Recently, while researching the history of school desegregation, I came across a document written in 1975 by Robert B. McKay, a program director at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. McKay noted that the high point of federal efforts to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) appeared to have passed, and support for policies aimed at ensuring equal educational opportunities for all the nation’s children was waning. Segregationists had convinced many Americans that “forced busing” and other inconveniences that resulted from reassigning some students to different schools were massive violations of their rights. President Gerald Ford expressed opposition to court-ordered school desegregation, and congressional representatives, under pressure from angry constituents, were scrambling to enact legislation to prohibit the use of busing for integrating schools. Observing that two decades of progress toward racial justice was about to unravel, McKay wrote: “The turnaround in attitude and practice is a tragedy of the first magnitude.”

That phrase echoed in my mind last week when Governor Steve Sisolak lifted mask mandates in Nevada, even though COVID-19 test positivity rates and community transmission remain high throughout the state. As The Indy reported on Thursday, the decision contradicted guidance from state and federal health officials as well as earlier commitments from the governor to base policy-making on clear scientific benchmarks. Instead, as in other states where Democratic governors have rescinded mask mandates, the rationale is political. People are tired, the reasoning goes. Many are already breaking the law by not wearing masks in public spaces, and some have engaged in organized, violent opposition. Across the globe, white supremacists and anti-government extremists have exploited the pandemic to recruit new adherents to their cause by framing public health measures as a form of government “tyranny.” Sisolak lent legitimacy to such views when he stated that it was time to “give people back some freedom” and “weigh the benefits of the mask versus the difficulties or the downside of wearing a mask.”

I just wonder what kind of scale gives more weight to the minor discomfort some people feel wearing masks than to those who could pass from this world gasping for breath after contracting COVID. Since December 2019, 77.7 million people have caught the virus and more than 900,000 have died from it in the United States. Around 167,000 children have lost at least one parent or primary caregiver to the disease. Health care workers are exhausted and traumatized from successive waves of the pandemic that have overwhelmed hospital capacity in many communities and forced them to witness harrowing suffering and death, day after day.

Much of this could have been prevented if more people had taken a few simple actions that help limit the spread of disease: wearing masks, social distancing, and getting vaccinated. But large numbers of Americans refused to adopt such measures because of their antipathy toward government, amplified by a right-wing noise machine that denigrated people who performed these basic civic duties or encouraged others to do so. The misinformation spread by anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers effectively sabotaged the nation’s COVID response, prolonging the pandemic and causing hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. 

The human costs of this are compounded by potentially serious political costs reminiscent of the 1970s, when the nation gave up on school desegregation. In that decade, lawmakers caved to pressure from citizens who argued that the federal government’s attempts to ensure access to high-quality education for all children violated parents’ rights, increased racial tensions, and drove middle-class families out of the public schools. Racial equality was not worth the disruption caused by redrawing districts or changing school assignments, they argued, and parents should have the freedom to choose where their children went to school. Support for federal intervention on behalf of racial justice declined as narratives framing the enforcement of civil rights legislation as insidious government overreach prevailed. Congress and the courts ultimately allowed schools to resegregate, and today there is zero appetite among policy makers for addressing the deep racial and economic inequities that still infect the nation’s education system.

Prematurely lifting mask mandates in the face of political pressures, rather than in accordance with scientific evidence, is another “tragedy of the first magnitude.” More people will get sick, die, or suffer the debilitating consequences of long COVID because of these decisions. More children will lose their parents. More nurses, teachers, and other essential workers will quit their jobs, leaving employers scrambling to fill positions. More people will avoid going out, and businesses that rely on in-person interaction will suffer. More fighting will break out in public spaces between the masked and unmasked because of the politicization of a piece of cloth. 

Beyond all of that, mass death will be normalized. If new variants emerge and cause COVID cases to spike again, political leaders will not easily be able to reinstate or enforce mandatory public health measures, and it will be left to individuals to decide for themselves whether to mask up again or not. We’ve seen where “freedom of choice” plans led in the past, and it was not in the direction of ensuring justice or protecting other citizens. Just like in the 1970s, capitulating to far right extremists will have lasting political and social consequences. In the next pandemic, federal and state officials may be too afraid to take the measures necessary to stop the spread of disease and save lives. More likely, they will not even try.

Greta de Jong is a Foundation Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900–1970 (2002), Invisible Enemy: The African American Freedom Struggle after 1965 (2010), and You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement (2016).