State lawmakers and law enforcement agencies are reviving dormant laws that criminalize wearing masks in an effort to punish pro-Palestinian protesters who hide their faces, raising concerns among coronavirus-wary Americans.
Republican lawmakers in North Carolina are poised to overturn Gov. Roy Cooper's (Democratic) recent veto of a bill that would make wearing masks a crime. New York Gov. Kathy Hockle (Democratic) said she supports legislation to ban masks on the subway, citing an incident earlier this month in which a masked protester on the subway yelled, “Raise your hands if you're a Zionist. Now's your chance to get out.” Student protesters in Ohio, Texas and Florida have been threatened with arrest for covering their faces.
Decades-old laws banning masks, often enacted in response to masked terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan, are on the books in at least 18 states and Washington, D.C., according to the International Nonprofit Law Center. Lawmakers in some areas have passed bills creating health exemptions during the coronavirus pandemic, but officials in others have vowed not to enforce the decrees.
Immunocompromised Americans and civil rights activists, who have long criticized mask bans as a bludgeon used against people protesting police shootings, economic inequality and environmental injustice, say mask bans are being reinstated because COVID-19 is no longer being treated as a public health emergency. High levels of coronavirus in wastewater across much of the Sun Belt and Florida are an early sign of a summer COVID-19 wave, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Lawmakers eager to restore pre-pandemic mask-wearing rules argue the laws would not target vulnerable people or those trying to avoid catching the respiratory virus, but critics say such an approach is unrealistic and would subject mask wearers to further ostracism and harassment from police and other citizens.
The day after the North Carolina state legislature passed an anti-mask bill in response to pro-Palestinian protests at the University of North Carolina in June, Shari Stuart said she entered a Raleigh-area auto repair shop to get her oil changed and was confronted by a man for wearing a surgical mask. When Stuart tried to explain that she has stage 4 breast cancer and a weakened immune system, the man called her a “fucking liberal” and claimed that masks were illegal. He then coughed on her and told her he hoped the cancer would kill her.
Stuart, who spoke about her experience for the first time to a local television station, said she fears such harassment will get worse if mask restrictions become law, even though the bill allows for the wearing of “medical or surgical masks intended to prevent the spread of communicable diseases.”
“If you wear a mask, people are still going to think you're breaking the law. They don't care what you do wrong,” Stewart told The Washington Post. “I thought we should have masks that say 'immunocompromised' or 'cancer patient' or whatever, but we shouldn't have to do that.”
Some worry that people of color will bear the brunt of law enforcement.
“When you have laws that require you to not do certain things with your body, who is affected the most? Black and brown people,” says Diana Cejas, a Black pediatric neurologist in Chapel Hill who wears a mask in part because cancer treatments have left scar tissue around her airways, putting her at higher risk for respiratory illness. “But I'm not going to give up trying to keep myself and my patients safe.”
In a statement announcing his veto, Governor Cooper said the bill “would strip away protections for people who want to protect their health by wearing a mask and expose them to criminal prosecution.”
Republicans say those concerns are overblown because the bill contains health-related exemptions, and their party holds the majority and has enough votes to override Cooper's veto.
“Bad actors have used masks to hide their identities while committing crimes and terrorizing innocent people,” state Sen. Danny Earl Britt Jr. (R-S.C.), one of the bill's sponsors, said in a statement. “Instead of ending this intimidation, the Governor is encouraging bad actors by continuing to give them time to hide from the consequences of their actions. I look forward to voting to override this veto and ensuring that people with real health concerns can protect themselves and others.”
Opponents of mask-wearing restrictions have questioned how health exceptions work when protesters wearing medical masks claim they are trying to stay healthy in crowds.
“When there's a political protest, I don't understand how authorities are going to distinguish between people who are wearing masks for health reasons and people who are wearing masks to protect their identity,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union who has written about the issue. “It creates a situation where selective policing is likely to occur against protesters authorities don't like.”
Sylvie Tudor, one of the protest organizers with the University of North Carolina chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, said participants were specifically encouraged to wear masks to curb the spread of the disease and that the Republican bill was an attempt to stifle protests.
“As defenders of Palestinian life, it is our duty to respect the real danger that infectious diseases pose to all people, whether in Chapel Hill or Palestine,” said Tudor, a doctoral student in sociology.
But Adam Goldstein, a medical professor at the University of North Carolina who supports legislation restricting mask-wearing, said widespread mask-wearing creates an uneasy environment for Jewish faculty and students, who are harassed by people they don't know. Goldstein said he was holding a sign calling for the release of Israelis being held hostage by Hamas when a protester covering his face with a kaffiyeh, a scarf often used in pro-Palestinian protests, approached him and shouted “intifada.”
He said people at high risk for COVID-19 infection should be able to wear medical masks, but he doesn't believe mask-wearing protesters are participating for public health reasons because many of them are using ineffective cloth coverings and wearing masks on campuses was much less common before the protests.
“We can't be selectively worried about only during protests,” Goldstein said. “If you're at high risk, you probably shouldn't be engaging in high-risk activities like large public gatherings.”
In New York, Democratic leaders say relaxing mask-wearing rules early in the pandemic has hindered police response to crime and anti-Semitism.
“We will not tolerate individuals using masks to avoid responsibility for criminal or threatening behavior,” Gov. Hokull said at a press conference this month, adding that he wanted to protect against wearing masks for “legitimate” reasons, such as protecting against COVID-19 and the flu.
New York Attorney General Letitia James (Democrat) has also indicated she supports regulation.
Rabbi Yaacov Behrman, who supports mask regulations with public health exceptions, said a Jewish man wearing a kippah and walking past the Brooklyn Museum recently was harassed by a group of pro-Palestinian protesters, some of whom were wearing masks, yelling, “Zionists are not welcome here.”
“They're using masks to harass and intimidate,” said Bearman, founder of the local advocacy group Alliance for the Jewish Future.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, has urged retailers to require customers to remove their masks when entering stores to deter robberies. “I think now is the time to get back to the way things were before COVID,” Adams said in a radio interview this month.
But some New Yorkers have embraced mask-wearing as a healthy habit in a crowded city of millions to avoid airborne pathogens that could disrupt their lives.
Logan Grendell, 46, of Harlem, credits regularly wearing a mask on the subway with helping him avoid contracting the respiratory illness since the pandemic began. “I can't believe the fact that I've never worn a mask on the subway,” Grendell said.
Meredith Kang, a telehealth psychotherapist in Manhattan who primarily sees the immunocompromised and disabled, said some potential clients seeking mental health care were frightened by Hoekl and Adams' calls for mask-wearing restrictions.
“Ordinary people are going to hear governors and mayors say, 'If you wear a mask, you're a criminal,'” said Can, who receives weekly injections of immunosuppressants for a chronic illness. “We're worried that our quality of life and our ability to be in public will be threatened.”
