Shocked to see NYPD had plastered my neighborhood with “No sidewalk BBQs” signs. Reminded of a recent article on silence and “gentrification”.

Sidewalk BBQs are a staple of summer in Harlem and one of the main ways families, friends socialize and spend time together. Important the designated locations they mention may not be easily accessible to some residents.

Also, can we talk abt how outdoors is often a respite from the summer heat esp. for residents who live in public housing where temps inside can often dangerously exceed outdoor temps.

As a Black @StuyNY grad who was one of 30 Black students in a class of ~800 thirty yrs ago, the headline should be that this inequity has been allowed to persist for decades without intervention.

I received the 201st highest score out of 25K students b/c…

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1664673293675134980

my parents had the resources to ensure I attended schools that set me up to do well on the exam + enrolled me to test prep courses. I remember having classmates at @StuyNY who had been taking test
prep courses since *THIRD GRADE*.

This is necropolitics.

Mississippi, a state which ranks among the lowest in health indicators & among the highest in poverty rates, is refusing to accept $1.35 billion in Medicaid dollars to cover medical care.

This is also a state with a largest % of Black residents in the US. Necropolitics = “necropolitics as “the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not…

[It] is a framework that illuminates how governments assign differential value to human life.”

teenvogue.com/story/what-is-…

It is more than obvious that the current status quo* is NOT working for most of us - most USians are harmed, Black, Latinx, Indig. ppl are disproportionately so.

*lack of health care for all, of a social safety net, of workplace protections, prioritizing profits > people, etc. Read more about the US’s declining life expectancy (not seen among peer nations):

npr.org/sections/healt…

This is a long thread so I may have missed it but nowhere do I recall seeing reference to risk of transmission *to others* & in particular to people who are at high risk for severe illness.

Mitigation measures aren’t just abt just the individual risk, but about the collective.

https://twitter.com/Bob_Wachter/status/1607162086282645505

I am not just concerned about *my* individual risk of getting COVID.

I’m also concerned about whether I were to pass it *to others* who may not be more vulnerable to serious illness/death.

Even white USian pregant ppl have worse maternal mortality rates than counterparts in peer nations.

Yet another example that while the status quo in the US (lack of universal health care, etc.) disproportionately harms Black USians, almost everyone pays a price.

https://twitter.com/uche_blackstock/status/1599227824002383872

Yet another reason why it’s important when examining inequities to go beyond just having white USians as the standard (as Bor et al did in their must-read research paper “Missing Americans”and consider comparisons to counterparts in other high income countries.