Underpaid, Ignored, and Essential: A Coronavirus Sketchbook

Underpaid, Ignored, and Essential: A Coronavirus Sketchbook

Underpaid, Ignored, and Essential: A Coronavirus Sketchbook

Drawing the workers who cannot stay home.

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Quarantined in my apartment, I put out a call on Twitter saying that I wanted to draw those workers who could not stay at home: delivery people, shelf stockers at grocery stores, nurses, janitors, and cashiers. In the next few hours, more than 50 people wrote to me. I drew these portraits from the selfies they sent me in their work clothes. These are the underpaid, ignored, essential workers who have always made the earth move—and now are forced to risk their lives doing it.

This project was made possible in part by support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

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Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets. 

Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.  

As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war. 

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