It probably came as no surprise to covid-cautious folks last week that, while speaking to CNN journalist Laura Coates, New York Governor Kathy Hochul expressed a strong desire to enact a mask ban in New York state. A similar ban against face coverings had just been ratified in North Carolina with only a very limited, ambiguous and ineffectual exception carved out for medical mask use. Up the Atlantic seaboard, New York City Mayor Eric Adams had been trying to convince stores to eject masked patrons for well over a year, saying in March of 2023, “We are putting out a clear call to all of our shops, do not allow people to enter the store without taking off their face mask.” Deterred from enacting a full ban at that point due to its potential unconstitutionality, Adams had resorted to framing mask-wearing New Yorkers as a threat to the security of the city, saying of those still masking “We need to stop allowing them to exploit the safety of the pandemic by wearing masks, committing crimes.” (I’m still trying to parse “safety of the pandemic.”)
Hochul, too, has framed mask-wearers as inherently dangerous people against whom those in the city and state must mount a vigorous defense. In last week’s CNN interview, she said “Someone puts on a mask like this and comes in – you don’t know if they’re going to be committing a crime, they’re going to have a gun, or they’re going to be threatening or intimidating you because you are Jewish, which is exactly what happened the other day.” This last point references a June 12 incident on the NYC subway, in which an unmasked (but sunglasses sporting) man riding with fellow war protestors (many of whom sported keffiyehs, some over their mouth and nose) threatened fellow subway car riders, “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist – this is your chance to get out.” After Hochul made the direct link between mask-wearing and protest violence (which North Carolina had also explicitly made, naming their bill the “Unmasking Mobs and Criminals Act,”) Adams quickly followed up with his own statement about protecting Jews by criminalizing mask wearing. No one said anything about scarves or sunglasses, of course.
As a person of Jewish heritage, I’m impressed that Hochul and Adams have so suddenly found their inner Jewish ally. (Note, however, that they’re also promoting an antisemitic trope that all Jews are necessarily Zionists who hold a highly suspect “dual allegiance” to two countries.) But I don’t appreciate being used as an excuse to justify discrimination against other marginalized groups, in at least one of which I also hold membership. And Adams, in fact, had launched his crusade long before religious divisions within the city were inflamed by the events of October 7, the ensuing war, and the appearance of masked pro-Gazan (and sometimes pro-Hamas) protestors at NYC’s Columbia University and other New York schools.
It’s not about crime
In any case, the logic behind Adams’s and Hochul’s fear-mongering seems awfully tenuous. The majority of crimes in the U.S. are non-violent property crimes, during which most perpetrators operate by stealth; the low prevalence of mask-wearing in the U.S. right now means that masks draw attention, something those miscreants are unlikely to want to do.
Mask ban proponents often argue that, in 2020 and 2021, we did see increases in the percentage of criminals who were masking. But that’s what social psychologists call an “illusory correlation,” which is a perceived connection between two things that doesn’t really exist. During the first two years of the pandemic, a much larger percentage of everybody was masking (especially in mandated retail spaces), so it’s no surprise that shoplifters were, too; everyone wants to fit – or blend – in. Adams’s rationale about store criminals makes about as much sense as if he’d enacted a top hat mandate in 2020, and then exclaimed “Say! All the criminals are wearing top hats!” In reality, even when criminals do try to conceal their identity, they’re often likely to go for disguises like wigs and sunglasses, which don’t draw attention. In the case of violent criminals operating with the full awareness of their victims, full-face coverings like ski, silicone or Halloween masks are more often the concealments of choice – and offenders are very unlikely to take them off just because a store owner makes a request, even though several states (both red and blue) already have laws that make masking illegal during the commission of a crime.
Yet Adams still claims that the problem with people wearing medical masks and respirators is that, “Right now, you’re unclear of who’s coming in.” This “know your partner” argument (or in the current case, “know your potential felon”) was popular in the early years of the HIV pandemic, when I was working in risk reduction intervention, and it makes just as little sense now as it did then. This is because “knowing” a person’s full face for a brief moment, like knowing their name and where they went to school in the early HIV years, does not tell you what you actually need to know (which, in this case, is “do you plan to commit a crime against my person or property?”).
Mask ban proponents also hint that masks impede identification of perps after commission of their evil deeds. But when it comes to picking out suspects, people aren’t especially reliable reporters. (I once knew a serial bank robber who never bothered to hide his face; when he was eventually caught, it was due to a ring he’d been wearing.) And medical half-face masks, while having some effect on facial recognition, are not as concealing as you might think. As a 2023 study published in Nature and previous research has found, when identification of a previously masked person is attempted, having the suspect re-don the same type of facial covering as they were originally wearing mitigates impairment challenges the mask might have imposed. That’s not necessarily true of sunglasses (those ubiquitous accessories that one can purchase every few feet along Manhattan streets, and that so many New Yorkers would be lost without). In fact, sunglasses are actually more identity-concealing than medical masks. This is because people’s eyes provide crucial information that helps us recognize them. Indeed, from early infancy, humans tend to gravitate towards other people’s eyes, especially at first glances, in part because “gaze perception” helps us suss out a lot of information that helps us make threat assessments. But the mask/sunglasses data doesn’t even really matter, because when a masked person enters an area full of unmasked folks, all eyes will be on them anyway, as a novel stimulus. When one of these things is not like the others, we look – long and hard.
What about the argument that masks make people more fearful? People often use heuristics (a kind of cognitive shortcut that saves thinking time) to determine whether someone is a threat to them. For example, because racist whites can easily think of examples of violence committed by people of color (because it is reported more and differently on the news than is crime by whites, and because they may be more attuned to such reporting), the availability heuristic may make them more likely to cross the street at night when a black person approaches than when a white one does. Women often do the same when there’s an approaching man, because they’ve heard many examples of man-on-women crime. (To comment on a recent meme: some women may be “choosing the bear” because we’ve heard many fewer stories of grizzly-on-woman crime, even though bears can be quite dangerous in close proximity.) Activated stereotypes also cause people to rely on contextual cues to assess threat – these may include skin color; religious or political apparel or iconography; a scruffy appearance; tattoos, piercings, and the like. But despite Adams and Hochul suggesting otherwise, being able to see someone’s mouth and nose is not on the list of how people generally perform risk assessments (at least, not yet), let alone relevant to the question of whether someone poses a true threat. Unmasked people may be annoyed, put off or politically triggered when they see you in a mask at the movies, but they’re unlikely to be more afraid of you than they otherwise would be.
Masks don’t cause harm; bans do
So mask bans aren’t necessary, in any practical sense, and they won’t be especially effective, in terms of crime reduction. But bans, themselves, are not a victimless crime. Framing mask wearers as criminals cannot but cause more harassment and less access to public spaces than is already occurring, among people who were often already stigmatized and denied entrée due to health and disabilities, as well as to factors such as race. The explicit association that Hochul made to CNN between masks on one hand and “crime,” “guns,” and “threatening or intimidating,” on the other, was irresponsible, but certainly not accidental, any more than the timing of her statements was, coming on the heels of North Carolina’s mask ban passage. Instead of focusing on real ways to reduce crime (for instance, through passage of common-sense gun control measures), blue New York, like its red sister to the south, has resorted to profiling people, and they are picking easy targets. Instead of fueling irrational fears and bigotry (ironically, among those who actually present a real threat to the medically vulnerable), New York’s government should be promoting understanding and acceptance of folks who face health challenges due to chronic disease or socioeconomic health disparities; they should be making public spaces more accessible to and welcoming of those people. Folks are at risk in public spaces and in need of governmental protections, but these are not the folks that mask ban proponents claim.
Adams surely hopes that tying mask bans to the combating of antisemitism in New York City will be a more effective pitch than “store crime” was. But it won’t do anything to resolve actual antisemitic crime, and it throws other vulnerable groups under the bus in the process. The fear of maskers that Hochul mentioned the other day (or: is trying hard to create) isn’t a justification for discrimination. On both sides of America’s political aisle, the populace tends to view politicians on the other side of our growing gulf as fear-stoking for ulterior motives, and to see themselves as impervious to these propagandistic appeals. But the reality is that both sides fear-monger, and both sides fall for it. A journalist asked me recently whether I was surprised that mask bans had become an issue in both a red and a blue state. My answer: No.
Adams has acknowledged having had “several conversations” with Houchul about a mask ban in New York, but he has not been able to make one statement about how the medically vulnerable will be protected, when queried. Likewise, North Carolina’s state assembly seemed wholly unconcerned about all the vulnerable people who will be harassed and forced to unmask in unsafe circumstances when HB237 is enacted, and has provided no guidance to prevent these occurrences. The reporter I spoke with asked me why I was worried that mask bans will provoke increased intimidation of the medically vulnerable. My answer was that it’s because the persecution becoming codified law has already been happening for a long time, and there are no measures in place to protect us. We have every reason to think these laws will make things worse for marginalized, at-risk people, and no reason at all to think they won’t.
We know store owners and others in North Carolina will claim that the law allows them to demand unmasking at all times (even though it doesn’t), because they already have. Some will play games to avoid legal backlash; you know how it will go: the customer takes off his mask upon entry, pulls it back on, and a few minutes later the manager says “I didn’t see you do it when you came in; do it again.” Then, a few minutes after that, the store clerk says “I’m not sure you’re the same person we ID’d before, because the mask makes it hard to tell. You’ll have to take it off.” The vagueness of North Carolina’s HB237 text (which says that any “occupant” of a public or private space can demand mask removal) is ambiguous enough – even to those who really mean to understand it – that any bozo in a red hat might feel emboldened to try ripping the mask off of someone’s face. Could this aggression spread to healthcare settings? Why not? There is nothing in the bill language to prevent it, and people generally behave only as well as they’re made to. Will people of color be at greatly increased risk? Of course – not just because they’re already more vulnerable to discrimination in retail settings and by over-policing cops, but also because they’re the folks who remain most vigilant about masking.
Ever since people got wind that covid outcomes are worse for indigenous, brown and black Americans (which they are, on a population level, due to a long list of structural health inequities), there’s been a huge disparity in mask use between white Americans and those of color. Surveys have shown that, at various points, black folks have been nearly twice as likely as whites to mask or to support mask-wearing. Even though they know that doing so will bring increased amounts of unwanted attention from police and others, black Americans have been more in favor of continued masking than white Americans have; a 2023 study in Political Science Quarterly found that racial minorities in the U.S. remained more likely to mask than whites despite also being more worried about being criminalized for that decision. And now it will be open season on these folks, in places that enact bans.
“It’s the economy, stupid.”
So, why do politicians insist that masks pose a threat to public safety and we all need to take them off? We know it isn’t to fight crime or curtail mob violence. New York politicians like Hochul, Adams and New York Attorney General Letitia James (who just hopped on the ban bandwagon) are suddenly hand-wringing about protesters, but at most, pro-ban politicians hope to give the appearance of addressing various societal concerns – about crime, about religious intolerance – without actually doing anything that might anger a bloc of voters, as real action like gun legislation would. Elected officials likely don’t really care whether masks bans are effective crime deterrents or not, as long as constituents think they’ve accomplished something; perception is king.
And it’s not about merely “restoring” well-functioning legislation that was paused for the pandemic, as pols in both New York and North Carolina have suggested. Yes, New York previously had a mask ban law. But that was passed in 1845 – 15 years before Pasteur’s germ theory hit the scene. Sometimes the good old days just aren’t, and there’s no politician in this country (among democrats, at least) who doesn’t know it. Democratic pols were only recently insisting that a “just getting back to our normal way of doing things” argument (that’s the status quo bias) is ridiculous, when Arizona legislators tried to defend their 1864 abortion ban, enacted before Arizona was even a state. This mask ban argument seems to be a case of the same dangerous, anti-science rhetoric, except New York’s law is even older. What ever happened to Maya Angelou’s advice: “when you know better, do better”?
Gov. Hochul inadvertently got a little closer to the truth when she told CNN that masks are “frightening to people” who don’t wear them, though it is both she and Adams who’ve been pushing the idea that folks should be. Masks are indeed a threat cue, an environmental stimulus that tells you something is wrong or off; that you need to be more aware and cautious, rather than just operating on automatic. Masks literally give people pause; I see it happen every time I’m in public. Masks remind folks that there may be danger associated with the place where they’re standing and hint at ambiguity about the future.
But unfortunately for Adams and Hochul, the thing that masks are cuing is ongoing disease transmission that masks prevent, not criminal activity that masks foster. The former is exactly what retailers and the government (which tends to prioritize the economy, because it informs so much voting behavior) don’t want. That’s why former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and those she answers to were in such a rush to drop masking guidance in May of 2021, in the absence of any indication that covid’s threat had passed. (In fact, the virus remained the third-highest cause of death in the U.S. that year, dropping only to the #4 spot in 2022.)
This threat cuing is problematic because it causes people to adjust their behavior in ways that exert a significant impact on the economy. For example, Americans are a historically spendy people, and according to the website Gocardless.com, between 40 and 80 percent of retail sales are impulse purchases. Even if that number seems high to you, it’s pretty consistent with other data; for example, in a market research survey reported by PR Newswire of people who impulse shop (which most Americans do), 73% of respondents reported that most of their purchases were impulsive in 2022. Historically, as many as 80% of these impulse buys have taken place in person, and they amount to thousands of dollars of annual transactions per capita.
But when people are triggered by threat cues in consumer spaces, their purchasing behavior changes. Folks engage in “discretionary thrift,” switching from more to less expensive goods even when they can afford the former. They avoid consumer items they haven’t tried before, which are often bought on impulse. They linger less long in stores, and so are exposed to fewer consumer goods. They may switch to curbside or home delivery, which also reduces exposure to impulse items. And they increase the proportion of buys they make through e-commerce, which is less conducive to impulse buying, and which also dramatically reduces the amount of engagement consumers have with small mom-and-pop retailers. Even if the pandemic didn’t completely break Americans of their daily purchasing habit, it at least made a dent, far more than our annual Buy Nothing Day ever did; negative public perceptions about the economy have only furthered this trend. It is no surprise that the popular retailer “Christmas Tree Shops,” a national chain of 72 stores designed completely around impulse shopping, suddenly went bankrupt and closed all of their locations last year. (I confess, I will miss them.) We’re still shopaholics, but many folks are “on the wagon” to a greater degree than they used to be.
So, despite the fact that, when the going gets tough, Americans traditionally go shopping, things aren’t exactly back to normal; as Uncle Sam might say, the Economy Needs You. As Buzzfeed has noted, the dictate is to “Buy often, buy cheap, buy a lot,” and those behind the mask bans mean to make you do it. The government’s hope in 2021 was that, if policy makers told people masks weren’t necessary, that would be enough to jump-start old habits and purchasing patterns. For a lot of people, it was; as soon as they put aside their KN94s, they seemed to forget that covid had (literally) plagued us, even during new surges when case rates soared. And those folks didn’t just unmask because they somehow felt safer; they felt safer because they had unmasked. This is both because masks are an illness/mortality cue to those who wear them as well as to those watching, and because people generally adopt justifications that make their behavior (including unmasking) seem reasonable and appropriate.
“Safer” means willing to engage in a wider variety of activities. It means spending more money in person. It also means dropping other disease mitigation habits, like work-from-home. According to Bloomberg, remote work cost Manhattan nearly $12.5 billion in 2023, even with office workers spending only 30% less time on site by that point than they did pre-pandemic, due to partial return-to-office demands. The average Manhattan worker is still spending almost $5,000 less annually than they used to on meals, shopping and entertainment near their workplaces. Manhattan real estate is facing a “multi-billion dollar crisis” due to new pandemic work habits, per Bloomberg. The transit system has been significantly affected, as has New York City’s tax base, on which infrastructure and public services depend.
Many folks have discovered they just like working from home, regardless of what new covid variants are doing and to whom. But for some, masks remain a cue that public environments aren’t completely to be trusted, regardless of whether they’re still wearing masks themselves, because other people are. So if those latter folks aren’t willing to take their masks off on their own, the government is now ready to assist – in North Carolina, in New York, and eventually in a revenue-hungry city and state near you. For people who don’t still mask, mask bans will create an “all clear” signal. For those who do, many will decide not to buck the system, as doing so will provoke, at best, hassle; at worst, violence or arrest. And many of those folks, once they’ve have finally been divested of their N95s, may well stop fighting for work-from-home policies or avoiding activities like vacation travel, not only because they’ll think “what’s the point; I’m exposed constantly anyway,” but because their unmasked behavior will inform their attitudes going forward. Most people, most of the time, think of most things, “If I have to do this, it will be okay.”
This matters, for all the reasons
Mask bans are ableist, racist, and likely unconstitutional. As enforced, they almost surely will violate the Americans with Disabilities Act on a regular basis; the text of the North Carolina ban bill that says, in effect, “not meaning to violate the ADA,” is ludicrous in the face of how the bill will surely be implemented. Demands that encompass religious clothing could easily meet us part way down this slippery slope. We can and should fight crime in the U.S. without resorting to profiling, and fear is never a justification for discrimination.
Further reinforcing the “masks are good” stereotype (which is a reference to the famous “beautiful is good” stereotype, but never mind; we’re at the finish line) will undoubtedly lead to further problems for all of us down the road. We are living in the Pandemicene. Sooner or later, there will be more novel infections coming at us, and the case fatality rate of some will likely be higher than it has been this time. Thanks to politicians whose agenda is really anything but public health and safety, we will be even more reticent about mask use at that point than we are today, and so, will be less able to fight our true foe when it arrives.
Essays you didn't want to read 