“Just to be clear, if it took a global pandemic to make you realize our systems are broken, that is a privilege”. @grayson_stevens
The Summer Lecture Series at Glenn this past summer focused on Racial Healing and Justice. Through speakers and bulletin inserts, we learned about the history and current realities of systemic racism and white privilege. We began to understand more fully the ways in which our history, systems and structures result in disparities in housing, employment, health care, wealth, education, voting rights and the criminal justice system.
Today, we find ourselves in a very different landscape than we were in this past summer. The advent of the coronavirus seems to have turned our world upside down in so many ways. But one thing that has not changed is that BIPOC* are once again finding themselves bearing an unfairly heavy burden. So many of the disparities we discussed this summer are being exacerbated by the pandemic and by our country’s response to it.
Physical distancing is being practiced throughout our country in an effort to slow down the transmission of the coronavirus. While clearly the right thing for all of us to be doing, physical distancing comes at a cost beyond the loss of socialization.
The latest numbers of people filing unemployment claims are simply staggering. While job loss is a frightening prospect for anyone, the impact on BIPOC is made even worse by the large racial wealth gap in our country. The typical white family has 10 times the wealth of the typical Black family and 7 times the wealth of the typical Latinx family. People with less wealth are less able to afford weeks, or even days, without income. BIPOC are heavily employed in restaurants and hotels, which are two industries being particularly hard hit by the pandemic.
As we learned this summer, BIPOC frequently have more limited job opportunities, and so are more likely to be employed in lower paying jobs without access to paid sick leave. And BIPOC have greater rates of unemployment, so in a country where health care is typically tied to a job, this means a disproportionate number of BIPOC will be without health insurance in the middle of a pandemic.
Those who do not have health insurance but need healthcare during this pandemic will find themselves facing large medical bills. Almost 30% of Black college-educated households and 60% of Black non-college educated households will not be able to afford to pay their bills after a $400 emergency expense, and the cost of treatment for COVID-19 for those who are hospitalized will far exceed $400. An additional risk is that people without insurance will not seek testing or medical care, which may lead to greater exposure to the virus by others.
Another place where we can see the virus having a greater impact on BIPOC is in our criminal justice system. We talked this summer about the school to prison pipeline and saw how our prison populations are disproportionality comprised of BIPOC, a large number of whom are incarcerated without having been convicted of a crime, but because they are unable to pay bail. We are now starting to see reports of COVID-19 outbreaks in prisons, where inmates are kept in tight quarters, often with inadequate sanitation and health care.
All of these structural factors, and others, including environmental racism, homelessness, immigration status, appear to be causing BIPOC to be much more likely to get and die from COVID-19. The numbers look to be particularly alarming for Black Americans.
Many of these issues, like the ones we talked about this summer, are rooted in the structures and systems of our society. Our country’s policies have been too often built on the concept of individuals pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. But as Martin Luther King, Jr. noted, it can be difficult to pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots. And even when a safety net has been created for some in our country, it has often not been made available to BIPOC.
It can seem impossible for us as individuals to have an impact on the systems and structures that are causing even greater suffering during the pandemic. But there are things we can do, now and going forward. Here are 6 antiracist actions we can all take (adapted and expanded from a list compiled by SURJ (Standing Up For Racial Justice)), along with names of organizations working in those areas:
1) Join a group that works for systemic change to protect and care for the most vulnerable (Faith in Public Life; Poor People’s Campaign)
2) Support efforts to get people out of jails and detention centers (Southern Center for Human Rights)
3) Interrupt racist stories about who is to blame by correcting people who refer to the Coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan virus”**
4) Fight to protect our elections (Fair Fight) - Georgia will be mailing out absentee ballot applications to all registered voters for the May primary and this is a significant step forward, but we need to unsure that easier access to the voting booth continues
5) Support organizations that provide resources to those in need – the Glenn web site lists organizations that our church already supports who are doing important work in providing food to the most vulnerable
6) As we expand our concept of essential workers to include - in addition to healthcare workers - teachers, grocery store workers, sanitation workers, delivery people and more, find ways to support those workers: in the short term by tipping generously and providing needed resources, and in the long term by advocating for better compensation and benefits
“We are releasing people from jail who are there for misdemeanors, we are preventing families from being evicted, we are sending people checks for food, we are giving the homeless places to live. We don’t have to wait for a pandemic to do these things, we should always do them.” @ClintSmithIII
Prayer for a Pandemic
Cameron Bellm
May we who are merely inconvenienced
Remember those whose lives are at stake.
May we who have no risk factors
Remember those most vulnerable.
May we who have the luxury of working from home
Remember those who must choose between preserving their health or making their rent.
May we who have the flexibility to care for our children when their schools close
Remember those who have no options.
May we who have to cancel our trips
Remember those that have no safe place to go.
May we who are losing our margin money in the tumult of the economic market
Remember those who have no margin at all.
May we who settle in for a quarantine at home
Remember those who have no home.
As fear grips our country,
let us choose love.
During this time when we cannot physically wrap our arms around each other,
Let us yet find ways to be the loving embrace of God to our neighbors.
Amen.
*BIPOC – Blacks, Indigenous Persons and Persons of Color
**A recent report on NPR discussed the increase in attacks on Asian Americans. Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, has been tracking these attacks using a website called Stop AAPI Hate. More than 650 reports of discrimination — largely against the Asian American community – were reported in the first 8 days after the website was launched. Mr. Jeung said in discussing the reported attacks “[n]ame-calling and verbal harassment — microaggressions are the most common. It moves up to people having bottles and cans thrown at them, their homes being vandalized, and then ... maybe three times a day, we have people actually being physically attacked, assaulted, being hit or punched, pushed on subways.
Resources:
What the Racial Data Show, Ibram X. Kendi, The Atlantic, April 6, 2020