Covid-19 and the Through-Line of Racism
I understand.
When students in Florida choose to party for spring break. When protesters in Michigan gather on the steps of the capitol without PPE in defiance of stay-at-home orders. When social distancing rules in L.A. are called fascist, and an impediment on constitutional rights. When the call goes out in Virginia to prematurely reopen businesses and get back to work, because losing your (perceived) way of life is more important than losing your (actual) life.
When Wisconsin voters show up en masse (thank you) and risk their lives to vote in a giant FUCK YOU to the obvious effort to disenfranchise them:
I understand. I get it.
You might be wondering how I drew parallels between those first four groups and the last. What could a bunch of MAGA hat wearing, confederate flag waving, literal mouth breathers, possibly have in common with the patriots who stood in line for hours, risking infection, standing six feet apart, wearing masks, to help elect a democratic supreme court judge?
Easy: this is what happens when the government treats white people the way they treat Black people.
Colonial capitalism, the great grand-daddy of white supremacy, has acted under a single guiding principle for centuries: create a metric shit tonne of wealth for a small handful of people by exploiting labor and resources, while using the skin color of the proletariat as a wedge, to keep them from uniting against the forces that oppress them both.
It’s a thin veneer, but it works. It may be the most successful con job of all time.
You’re more than welcome to google the Doctrine of Discovery (1493), Manifest Destiny (1845), and American Exceptionalism (1929) if you want to see a clear through-line. The creation of the concept of race, and establishing laws and social order that advantaged one group over another around this construct, has been a guiding principle of capitalism for around 600 years.
It’s easy to deny and/or ignore until the day you wake up and realize your “first world nation” is actually a feudal state.
Inability to gather publicly? Go look up vagrancy laws, established immediately after emancipation, which made loitering a criminal offense, and paved the way for peonage. Restricted freedom of movement? Research the Green Book (the book not the shitty movie) which helped Blacks in Jim Crow America find shelter that might not end their nights as strange fruit. Restaurant chain Ruth Chris gets $20M in PPP loans earmarked for small business, while your local restaurant gets denied by the SBA? Go look up how FDR’s New Deal deliberately excluded Blacks from home loans, education loans, and small business loans.
Government up to some chicanery, trying to make it impossible for you to vote? Educate yourself on the whole history of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.
You’re livid. You’ve got the right to be. Blacks grok this.
This may be one of the reasons you don’t see angry Blacks (or other people of color) waving signs in the streets. We’re used to having limitations forced on us. While we know it’s the actual reason it exists, we never expect the government to help us. Getting creative in times of crisis is what we do: it’s how this country got soul food, jazz, rock & roll, country, gospel, hip-hop, and every groove worth shaking your ass.
We have some experience with channeling anger.
If the actions of the selfish only affected themselves, I’d be fine letting Darwin sort it out. Unfortunately, science doesn’t require your belief and viruses don’t judge you by the color of your skin. Selfishness hurts everyone, but centuries of systemic oppression ensure it will affect Black and Brown people first, and disproportionately.
The thing about racism, especially the casual kind, is: it takes commitment. Even when a president (in this case Lyndon B. Johnson) admits “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you” that slight advantage is just too addictive to abandon.
Until your feudal lords start treating white people they way they’ve treated Black people all along.
I’m not so naive as to think something like a global pandemic will change anyone’s mind. Admitting your entire ideology is based on a lie requires the kind of frontal lobe neuro-plasticity you’ve never had to develop if you’ve been making lizard brain decisions your whole life. I would like to believe it doesn’t have to be a zero sum equation; that there are alternatives to running back to the fields like so many serfs and merchants, scrambling to fill the local duke’s coffers, then settling for so much pittance they begrudgingly return.
I get it. WE get it. And we’ve been ready for REAL change.
Are you?
