Leveraging Racism for a Pandemic-Level Power Grab If you’re inclined toward the view that society, as it is presently constituted, is all wrong and that dramatic, top-down interventions are necessary to reform not just private institutions but private behaviors, you’ve never seen a tool to achieve those ends as powerful as the pandemic. We’re not talking about gentle “nudging” anymore. What was needed were blunt instruments and a willingness among elected officials to use them. And that’s what we got. But it wasn’t long before it dawned on social reformers that the holistic approach policymakers took to addressing this crisis could be applied to any number of conditions that have some tangential relationship to public health. It’s a concept that the researchers who composed one study published in the