In the fourth month of the time of COVID, in Louisville Kentucky, Breonna Taylor was shot by police as she lay sleeping. Her boyfriend was wakened by the ruckus of police busting down their door looking for drugs. He thought it was a home invasion and fired a bullet into a policeman’s leg. That triggered the hail of bullets that killed Ms Taylor.
Trouble was, the cops were 10 miles off target – they were in the wrong house. The initial police report didn’t mention that. Nor did it mention that they had killed Ms Taylor. Or that she was a decorated Emergency Medical Technician serving on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic.
What makes this story especially poignant is that it is largely black and brown people on those front lines. As a consequence, as recent epidemiological research shows, the virus is killing Latinos and blacks at rates higher than their representation in the population. In the case of African Americans, it’s more than twice (blacks make up 13% of the population but 27% of the dead).
For those who labour in precarious jobs, social distancing is not an option. Add the fact that precarious employment yields precarious pay and poor pay buys you poor nutrition, poor housing and poor health, and you’ve got another reason for the inequality of who’s dying.
Now, stir in 400 years of slavery and its toxic racist legacies, et voilá – American pie.
Canadians are too smug when we look at the racial carnage in the States. We may not be hosting the brutal shooting gallery that’s America (although the Boushies might disagree), but we have nothing to crow about.
A recent study by the Toronto-based Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences shows neighbourhoods where the virus is most active are those with lower incomes, poorer housing and greater concentrations of visible minorities.
It’s the same in Montreal where a collaborative mapping project shows the neighbourhood of Montreal North is the hardest hit area in the city. Here, incomes are low, unemployment is high, and half the population is of a visible minority. Many work in the health care industry and are bringing the virus home with them.
Also living in Montreal North are many of the “guardian angels” lauded by Premier Legault. They are asylum seekers who, even as angels, have no guarantee of staying in Canada, unless they die of the virus.
As the Americans say, if white folk catch a cold, black folk get pneumonia.
There’s any number of ways to think about the role of race in COVID in America, including a cogent argument that there’s a ‘racial contract’ – an invisible codicil to the social contract we all buy into.
The racial contract allows society to suspend the social contract for those who are not white. So it’s all right to suppress the vote of black people (as was done during Jim Crow flagrantly and now surreptitiously to ‘prevent voter fraud’), or to lynch black folk for the slightest perceived offence (flagrantly in Jim Crow years and under the cover of self-defence today).
Pushing for the re-opening of the economy is, in effect if not by design, exercising the racial contract with a COVID addendum that says, black and brown lives are expendable to the corporate well-being of the nation.
I prefer the idea that whiteness is property because it applies to Canada. Whiteness is like a get-out-of-jail-free card á la carte blanche (literally). If you have whiteness, you are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (and a jury of your peers). If you do not, well, the end of the line starts at the back of the bus.
But then, some say Mr Trump is the first white President, well, except for Trump’s hero, Andrew Jackson (who owned 100 slaves and drove the tribes west of the Mississippi). Oh, and maybe Thomas Jefferson (who did not count his slaves amongst all the men who are created equal). Or James Polk (who wanted slavery extended to the west coast and stole Mexican Americans’ land). Then there was Woodrow Wilson (who purged the civil service of blacks and backed the KKK).
And, of course, Ronald Reagan whose Reaganomics impoverished black households and whose Anti-Drug Abuse Act decimated black families … which brings us back to Breonna Taylor.
David McLaren
Neyaashiinigmiing
[Editor's note: There is an increasing demand from Canadian health care agencies to have race-based data collected to inform better health care resources.]
