THREAD: The loss of 1 in 1k Americans (including about 175k white ones) due to COVID & the pandemic's economic devastation are both the collateral damage of anti-Black and brown racism. Sound hyperbolic? It's not, and it's easily proved. Please follow along...
2/ On the one hand, sure, the Administration's nonchalance in the face of the virus is the initial cause of the devastation. And that had been evident since January. But that was actually starting to shift a bit by late March, right up to April 7. What happened then?...
3/ As @Thom_Hartmann has noted, that day the NYT & WaPo (among others) reported that the disproportionate death toll of COVID was among Black & brown folks. THAT NIGHT, Tucker Carlson (who had actually been taking C19 seriously) changed his tune. A few days later so did Trump...
4/ Suddenly Trump began demanding the re-opening of the economy and focusing on getting people back to work at all costs. That was when protests for re-opening began. Once the face of C19 was of color, many white folks (egged on by the right) clearly shrugged...
5/ It was Black & brown folk in blue states & cities, so who cares? It was old folks sure, including whites, but as Ben Shapiro explained, 'if an 81 year old dies from COVID, it's not like they were 30. And ya know, life expectancy is only 80' so...The mentality was eugenic...
6/ And that's the thing: once you construct a society on the scaffolding of a hierarchy of human value (which this society has been from the start), the poison is not containable. Oh you can say it's just white over everyone else, but that mentality metastasizes...
7/ And so it becomes easier to accept the loss of elderly and working class of all colors and those with pre-existing conditions. Oh well, so sad, but we gotta get back to work! Those who die are seen as weak and the weak are expendable...
8/ and so we end up rolling the dice on everyone...rather than paying folks to stay home till the crisis could pass, rather than guaranteeing paid leave, rather than mandating a small inconvenience (masks and social distancing) for the greater good...
9/ And here we are pushing 350k dead, with many more to come and the vaccine rollout a shit show...and all because of who this thing was disproportionately killing. If it had been dispro white, younger healthier and richer folks you KNOW things would have been different...
10/ We'd have shut everything down and sent weekly checks to everyone to get them through. We'd have frozen mortgages & rent indefinitely. And white folks wouldn't have been screaming about their 'right' to go unmasked in Costco or Trader Joes...no camo demos at state capitols...
11/ But bc the dead were dispro of color, racism said "meh." Dispro working class, classism said "meh." Dispro older, ageism said "meh." Dispro less healthy, ableism said "meh." This is what happens when your society is founded on the idea that Black life doesn't matter...
12/ ...and why it is so crucial to insist that it does. Because when Black lives don't matter, pretty soon neither do the lives of any others deemed relatively lesser. And the kicker is, that's going to be ALL of us at some point. We all get older. We all get sick...
13/ Once you accept a hierarchy of human value, all are at risk. So white folks who have buried loved ones from COVID, especially after 4/7, know this: if Black lives had mattered in this country from the start -- if they mattered enuf NOW -- your pain might have been avoided...
14/ And only if we construct a society where Black and brown life IS valued equally -- in short, where all lives really DO matter, and that's not just some shit people say to rhetorically smackdown Black people -- willing of us really be safe. END
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