墓地：棉花王国的疾病、权力和资本主义

疾病被认为是人类的一大平等因素，但在战前的新奥尔良，获得对黄热病灾祸的免疫力放大了奴隶资本主义的残酷不平等。
战前的新奥尔良位于美国奴隶和棉花王国的中心。在19世纪，黄热病疫情也在这里导致多达15万人死亡。由于对蚊子传播的病毒——以及贫乏的公共卫生基础设施——知之甚少，一个人抵御这一祸害的唯一办法就是通过在疾病中生存下来“适应”。感染黄热病的人中约有一半死亡。
反复的流行病通过引入另一种等级制度——凯瑟琳·奥利瓦利乌斯（Kathryn Olivarius）称之为“免疫资本”（immunocapital）——加强了新奥尔良严格的种族等级制度正如这项极具独创性的分析所显示的，白人幸存者可以利用他们的免疫力作为证据，证明他们已经支付了他们的生物责任，然后可以追求经济和政治进步。对于被奴役的黑人来说，情况就不同了。免疫力保护他们免受黄热病的侵袭，但作为体现资本，他们看到自己适应环境的社会和金钱价值会累积到白人主人身上。豁免权赋予白人机会和特权，却把被奴役的人降到最艰苦的劳动中。
健康问题——谁有，谁没有，为什么——在一定程度上是政治问题。墓地展示了19世纪强大的奥尔良白人——据称他们都免疫——是如何将这种政治推向极端的。他们构建了一个将致命风险资本化的社会，并将感知免疫与信誉和可靠性等同起来。免疫白种奥尔良人没有试图通过卫生设施或隔离来遏制黄热病，而是利用了这种疾病造成的混乱。因此，在一个以不平等为前提的社会中，免疫歧视成为了另一种形式的偏见，也是资本约束和分化人口的另一种渠道。
Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom
Disease is thought to be a great leveler of humanity, but in antebellum New Orleans acquiring immunity from the scourge of yellow fever magnified the brutal inequities of slave-powered capitalism.
Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of America’s slave and cotton kingdoms. It was also where yellow fever epidemics killed as many as 150,000 people during the nineteenth century. With little understanding of mosquito-borne viruses―and meager public health infrastructure―a person’s only protection against the scourge was to “get acclimated” by surviving the disease. About half of those who contracted yellow fever died.
Repeated epidemics bolstered New Orleans’s strict racial hierarchy by introducing another hierarchy, what Kathryn Olivarius terms “immunocapital.” As this highly original analysis shows, white survivors could leverage their immunity as evidence that they had paid their biological dues and could then pursue economic and political advancement. For enslaved Blacks, the story was different. Immunity protected them from yellow fever, but as embodied capital, they saw the social and monetary value of their acclimation accrue to their white owners. Whereas immunity conferred opportunity and privilege on whites, it relegated enslaved people to the most grueling labor.
The question of good health―who has it, who doesn’t, and why―is always in part political. Necropolis shows how powerful nineteenth-century white Orleanians―all allegedly immune―pushed this politics to the extreme. They constructed a society that capitalized mortal risk and equated perceived immunity with creditworthiness and reliability. Instead of trying to curb yellow fever through sanitation or quarantines, immune white Orleanians took advantage of the chaos disease caused. Immunological discrimination therefore became one more form of bias in a society premised on inequality, one more channel by which capital disciplined and divided the population.

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