'All the psychoses of US history': how America is victim-blaming the coronavirus dead |... - 0 views
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hy do Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population but nearly a third of the known coronavirus death toll? Not because of government incompetence, the Trump administration is arguing, but because Americans are very unhealthy.
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The United States’ organized response to the pandemic had been “historic”, Trump’s health secretary, Alex Azar, told CNN on 17 May, but America “unfortunately” has a “very diverse” population, and black Americans and minorities “in particular” have “significant underlying disease”.
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“This is not about fault. It’s about simple epidemiology,” Azar said, adding in a pious tone: “One doesn’t blame an individual for their health condition. That would be absurd.”
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Blaming black Americans for dying from a novel virus because they had diabetes or high blood pressure was precisely what Azar was doing
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the moment when the US response to coronavirus escalated into a full culture war is revealing. The big protests at state capitols, with crowds of white Americans demanding their governors reopen the economy, started about a week after national news outlets began reporting in early April that black Americans made up a disproportionate number of the dead.
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Systemic racism created the health disparities that made black and brown Americans more vulnerable to dying from coronavirus, public health experts say; and now the same racism is also shaping, and undermining, the country’s political response to the pandemic.
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It’s not a new idea that thousands of people must die to preserve America’s “business as usual”. It’s not a new assumption many of those people will be brown or black.
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Americans don’t have much of a national vocabulary for talking about collective action and sacrifice
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a gun rights activist from Austin, Texas, has strong opinions about tyranny and freedom. But he said he was frustrated that some of his usual allies did not seem to understand that dealing with a novel virus, in a country where no one has immunity, required a different kind of politics.
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“Our rights are being violated. That is all actually real,” Stokes said. “But this is one of the few times when that’s OK. Pandemics – these call for a collectivist response. They don’t work without one.”
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For some wealthy Americans eager to reopen the economy, the motivating fear may be the risk of social change, the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz said.
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It’s not surprising that Americans, who are used to tackling every problem through the lens of “individual rights”, would struggle with how to respond to the collective demands of a pandemic. “It’s this mismatch in terms of a social problem, and the tools we have at our disposal to make sense of it,” the sociologist Jennifer Carlson said.
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Early Puritan accounts of arriving in the New World and seeing indigenous people dying of illness are marked by a familiar self-righteousness. The Puritans look at an epidemic and “think it’s a divine dispensation”, Blanchfield said. “The very fact that people are dying is taken as both pragmatically offering market opportunities ... but also as a theological vindication of your own survivorship.”
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European colonists established their settlements in the midst of the mass death of indigenous people and opened the American market for business “at gunpoint, in the wake of that epidemic”, said Patrick Blanchfield, the author of a forthcoming 500-year history of American gun violence. Enslaved black people died performing the essential labor that kept the economy running.
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Today, “who is being asked to die for the market to be open?” Blanchfield said. “It’s black people. It’s Native American tribal communities.”
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The coronavirus culture war is “kind of a petri dish of all the psychoses of US history”, as Dunbar-Ortiz, the author of An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, put it.
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That Puritan instinct to see infection as a sign of guilt, and health as a kind of vindication, is currently playing out across the political spectrum.
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American liberals sometimes treat their belief in science as a kind of religion, Blanchfield argued, fetishizing technocrats and rejoicing when conservatives who do not “believe in science” are punished.
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“Everyone wants some narrative, to explain the unimaginable level of illness and death and vulnerability that we’re all feeling,” he said. “Everyone wants there to be a logic to this.
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The victim-blaming on the left, though, has come from individuals’ Twitter accounts, not Democratic party leadership. The victim-blaming of black Americans has come from the highest levels of government.
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Just days after national news outlets first reported the emerging racial disparities in coronavirus deaths, Trump’s surgeon general, Jerome Adams, said at a White House briefing that communities of color needed to “step up” and advised them to “avoid alcohol, tobacco, and drugs”.
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Lecturing individual black Americans about smoking, rather than talking about African Americans’ increased environmental exposure to air pollution, a demonstrated coronavirus risk, was classic “victim-blaming”
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Poll results from mid-March had shown black respondents were actually more likely than white respondents to see coronavirus as a serious threat to their own health, he said.
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“It’s hard, when you have so many white people who are protesting and not social distancing, to argue that they are taking it more seriously and that’s why they are less likely to die,” he said.
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But the same argument that black Americans were to blame for dying simply evolved, Kendi said, to focus more on their “pre-existing conditions”.
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In Louisiana, Senator Bill Cassidy, a white Republican and a medical doctor, had already cast doubt on whether inequities rooted in systemic racism were the reason so many black Louisiana citizens were dying of coronavirus. “That’s rhetoric,” he told NPR in early April. The real answer, the answer backed by science, was that “African Americans are 60% more likely to have diabetes” and that “we need to address the obesity epidemic”.
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Blaming the victims of American racial disparities for what they suffer has a reliable outcome: nothing is done. The deaths mount.
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Ronald Reagan attacked America’s post-war investment in social programs, Kotsko said, “by pointing out that the generosity is now extending to black people” and suggesting that “it’s better to tear down the system of solidarity than to allow the wrong people to get the benefits”.
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Metzl argued in his book Dying of Whiteness that the way racism has shaped gun policy and healthcare choices in this country has led to outcomes that hurt black and brown Americans, but that also led to measurable increases in the deaths of white Americans. Today, he’s afraid that same dynamic is playing out again.
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The Puritans had a form of torture called “pressing”, used during the Salem witch trials. They made the accused person lie on the ground, and then very slowly, over many days, placed one rock on their chest, and then another.