask, one that doesn’t conceal who we are but broadcasts our identity to anyone with the right app. Even Facebook has discontinued its use of facial recognition…
These days, peaceful protesters and violent agitators alike are likely to fall back on masks as a last line of defense of their privacy and personhood. Even more so in the aftermath of the Capitol Insurrection, where a combination of facial recognition and old-fashioned sleuthing of photographs and video captures has led to the arrest and conviction of numerous lawbreakers and traitors.
Wearing a mask grants anonymity. Yet at the same time, wearing a mask can paradoxically disclose an identity. The hood marks the Klan member, the Guy Fawkes mask marks the Arab Spring protester. Governments want neither of these things: no anonymity, no group solidarity, whether the group is a hate group or a protest.
Strange, then, that in an early round of debate on their proposed removal of the public-health exemption for masking, North Carolina Republicans voted down a proposed amendment to ban hate groups like the KKK and the Proud Boys from wearing masks in public.
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