April 7, 2020
These are dark times. The unceasing toll of illness and death and this administration’s unrelenting determination to bungle the response and lie about it, saps our ability to remain hopeful. In the fourth week of our domestic Coronavirus crisis, a grimly predictable pattern is beginning to emerge. As with all other social ills in this country, the brunt of this frighteningly virulent contagion is being borne overwhelmingly by Black, Brown and Indigenous Americans, who are disproportionately poor and are concentrated in low wage jobs where they are unable to telecommute and effectively socially distance themselves.
As Ibram X. Kendi details in The Atlantic, the racial data available is alarmingly clear. In Michigan, 40% of those who have died from COVID-19 are Black, despite making up only 14.1% percent of the state population. In North Carolina’s Mecklenburg County, where Charlotte is located, Black people are 32.9% of the population, but 43% of the positive cases. In Milwaukee, Black people are only 26% of the population, but 43.9% of the cases and 81% of the deaths! (Source: “What the Racial Data Show,” by Ibram X. Kendi, The Atlantic, 4/6/20).
In Southern states, where Republican governors have belatedly and haphazardly imposed porous “shelter in place” orders with exemptions for churches and gun shops, the inevitable spread is poised to land like a hammer on the Black community. As Vann Newkirk details in The Atlantic, the “four state arc of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia,” currently account for one in ten deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. Across the South, red states have doggedly pursued policies that have entrenched health disparities between “poor Black, Latino and rural residents,” and the affluent whites in the rest of their states, (Source: “The Coronavirus’s Unique Threat to the South,” by Vann R. Newkirk II, The Atlantic, 4/2/20).
Indigenous people are also at a heightened risk. According to Kevin Allis, the chief executive of the Nation Congress of American Indians, Indigenous people are particularly vulnerable due to health disparities, lack of access to adequate healthcare and overcrowded, multigenerational housing, (Source: “Particularly at Risk? Native Americans,” by Dana Hedgpeth, Darryl Fears and Gregory Scruggs,” The Washington Post, 4/4/20).
Against the devastating backdrop of this disproportionate loss of life, the Supreme Court’s last minute decision to prevent the extension of the deadline for receipt of absentee ballots in Wisconsin is shockingly immoral. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Wisconsin received 1.2 million requests for absentee ballots, five times the usual number of requests, which swamped the state’s ability to meet the demand. As of Sunday, at least 12,000 requested ballots had yet to be sent out. Democratic Governor Tony Evers tried to balance public health concerns with preserving citizens’ voting rights by issuing an executive order extending the deadline for absentee ballots to April 13th. The stakes couldn’t be higher, given that control of the state Supreme Court, 100 judgeships and the Democratic presidential primary are all on the ballot in today’s Wisconsin election, (Source: “The Supreme Court’s disturbingly effective order to effectively disenfranchise thousands of Wisconsin voters,” by Ian Milhiser, Vox.com, 4/6/20). As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg put it in her dissent, “the Court’s order…will result in massive disenfranchisement,” (Source: “Supreme Court Blocks Extended Voting in Wisconsin,” by Adam Liptak, The New York Times, 4/7/20).
The actions of the Supreme Court and this administration make it clear that ⅔ of our government cares neither for our liberty nor our lives. They pimp our suffering for profit and power. These actions should be shocking, but hardly surprising. After all, the Supreme Court is the same institution that defended caging Japanese Americans in Korematsu; and the same one that justified violating a treaty to sell two million acres of Native American land in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock. The federal government playing games with American lives by pushing unproven drugs is the same one that conducted the Tuskegee Experiment” denying penicillin or any treatment for forty years to 600 Black men infected with syphilis. People of color have long known what this country is capable of. My question is, “Do you believe us now?”