This American carnage.
Black lives don't matter, unless we see people die on video. White America averts its eyes.
This really happened; it is not right wing fantasy: Gunfire killed 25 black people in Chicago last weekend. Another 85 were injured. In one weekend!
Eighteen of those people were killed in a 24 hour period, the worst day of violence in Chicago's history. There have been many days of violence going on for years, but this set a new record.
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| Click: Chicago Sun Times |
Meanwhile, something big is happening with the coronavirus response: America is opening up, ready or not. The virus case count is going up. In Oregon, we had our worst day ever. Similar things are happening in other, more rural states that were late to the party. It is the will of the American people to reopen.
It could have been different. Had there been consistent leadership from political and scientific authorities, coordinated between federal and state governments, there might have been widespread consensus to suppress the spread early on. In actual fact, President Trump underplayed the virus at the early stages, then briefly and reluctantly followed the guidance of the medical epidemiologists, and then undercut and contradicted it all by tweeting encouragement to protests against governors carrying out the federal government's own guidelines. The result was widespread impatience and flouting of social distancing rules. The dam has broken.
Democrats and think tank experts criticize Trump. Historian Francis Fukuyama observed in Foreign Policy that some countries with strong, credible leadership suppressed the spread of the disease, which allows their economies to reopen.
"The United States, in contrast, has bungled its response and seen its prestige slip enormously. . . . It was the country's singular misfortune to have the most incompetent and divisive leader in its modern history at the helm when the crisis hit, and his mode of governance did not change under pressure. Having spent his term at war with the state he heads, he was unable to deploy it effectively when the situation demanded. Having judged that his political fortunes were best served by confrontations and rancor rather than national unity, he has used the crisis to pick fights and increase social cleavages." Click: Foreign Affairs
This is unfair to Trump.
Americans would never have been willing to give up freedom the way that citizens in Singapore, South Korea, or Wuhan were willing. We are a country where people insist on carrying guns. We have a multi-century tradition of resisting top-down government.
Trump realized that the virus rarely kills his swing vote base of white non-college working men. It kills people older than them, and people in New York City area. It also kills Black people and immigrant communities, people in poverty, the kind of people who work packed into slaughterhouses. Not them.
Trump was telling his base the virus response was overblown, that their sacrifice was unnecessary. People heard him and began walking around maskless, shopping, sneaking haircuts. The dam broke.
There will be an increase in deaths, disproportionately among people of color. Americans regret it in the abstract, but are going to forge ahead with re-opening the economy anyway. The shutdown is disastrous for some and inconvenient for everyone. Heck with it! The tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of extra deaths will take place one at a time, out of sight, not televised.
The millions of people on the streets of America protesting reflect that Americans, both black and white, recognize that racism is alive and well in America, and that systematic injustices being practiced. They have George Floyd in mind. Yet American housing and education are still largely segregated by race. Incomes are inadequate to pull people out of poverty. That doesn't change. The reforms are about policing. Look at what he did to George Floyd!
The Chicago murders don't take place in "nice" neighborhoods. They take place in black neighborhoods, where White America doesn't see it. The greatest risk of death from the virus is to poor people of color. These deaths are possible to ignore because the original premise--that there is endemic racism in America--is still true. If thousands of other people are disadvantaged in housing, education, incomes, or they die from the virus, and it isn't on TV, we can avert our eyes and carry on.
That's how endemic racism works in practice.
The Chicago murders don't take place in "nice" neighborhoods. They take place in black neighborhoods, where White America doesn't see it. The greatest risk of death from the virus is to poor people of color. These deaths are possible to ignore because the original premise--that there is endemic racism in America--is still true. If thousands of other people are disadvantaged in housing, education, incomes, or they die from the virus, and it isn't on TV, we can avert our eyes and carry on.
That's how endemic racism works in practice.
3 comments:
Donald Trump and the Regressives won in 2016 due in part to a revolt against the neo-liberal establishment in the Democratic party. It could happen again, the protestors aren't carrying Biden signs. It's hard to imagine a that a Clinton administration would have been any more effective at addressing inequality.
I'm pretty sure as hospitalizations increase we will be back to lockdown soon. We might be able to hold down infections with mitigation practices. One point that needs to be made is that a recent survey showed that Republicans were more resistant to wearing masks and disdainful of social distancing.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/01/masks-politics-coronavirus-227765
For now, I can't think of anything except a huge spike in Republican deaths which might change their minds. Some people are slow learners, so maybe when it's their parents or grandparent drowning in their own phlegm, they'll start paying attention.
THe make-up of our political establishments, both Federal and State, show that Republicans control not only the White House and the Senate, but a great many of our state governments as well. For some incalculable reason, voters seem unable to distinguish between the Democrats (who against strong opposition from the Republicans gave them both Social Security and Medicare) from a party (Republican) that exists only to preserve a status quo that benefits only the wealthy. It's unbelievably simple. We are a nation composed not of the brave but of the fearful who believe that guns are the solution to all of our problems. That premise (given questionable credence by a misinterpretation of the Second Amendment by a politically mmotivated Supreme Court) is obviously not working out too well. While the Democrats have plenty of warts, they look snow white in comparison to the hypocritical, bigoted and mentally unstable man incessaanatly tweeting his diatribes from the safety of the Oval office. And while examining this curious state of affairs, let us not forget the truancy of the young, a majority of whom have ignored a basic privelege denied today in too many nations the world over: the vote. The seniors, who are shortly to depart this world, partake enthusiastically of this privelege to defend and fund their abilities to age and exist in comfort while the young, who are doomed to live under mentally compromised leaders like Donald Trump, boycott the polls as if it were a curse instead of a precious right. Alas, something is very rotten and the odor emanates from sea to sea across our nation, not from Denmark.
Bob Warren
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