Executives in Nassau County, on the western side of Long Island, New York, have recently signed into law a mask ban, with all 12 Republican legislators voting in favor and all seven Democrats abstaining. The Mask Transparency Act, writes WABC New York, “makes it illegal to wear a mask ‘for the purposes of concealing an individual's identity in public places,’ as well as wearing a mask on private property without the consent of the owner or tenant.” Mask wearers face up to a year behind bars and up to a $1,000 fine, but there is an exemption for religious, medical, or cultural purposes. 

Everyone should be concerned about this ban. Without citing any evidence, the lawmakers write, “this legislature finds that” masks or face coverings that aren’t used for health, safety, religious, or celebratory purposes are essentially worn for nefarious purposes: “as a predicate to harassing, menacing or criminal behavior.” Police are allowed to require masked people to remove the face coverings during traffic stops or “when the officer has reasonable suspicion of criminal activity and/or intention to partake in criminal activity." The text of the law does not elaborate further on what “reasonable suspicion” means. Translation: the legislature has decided that masks are mostly a sign of bad behavior except in a few cases that police are given carte blanche to determine. And the reasoning that police might use to determine whether a wearer is up to something bad is intentionally vague because lawmakers have already “found” that a mask wearer is probably up to something bad. Sounds like guilty until proven innocent, a total reversal of the legal presumption of innocence!

Nassau County isn't the only place where a mask ban has become law in recent months. The General Assembly of North Carolina also passed a similar bill in June, overriding the veto of Governor Roy Cooper. Lawmakers were open about their motivation: to put a damper on anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian protest, with one state senator saying that the “craziness” of the Gaza protests needed to be “slowed down, if not put to a stop.” Also in June, Los Angeles’ Mayor Karen Bass said the city should consider restrictions on “the idea of people wearing masks at protests.” The same reasoning applies in Nassau County. 

 The Mask Transparency Act was introduced by Republican Mazi Melesa Pilip, who, according to the Long Island Press, had “argued for the law’s necessity in the wake of pro-Palestine protests across the country. Pilip – and others – have argued that protesters are wearing masks to conceal their identity and commit antisemitic acts.” Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman specifically cited college protesters as the targets of the new law and issued a laundry list of grievances against them:

“We’ve seen throughout the United States, and specifically in New York City, at Columbia University, people who wore masks and engaged in antisemitic acts, engaged in violence, tried to abridge people’s constitutional rights,” Blakeman said. “They occupied buildings, they tried to block roadways and bridges and disrupt traffic and people’s lives, and they engaged in violent acts as well, all while wearing a mask.”

This is a highly misleading version of events. The college campus protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful, with students sharing meals and holding teach-ins—until the police have gotten involved, that is—and charges of rampant antisemitism don’t really stick when groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace documented that the encampments were peaceful and that Jewish students have played a “critical role” in them. Professor Steven Thrasher, who spent time at the Columbia encampment, described it as “very beautiful and not threatening at all”:

It was really beautiful to see how during the Muslim prayers—the Muslim students while they were praying—other students surrounded them so they could have some privacy. And then there was also a Shabbat happening with Jewish students. I was there on Friday, so it was at sundown, and I think it was a regular Friday Seder dinner. I've since read that there has also been a Passover Seder dinner that's happened in that space. It was really touching to see them working together to think differently and really create critical pedagogy [...] and a real creativity to try to force the university to divest, but also to apply the things they're learning in class to a mini-society they were making.

So, to recap: Nassau County, one of the richest counties in the nation, which is heavily white and also happens to have a “serious problem with police accountability,” has just put the police in charge of dealing with a political problem that happens to be a thorn in the sides of those in power: opposition to a genocide and support for Palestinian liberation. What could go wrong here?

Plenty, as groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union of New York, the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (which submitted comments in Nassau against the legislation), and others have pointed out. It’s not just that the mask ban infringes upon people’s right to protest or express potentially unpopular political opinions (although Gallup notes that as of March 2024 polling, a majority of Americans disapprove of Israel’s actions in Gaza). It’s not just that people have a right to privacy, particularly in an age of surveillance and doxxing, and mask bans strip people of this right. It’s not just that religious, racial, and ethnic minorities, particularly Muslim Americans, Arab Americans, and South Asian Americans, have been profiled, surveilled, and targeted by police in recent decades and have good reason to fear discriminatory enforcement of this law against them. It’s not just that people who cover their face for any reason—such as those who simply wish to avoid air pollution, UV exposure, or airborne illnesses such as COVID or others, particularly those who are disabled or have weakened immune systems—will be targeted. It’s not just that Black Americans and poor people, who already bear the brunt of the police, will face disproportionate harassment. It’s all of that plus the fact that the police have one major tool in their toolkit: the threat of force, or actual violence. Putting the police in charge of political and social problems—as we already do with protests, homelessness, mental health crises, drug use, or petty theft—usually ends badly.

Consider police killings of civilians. Since the historic 2020 uprisings against police brutality, U.S. police have killed more people each year than the previous. This year, 820 people have been killed by police. This is not normal. This does not happen in other countries.

Even when police aren’t killing people, they carry out their jobs in discriminatory and harmful ways. The Nassau County police in particular have faced accusations of racially biased traffic stops against Black and Latino people and have been reported to downplay the seriousness of civilian complaints made against the department.

Nassau County also has a history of passing pro-police, anti-protest legislation. In a move that was widely seen as retaliation for the George Floyd uprisings of 2020, the County passed a bill in 2021 that would allow the police to sue protesters that “seriously annoy” or “harass” them. The absurd bill, which would also have made police a protected class similar to racial, religious, or sexual minorities, was rightly vetoed by County Executive Laura Curran, who cited advice from the state attorney general that the bill might not be constitutional because it “would inhibit residents' rights to free speech and protest.”

Besides death or serious injury, the police levy expensive fines or fees against people and shuttle the unluckiest of people into cells in jails or prisons. Every day, I read another horror story about one of the nation’s “correctional facilities”—the cruel lack of air-conditioning, the deadly and abysmal medical care, the lack of accountability for deaths inside facilities, and so on. (This is why I am a prison abolitionist, and you should be, too.)

It is easy for any of us to forget about what happens to people behind bars, as prisoners have simply been disappeared. As prison abolitionist and activist Angela Y. Davis once put it, “Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.” Prisons, of course, are just the endpoint for a punishment process that starts with the police.

Who gets disappeared into the criminal punishment system—and who will get disproportionately targeted by a mask ban? People without housing who are living on the streets, for one.¹ The criminalization of homelessness, which helps to perpetuate the revolving door from homelessness to imprisonment, has only intensified since the Supreme Court ruled that city governments could arrest people for simply sleeping outside. Mask bans will provide cops with yet another excuse to make arrests. However, this approach does nothing to address homelessness itself—which is, by the way, an entirely solvable problem. 

Policing does nothing to address the root causes of the problems that police encounter. Protesting an injustice is, of course, a good thing for society, but the police—and the politicians who direct them—don’t see it that way. Thankfully, siccing the police on “problem” masked protesters has so far failed to quell the growing anti-war sentiment in the country (young people in particular are not happy about Gaza and more Americans generally think the U.S. is doing too much to aid Israel). As Columbia student protesters chanted, “The more you try to silence us, the louder we will be.”

The 'Internal Other'

One of the troubling aspects of mask bans is how politicians and others talk about them, using amnestic and bizarre historical references that to a casual observer may seem reasonable. Reporting on the growing interest in mask bans among New York leaders such as Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, Politico wrote in June that New York State Assembly Members had compared pro-Palestinian protesters to the Ku Klux Klan:

“I’m saying they’re exactly like the KKK, in my opinion,” Dinowitz said. “They both wear things that cover their eyes.” 

 

“These individuals are employing KKK tactics, and we’ve seen it throughout history,” Greenblatt [the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League] also said.

Going beyond mere comparisons, Nassau County Executive Blakeman and others have referenced past anti-mask laws that targeted the Klan as a way to justify the current mask ban. As the Long Island Press noted, 

Blakeman referenced laws designed to stop the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan, who historically wore white hoods covering their faces, as precedent for banning masks. “Nobody has a constitutional right to hide their identity in public,” Blakeman said. “This has been something that’s been in practice in many jurisdictions. We are just reinforcing it here in Nassau County with this [bill] today.”

In a June 5 publication, the conservative Manhattan Institute argued that we need to “Modernize Anti-KKK Masking Laws for Intimidating Protesters,” citing previous state laws against masks. 

Now, on the surface, the idea of dusting off old laws might seem to make sense. If authorities needed to ban masks in order to stop racist Klansmen from terrorizing society in the past, and presumably that was a good thing, why shouldn’t we do the same thing now? 

In the first place, this is historically amnestic. Obviously, the Klan was a violent, racist organization that killed or terrorized anybody it perceived as not upholding white supremacy. It’s dishonest to equivocate the Klan with people today who are protesting against racism and oppression, in the form of an apartheid Israeli state that is committing a genocide against Palestinians. That much should be obvious. But these lawmakers simply think “mask, bad” and don’t stop to really think about the critical differences here. (Or they are fully aware of the differences and just choose to lie about them for political expediency.) Preoccupation with the Klan has happened before, of course, with the federal Unmasking Antifa Act of 2018, which drew on anti-Klan legislation of the past. That bill went nowhere, but it has been reintroduced recently.

In terms of state laws: while it is correct that various states enacted anti-mask laws in response to the Klan, as Shawn Setaro pointed out in Prism, “bills that were introduced because of the Klan did not intend to fight racism or segregation.” Lawmakers were fully invested in segregation. It’s just that the Klan were causing problems for people in power. Setaro quotes law professor Robert Kahn, who has written in depth about the history of such laws as well as mask mandates and bans in the COVID era. As Kahn has explained, the anti-mask laws came about at various times in history, and the Klan’s relationship to authority changed over time. At one point, the Klan was targeted because Southern leaders felt they were “uncouth” and “cowardly.” At another point, authorities decided they didn’t like the Klan’s secretive infiltration into law enforcement and other organizations. In other words, authorities targeted the Klan not because of objections to the Klan’s white supremacy as such, but at least in part because the Klan weren’t doing white supremacy the right way and were being too secretive, potentially “undermining and replacing state authority.” It turns out that while past laws might seem to reflect some modern-day notion of justice, they were actually just about people in power grasping to maintain their power and legitimacy. The same is true today!

Which brings me to the second problem with the Klan rhetoric: it diverts attention to an “internal other,” the pro-Palestine protester, who is being unjustly maligned by association with a familiar bogeyman, the Klan. At the same time, attention is being diverted away from the fact that what leaders don’t like is that the nation’s pro-Israeli-apartheid policies are being challenged. Today’s anti-mask laws, just like those of the past, cannot tell us what is morally correct. These laws only magnify the preoccupations of (and fears of) powerful leaders.²

Public Health: from 'You do You' to 'Don't do That'

It goes without saying that enacting a mask ban during a pandemic, especially when we are in a summer COVID surge (over 300 deaths weekly since July), is just unabashedly anti-public health. Medical “exemptions” are no good, either, because they rely on the police, who aren’t healthcare workers, to determine who is wearing a mask for medically legitimate reasons. Blakeman of Nassau County has said that he “trusts [police] officers to assess and determine” whether a person is in violation of the law. But again, these are hardly comforting words given the police’s record of being very good at injuring or killing anyone they look at. And it is unfair to place the burden on the citizen to prove that their mask is medically necessary!

It’s also notable that these mask bans are being passed by Republican lawmakers who, in particular, have been the ones screaming about mask mandate authoritarianism over the last few years. As Kahn points out, mask mandates and bans are both exercises of state power, and we ought to be critical of both. Mask mandates make good public health sense during a pandemic, but they need to be humanely, not punitively, enforced. Just as we need non-police responding to things like mental health crises, so we need non-police enforcing any future mask mandates humanely. This means we absolutely need to move away from being a punitive society to being a more uplifting one.

As my colleagues have written recently, Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism are alive and well in the United States and have been totally normalized by both elected leaders and those in the media. The dehumanization of Muslim people and Palestinians creates dangerous conditions for our fellow Americans, and anti-mask bills will only heighten that danger. 

Americans are right to protest the horrific genocide in Palestine that the American government is directly aiding: the mass starvation and rampant disease, the bombing of schools and hospitals, the lack of humanitarian aid. And Americans are right to wear face masks and coverings to protect their identities and their health. In this time, it is critical that we continue to protest unjust U.S. foreign policy and mask in solidarity in public.

If politicians are tired of the protests, there is a simple solution that completely bypasses the police: all elected officials can urge President Biden to enact an arms embargo to Israel and stop arming the genocide. Numerous human rights groups have been calling for this. The Abandon Biden movement (which may very well become the Abandon Harris movement) has been calling for a ceasefire for months and, along with leftist third-party presidential candidates, is mobilizing anti-genocide sentiment to be a political force in this year’s presidential election. There is time for the U.S. to change course rather than enact more mask bans and crackdowns on protesters.

No justice for Palestine? No peace here at home.

notes

1. 

Perhaps one of the most shameful recent instances of a politician “disappearing” people was that of California Governor Gavin Newsom personally clearing out a homeless encampment in Mission Hills, Los Angeles. Newsom’s net worth is around $20 million, making his participation in this act something that is “depraved even by politicians’ usual standards,” as my colleagues Alex Skopic and Stephen Prager pointed out recently.
2.

The rhetoric and fearmongering about masks and crime was pronounced in 2020, as news headlines proclaimed that masks emboldened criminals: “Coronavirus masks a boon for crooks.” “Surge in armed robberies.” One quote from a criminologist stood out to me: 

“Being anonymized has always been associated with more deviant and criminal behavior,” ranging from bank robberies to the Ku Klux Klan, said Bryanna Fox, a former FBI Agent and associate professor in the University of South Florida’s criminology department.

The problem here is that the professor wants you to equate a robber with the Klan because of a “mask.” But the primary problem with the Klan’s “deviant” behavior is that they are violent white supremacists. It’s not that they were a group of mask-wearers who met up and were driven to white supremacy by their mask-wearing. But the effect here is for a reader to make a blanket association of mask/crime with Klan, and therefore to think “mask equals bad behavior,” but it’s a logical fallacy.