Teh One Who Knocks
05-04-2020, 10:27 AM
BY KANDIST MALLETT - Teen Vogue
https://i.imgur.com/XFqAc3Kl.jpg
In Huntington Beach, California, about 45 minutes away from Los Angeles without traffic, the beach was recently crowded with mostly white bodies who were not wearing masks nor practicing social distancing.
Huntington Beach is home to one of the “reopen" movements, an astroturf protest focused on reopening businesses across America as the COVID-19 pandemic still rages, in a rejection of all things science. A year ago protesters took to downtown Huntington Beach for an anti-immigration rally that turned violent. Huntington Beach and Orange County in general have a strong white nationalist presence. Whether it’s “taking back their country,” “making America great again,” or “reopening America,” the goals of these white Americans are rooted in a desire to return to their white dominance and white comfort.
There are two fronts where Black people are being hit hard by the pandemic: the physical and the financial. A long history of government neglect and unequal access to health care has meant that Black people have been disprortionately killed by this virus. The decision of some states to reopen as the number of positive cases continues to grow feels like a big ole racist F-you to Black Americans. It’s almost like once they found out Black people were the most impacted, they became even less concerned.
Georgia governor Brian Kemp, who has been accused of voter suppression and took a picture with a notorious racist during a campaign rally, was the first to order his state to reopen. Georgia is currently ranked twelfth in the U.S. for states with the most COVID-19 infections, with more than 26,000 cases and more than 1,000 deaths. On April 14, when there were 501 deaths, the Georgia Department of Public Health reported that at least 248 were Black people. Dougherty County, which is 70% Black, has the most deaths in the state. There has been resistance to reopening by some local leaders. Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said she would consider legal options to keep Atlanta closed. In response to her pushback, Bottoms received a racist text message that used the n-word and demanded she reopen the city.
Despite data showing that social distancing is working in other states, ordering Georgia’s heavily Black and brown workforce back on the job relieves the state of having to pay unemployment benefits. According to CityLab, $42 million was distributed in unemployment benefits in Georgia during a span of seven days in late March. And as As Vice reported, those who refuse to go back to work out early of fear for their safety will lose their pandemic unemployment insurance. The $2 trillion federal stimulus package also meant that those on unemployment would have seen an extra $600 in their unemployment paycheck.
The same sort of callous logic is playing out at the federal level. When it appeared that the supply chain of meat production was threatened, President Donald Trump didn’t hesitate to cite the Defense Production Act to force meat production plants to stay open. A lot of those workers are Black and brown, including immigrants. Largely what Trump is saying is that the country's desire to have meat — and these companies’ bottom lines — is more important than the lives of the workers.
The calls from white officials and their constituents to “liberate” America and get the country back to work are rooted in white entitlement. These people want to return to the comforts of their lives even if it costs the lives of the workers providing them. In some of the anti-lockdown protests, Confederate flags could be spotted among the signs reading, “I want a haircut.” The point of some of these protests isn’t that these white workers are eager to get back to their own jobs, but that they want “their help” to get back to work. The parallels to slavery raise themselves.
Racism in this country is more than just how an individual feels about a race; it’s the systemic, institutional inequality. When we look at the calls to reopen and policies surrounding recovery, Black communities are largely disadvantaged by both. Type Investigations reported that out of the 63 retail COVID-19 public-private testing sites that Trump boasted about, only eight were in Black communities. The lack of testing for those who are Black has been a story we’ve heard throughout this crisis. Kaila Corrothers told NBC News that her mother, Deborah Gatewood, was denied testing four times before ultimately dying of COVID-19. Corrothers said Gatewood was a hospital worker who had symptoms but had her concerns repeatedly dismissed. (Gatewood’s employer, Beaumont Hospital in Farmington Hills, Michigan, told NBC that it was "doing everything we can to evaluate, triage and care for patients based on the information we know at the time. We grieve the loss of any patient to COVID-19.") Gatewood’s story is infuriating, but it’s not surprising. The Detroit area has long shown a lack of care for Black lives; whether it’s through environmental racism, economic failure, or mass incarceration, racists are going to racist.
I can’t help but think of Black health overall and how many of us have died because we’ve been denied proper treatment. I’ve been thinking about the thousands of Black women who have died because of failures in pregnancy and the difficulty Black people face getting screening for cancer and other deadly diseases. When we first started to hear about a shortage of testing, I knew that meant that Black people would be denied testing somehow because of institutional racism in our health care system.
The severity of this pandemic could have been avoided, and it’s a failure of the government on every level and across both parties. This administration’s failure to adequately prepare has cost thousands of Black lives. Congress has failed to pass adequate recovery packages that address the needs of the people, and specifically Black people, who will face disproportionate economic impacts.
As I wrote in my March piece "We Shouldn’t Go Back to the Way Things Were", the normal we knew before COVID-19 needs to remain in the past. The society that these white protesters so desperately want to reopen is rooted in anti-Blackness. That society allowed for Black people to die at a disproportionate rate the way it has since we were brought to this country to be enslaved. We must build a new society where Black people are no longer the first to be sacrificed for the elites' mistakes and failures.
RBP
https://i.imgur.com/XFqAc3Kl.jpg
In Huntington Beach, California, about 45 minutes away from Los Angeles without traffic, the beach was recently crowded with mostly white bodies who were not wearing masks nor practicing social distancing.
Huntington Beach is home to one of the “reopen" movements, an astroturf protest focused on reopening businesses across America as the COVID-19 pandemic still rages, in a rejection of all things science. A year ago protesters took to downtown Huntington Beach for an anti-immigration rally that turned violent. Huntington Beach and Orange County in general have a strong white nationalist presence. Whether it’s “taking back their country,” “making America great again,” or “reopening America,” the goals of these white Americans are rooted in a desire to return to their white dominance and white comfort.
There are two fronts where Black people are being hit hard by the pandemic: the physical and the financial. A long history of government neglect and unequal access to health care has meant that Black people have been disprortionately killed by this virus. The decision of some states to reopen as the number of positive cases continues to grow feels like a big ole racist F-you to Black Americans. It’s almost like once they found out Black people were the most impacted, they became even less concerned.
Georgia governor Brian Kemp, who has been accused of voter suppression and took a picture with a notorious racist during a campaign rally, was the first to order his state to reopen. Georgia is currently ranked twelfth in the U.S. for states with the most COVID-19 infections, with more than 26,000 cases and more than 1,000 deaths. On April 14, when there were 501 deaths, the Georgia Department of Public Health reported that at least 248 were Black people. Dougherty County, which is 70% Black, has the most deaths in the state. There has been resistance to reopening by some local leaders. Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said she would consider legal options to keep Atlanta closed. In response to her pushback, Bottoms received a racist text message that used the n-word and demanded she reopen the city.
Despite data showing that social distancing is working in other states, ordering Georgia’s heavily Black and brown workforce back on the job relieves the state of having to pay unemployment benefits. According to CityLab, $42 million was distributed in unemployment benefits in Georgia during a span of seven days in late March. And as As Vice reported, those who refuse to go back to work out early of fear for their safety will lose their pandemic unemployment insurance. The $2 trillion federal stimulus package also meant that those on unemployment would have seen an extra $600 in their unemployment paycheck.
The same sort of callous logic is playing out at the federal level. When it appeared that the supply chain of meat production was threatened, President Donald Trump didn’t hesitate to cite the Defense Production Act to force meat production plants to stay open. A lot of those workers are Black and brown, including immigrants. Largely what Trump is saying is that the country's desire to have meat — and these companies’ bottom lines — is more important than the lives of the workers.
The calls from white officials and their constituents to “liberate” America and get the country back to work are rooted in white entitlement. These people want to return to the comforts of their lives even if it costs the lives of the workers providing them. In some of the anti-lockdown protests, Confederate flags could be spotted among the signs reading, “I want a haircut.” The point of some of these protests isn’t that these white workers are eager to get back to their own jobs, but that they want “their help” to get back to work. The parallels to slavery raise themselves.
Racism in this country is more than just how an individual feels about a race; it’s the systemic, institutional inequality. When we look at the calls to reopen and policies surrounding recovery, Black communities are largely disadvantaged by both. Type Investigations reported that out of the 63 retail COVID-19 public-private testing sites that Trump boasted about, only eight were in Black communities. The lack of testing for those who are Black has been a story we’ve heard throughout this crisis. Kaila Corrothers told NBC News that her mother, Deborah Gatewood, was denied testing four times before ultimately dying of COVID-19. Corrothers said Gatewood was a hospital worker who had symptoms but had her concerns repeatedly dismissed. (Gatewood’s employer, Beaumont Hospital in Farmington Hills, Michigan, told NBC that it was "doing everything we can to evaluate, triage and care for patients based on the information we know at the time. We grieve the loss of any patient to COVID-19.") Gatewood’s story is infuriating, but it’s not surprising. The Detroit area has long shown a lack of care for Black lives; whether it’s through environmental racism, economic failure, or mass incarceration, racists are going to racist.
I can’t help but think of Black health overall and how many of us have died because we’ve been denied proper treatment. I’ve been thinking about the thousands of Black women who have died because of failures in pregnancy and the difficulty Black people face getting screening for cancer and other deadly diseases. When we first started to hear about a shortage of testing, I knew that meant that Black people would be denied testing somehow because of institutional racism in our health care system.
The severity of this pandemic could have been avoided, and it’s a failure of the government on every level and across both parties. This administration’s failure to adequately prepare has cost thousands of Black lives. Congress has failed to pass adequate recovery packages that address the needs of the people, and specifically Black people, who will face disproportionate economic impacts.
As I wrote in my March piece "We Shouldn’t Go Back to the Way Things Were", the normal we knew before COVID-19 needs to remain in the past. The society that these white protesters so desperately want to reopen is rooted in anti-Blackness. That society allowed for Black people to die at a disproportionate rate the way it has since we were brought to this country to be enslaved. We must build a new society where Black people are no longer the first to be sacrificed for the elites' mistakes and failures.
RBP