Thread by @ShahrarAli

My article in @GreenWorld_UK on
BAME LIFE CHANCES, COVID INEQUALITY AND DEATH
Pls RT and share
greenworld.org.uk/article/bame-l…
@TheGreenParty @LonGreenParty @GreensofColour @thgreenparty

How is structural prejudice on racial grounds laid bare in our collective response to the Coronavirus pandemic? How can we use the galvanising force of a global crisis to properly tackle racial and social inequality?

A third of people in intensive care for Covid-19 are also from BAME backgrounds; greatly disproportionate to their population.

Who, if anyone, is to blame? Greens rightly continue to interrogate statements and assumptions made by the government.

Excessive focus or careless attribution of intent risks overlooking actions with highly negative outcomes due to failures of competence – regardless of good or bad intentions. Blame culture also risks letting souls who take themselves to be virtuous off the hook.

Health inequalities are already known to disproportionately affect people from ethnic minorities, whether lower life expectancy, experience of infant mortality, or increased incidence of mother’s death through childbirth – trends established long before this pandemic reached us.

Pregnant nurses unable to resist pressure to work in clinical settings where exposure to Covid inevitable; or retired doctors returning to duty without complaint about working conditions; pressures more acute when it comes to ethnic minorities' oppression. #hostileenvironment

There is an opportunity for @PHE_uk review to help us see more clearly how institutional racism is still rife across all walks of life; but there is also a risk that we will revert to collective denial about the scale of the problem.

Ironically @UKLabour also announce a review into impact of #COVID19 Covid on BAME people but refuse to act upon grotesque examples of internal racism revealed in a report leaked just days before. #LabourLeaks

We owe it to each and every one of us to grasp the nettle and to make good on the collective objective to create a decent and fair society – where race is no barrier to life chances, or chance of death from Covid.

Our voluntary decisions – in short, choice – about how we organise society is what predominately lies behind these so-called chances.