Quarantine Journal: the inequities of Covid-19

QUARANTINE JOURNAL: THE INEQUITIES

Day 54, Sunday, May 3, 2020
This pandemic is bringing up cruel, but predictable, inequalities: poor people, black people, Native Americans, Hispanics - they're all dying in greater percentages than their share of the population. It seems we are at war with ourselves. 
We are. Since Trump was elected we've seen how the aggressiveness we habitually exported declaring war on other countries starts with unchecked angers at home. The pandemic is an accelerator of what has been festering.There are protesters waving assault rifles at State Senators in the capitol building in Michigan today, demanding the opening of businesses before it is safe. Along with our President, many of them are inspired by conspiracy theories that have, at their heart, the promise of a race war. Their language makes it clear it is a feature, not a bug, that brown and black people are dying at much greater rates of coronavirus - as of May 5th African Americans made up sixty percent of Covid-19 cases even though they are only thirteen percent of the population.. This is the fulfillment of the politics white supremacists have been pushing for. They give Trump support for dismantling the government he inherited in order to replace it with a white dominated one; in exchange, he gives these "very good, very fine people" credence. And, by association, to their heroes: from Charles Manson to Dylan Roof to James Jackson, each of whom killed people specifically to instigate a race war; or John  Earnest and and Brenton Tarrant who massacred people in synagogues; or James Fields in Charlottesville and Patrick Crusius in El Paso. And so many more.  
From what I can see we have been in the middle of a race war every since we came here - first dominating Native Americans, then importing people we enslaved. When slavery was over on paper its inequalities were never over in the real lives of  black Americans. Lynching, red-lining, vast inequalities in health care, education, and jobs are a constant reminder that we struggle to come together across color lines. 

I grew up in one of the most integrated communities in America: Hyde Park, Chicago. In elementary school I was in classes with  kids like me, both black and white, but there was another group - they were black students, older and physically mature. They were silent and  invisible to me and my friends, and, from what I remember, to our teachers. Was it their grown-up size that meant they sat at the desks at the back of the room?  Looking at class photos from fifth and sixth grade I see them, standing in the back rows, taller than the teacher. What I realize now is they had come with their families in the Great Migration: five million black people fled the Jim Crow laws of the South - the lynching and terror, the poverty; or the punishment if they were successful. This was the largest migration in American history; the people who came to Chicago and other Northern cities were refugees in their own land. 
Why were high school age kids in my classes at grammar school? My guess is the segregated schools of the South were piss poor. This is what inequality looks like. I wish I could say this was the inequality of my youth, 60 years ago, and things have changed. But, though there have been decades of civil rights legislation to make things better, the latest reporting shows segregation has gotten worse in cities like Chicago and New York. Worse than it was in the 50's and '60's. We've been at war with ourselves from forever, but we haven't talked about it as such. War is something you do to people "over there." 
  I'm a boomer; for as long as I've been alive we've been sending troops and bombs to countries around the globe. During Vietnam the nightly news on television carried pictures of flag draped coffins coming back from that debacle. It made it somewhat real that people we knew - neighbors and friends if not family - were getting killed and for what? Bush banished pictures of coffins during the Iraq war. Not good to remind Americans their fellow Americans were being killed, and for what? He and his cabal hadn't even invaded the country the 9/11 attackers came from - that would be Saudi Arabia.  All my life we have been using our might and aggression globally but I, and people like me, are strangely immune from the affects of our bombs, land mines, drone strikes.. We aren't like friends and family in Europe who see signs of WWII around them, or who know people who spent time in concentration camps, or had nightly blackouts and bombings in their cities. 

We bomb other countries incessantly. Here are the countries America has bombed in my lifetime: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Cambodia, Cuba, Grenada, Iraq, Iran, Korea, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Panama, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Vietnam, Yemen and Yugoslavia. That's 20 countries. Add to that CIA assisted bombings (remember Iran-Contra in Nicaragua?) in the Congo, El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Nicaragua, and Peru. 
What ties this back to our war with ourselves is that, with the exception of Bosnia/Yugoslavia, all the places we have bombed are non-white. It is easy for Americans to make brown people the "other." Because we learned that at home. This administration has been exposing our fault lines, challenging us to deal with the root forces that drive our aggression. Covid-19 is etching its way through any complacency we have about our systematic cruelties. 
But I still have hope. As Rebecca Solnit says in her book "A Paradise Built in Hell," extraordinary communities rise up from disasters. I hope we, as a nation, use this massive disruption to create a different world. There is no limit on education, or creativity. To think otherwise is to buy into a zero-sum view of the world that fuels the anger and bitterness propelling Trump and friends into power. Their message says that if you get something it must mean it was taken from me. Trump is masterful in creating this fear and then providing the necessary relief: he delivers up enemies that have in common they are not white. 
This viral epidemic breaking down old social contracts is an invitation for invention; it's the crack that lets the light in. There are forces using this chaos to increase authoritarianism: that is the implication of armed men standing on balconies in the capitol building in Michigan. In their literature they are specific that white+guns is their privilege; they are signaling that Second Amendment rights belong to whites only. Imagining a group of black men similarly armed standing there day after day is impossible, just like it's impossible to imagine that if a black man had massacred nine white people in a church the police would politely give him a Burger King when they caught him, but that is what they did for Dylan Roof. 
But white supremacists aren't the only people who can imagine another America, where white men rule over everyone. We can - we must - imagine other worlds; societies that are more just, more inclusive. This is our work. Coronavirus is not our last crisis. The skills we hone at this time will serve us as we turn planetary greed around and bring change to schools, transportation, housing, medicine, food production, courts, politics. Tomorrow we will wake up in a society irreversibly transformed from the one we ushered in on New Years Day. People everywhere feel emboldened to imagine profound changes. Pick a subject, any subject, and imagine how it could be better. It doesn't matter where you start, it matters that you start, that you connect to others and begin.