The “twin pandemics” of 2020, COVID-19 and systemic racism, merged the concerns of health equity and biosecurity against emerging diseases in American public health. Controversies over personal protective equipment and indoor air ventilation drew concerns over how to design safe spaces and practices against the novel coronavirus, while racial disparities in COVID mortality and public health enforcement raised questions of who is being prioritized by such efforts to build safe spaces from the pandemic. Contextualizing the American COVID-19 response in the history of racism and racialized epidemics, this dissertation asks: How does the ongoing building of American national biosecurity and safety against emerging diseases intervene in the social geography of race? How are different conceptions of safety formed and materialized in biosafety practices, built environment features, and biomedical infrastructures? How are these processes of building safe spaces influenced by existing racial hierarchies? Drawing upon 20 months of fieldwork with laboratory designers with biosafety expertise, oral history archives, news media, design and public health guidelines, and governmental reports, this dissertation traces the complex and oft-contradictory ways in which COVID-19 protection has been sought. Efforts to maintain disease barriers, dilute virus-laden air, and mobilize mass testing and vaccination through careful delineation of space have more often preserved rather than challenged existing hierarchies of class, gender, and race, doing so in a process that I call “safecraft” – the tentative and relational movements toward familiar terrains that inform folk understandings of “safety” and their endeavors to restore the bodily, social, and spatial order that have been disrupted by COVID-19. Safecraft highlights the diversity in how safety is perceived and felt, underscoring the detailed processes of making safety through physical re-ordering and movement. Where safety is usually taken to be apolitical, safecraft references existing power distribution and dynamics in its enactment. This, along with the durability of physical space, creates an inertia that preserves existing inequities, potentiating disavowal and violence in the building of safe spaces. Whereas the comfort of the familiar perpetuates existing inequities, the dissertation suggests that equitable biosafety and safe spaces cannot be built without reconfiguring existing tolerances to risk and discomfort.