For hundreds of years, Black folks have spoken in regards to the struggles we face, pointing to root causes like poverty, housing segregation, unemployment, and environmental degradation. And for hundreds of years, these considerations have largely gone ignored. The identical factor has occurred with the pandemic. Lengthy earlier than any information confirmed our worst fears, Black folks knew that the coronavirus would disproportionately devastate our already weak communities. Pushed by that foresight, I launched a publication, Coronavirus News for Black Folks, in early April. Because the demise toll crept up and up, the brutality of American racism grew to become even clearer. Black folks with clear signs of COVID-19 have been turned away from receiving exams, generally on a number of events, solely to die at dwelling. Black households have been entirely destroyed as members died inside weeks and days of each other. By the tip of July, twice as many Black kids as white kids had died of COVID-19: In Michigan, the primary baby to die from the virus was a 5-year-old Black girl who spent two weeks on a ventilator.
Whereas a big swath of People, myself included, are in a position to safely keep at dwelling, Black individuals are disproportionately essential workers, who don’t have any alternative however to courageous the pandemic and head to work. Many have misplaced their lives working jobs they felt have been unsafe and underpaid. “Our white govt director has not been within the workplace for the previous six weeks, has not requested how any of us are holding up, and has not emailed us to say thanks,” a 20-something safety guard told me in April. “I really feel betrayed. I used to like my place and the folks I work with. Now I’m resentful of the safety some individuals are afforded whereas others, like myself, are despatched out to the entrance strains.” (The safety guard was granted anonymity for concern {of professional} reprisal.)
As if the havoc wreaked by the virus wasn’t already dangerous sufficient, the racial disparities will persist because the U.S. works its method out of the pandemic. Simply as one in three Black folks is aware of somebody straight who has died from COVID-19, one in three Black folks has said they won’t get the vaccine, based on a latest Kaiser Household Basis research. Medical trials have proven that the vaccine is secure and efficient, however a long-standing distrust in America’s predominantly white medical establishments is just deepening, and so the variety of Black lives misplaced to this virus will proceed to rise, although we now have a solution to finish it.
Fortunately, moments of Black kinship nonetheless emerge even throughout all of the struggling. The identical week that marked greater than 50,000 Black deaths noticed a horizon of hope. Sandra Lindsay, a Jamaican-born nurse in Queens, New York, grew to become the primary particular person to be vaccinated in the US, after receiving the shot from Michelle Chester, additionally a Black girl. Even a pandemic can’t break the resilient bond of Black America.
