Britta Shoot. Mask blocs are grassroots mutual aid groups that distribute high-quality masks, such as N95s, for free in response to public health failures during the ongoing COVID pandemic.
Many were created and are led by disabled people, many of whom had little or no prior organizing experience. Most of the earliest mask distribution groups formed in late and early In this first piece of a three-part oral history series , mask bloc organizers across the United States explain their personal and organizing backgrounds, and what being in a mask bloc means to them. Many individuals requested anonymity or use of their first name only for these interviews, for reasons both personal and political, with concerns about the criminalization of mutual aid work and as mask bans are spreading across the U.
Read part two of the series here and part three here. Interviews have been condensed. Full interview transcripts and audio will eventually be available at MaskBlocHistory. I lost most of my friends because of differences in precautions and ableism. I met my comrade [on CovidMeetups], and they gave me my first box of Auras! They had been buying extra masks to give to people, mostly posting on Facebook. As that winter surge started hitting, they were saying it had really slowed down in terms of people taking them up on the offer.
What if we made this a thing and not just a private Facebook offer? I was feeling really, really powerless. I have no interest in running for office or anything like that, but I can directly help people who are my neighbors. I had the idea for the project six months prior; I think we launched in February ? My brain is mush. And they [said]: Yeah, do you want 2, masks? It was really a lot of stumbling upon information online from other people who were trying to do the same thing.
I think we were the third or fourth [mask bloc] in the United States. View previous campaigns. What was the first mask bloc? It might have been Portland. I was still in the years-long process of understanding my own identity as a disabled person. By the end of , I thought it was too late to do anything about the pandemic. I had a lot of things that stopped me from starting anything sooner, a combination of imposter syndrome and just the fact that I was busy trying to survive.
