White Supremacy: America’s Incurable Virus

I learned early that having a virus was much more deadly than having a bacterial infection. The latter could be treated with antibiotics. On the other hand, There was no miracle drug for viral diseases. Viruses had to “work their way” out of our bodies.

I remember reading stories in Readers Digest about the predicaments of young children, many of them babies, falling ill and succumbing to viruses and I learned to fear them. Being sick was one thing; being sick but having no medicinal cure or treatment was quite another.

When my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, I remember watching in horror as she suffered. Her cancer was treated with radiation and chemotherapy, and yet she remained sick and got worse. In the end, the disease won. Cancer consumed and killed her – and I remember thinking that cancer must be a virus because medicines could not kill it. At that time, it seemed that there was nothing effective enough to kill the seed or abnormality that caused it, and it refused to “work its way out” of affected bodies. To me, it was like a cold, only far worse. The difference is that the virus that causes head and chest colds can be forced out by consuming liquids and resting.

But there is no liquid, no tonic, that this country can consume that will push this hatred and bigotry out of the American political and sociological ecosystem Our country has a sociocultural belief system that behaves like a virus, carved out of the need to find justification for the treatment of Black people in this country. While that belief system was always in place, it seems to have gotten worse for white evangelicals twice: once after the end of the Civil War and during Reconstruction, and once again after the US Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v Board of Education that determined that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional.

Necessary for white people in this country to feel comfortable was for non-white people and women to “know their place.” White people determined themselves to be dominant. Black people, Native Americans, and women fell into lower categories. As long as these people did not rise against white authority or challenge white men in power, things were said to be going well.

But when, after slavery and during Reconstruction Black men were given the right to vote and did so, tipping the scales of power toward a more equitable society, those who had been in power began to wretch with fear and anger, and they rebelled. They intensified efforts to keep Black people under their control, creating Black Codes and Jim Crow laws, designed to put and keep things “back” to where they were “supposed” to be. That included taking away their right to vote.

I have not researched how prevalent was the fear of miscegenation when Black people were enslaved and white men raped Black women at will and were never held accountable. But what did happen was the “race mixing” they feared would happen between Black and white children as they railed against the 1954 US Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v Board of Education that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional.

Though the race mixing had already been put in motion by the actions of white men free to rape whomever they wanted, now, with Black and white children attending the same school, the issue of “race mixing” gained a seat in the front row of the American drama of race relations. The government was going against the will of God, who, some said, was the “original segregationist,” using selected scriptures from the Hebrew Bible including the story of Ham and the story of the Tower of Babel, among others. The government was breaking divine law in pushing for racial equality and an end to segregation anywhere, but especially in public schools. So enraged with the ruling were the people of the South that they intensified their fight against racial equality using their conception of God and their interpretation of the Bible as proof. In 1954, Rev. Carey Daniel of Dallas, TX preached a sermon entitled, “God, the Original Segregationist.”(https://crdl.usg.edu/record/usm_hmp_mus-m393-0031) Daniel and others posited that God intended for all races to live separately, which was why the Bible said that God created separate continents and scattered the people who were in the Tower of Babel. Had God intended the races to live together, God would have created the world’s geography in such a way that supported full equality of all. The government, they said, was encouraging people to go against God’s will.

What they did not mention in their diatribes was that it was they who had apparently gone against the will of God, as they were the ones who explored and “discovered” lands that non-white people already inhabited, took residents of those lands out of their country, and brought them to the Americas. The miscegenation they so feared had been begun by them.

This virus of white supremacy has so badly infected this country that it has spread, like the virus that caused COVID-19, around the world. The United States has created its own strain of white supremacy that it has taught to everyone in the world who, in turn, recognizes and uses it as a point of attack, and pounces on at every opportunity to weaken the country that has boasted that it is better than others.

Our enemies are quite familiar with our peculiar virus and have no qualms about attacking us at times when the virus rises up.

We are an infected country. The question is, “How do we address it? How do we get rid of the virus that is still swirling around in our national digestive system? We cannot pass laws that will get rid of it, nor is there a quick sociological fix. The virus has settled into the American DNA and is multiplying.

Will the virus work its way out of our national constitutional framework? Or will it finally dehydrate us as a nation and cause us to become so weak that we will be ripe for the enemies that want to overtake us?

A candid observation …

The Expendability of “Essential” Workers

Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has said repeatedly that “slavery never ended. It just evolved.”

I have been thinking about that statement as I have watched and listened to conversation about “essential” workers as we live in this pandemic. They include health care workers, janitors, grocery store workers, sanitation workers, waiters and waitresses, bus drivers, police and fire personnel, those who run the subways and more …and yet, it seems to me they are the people considered to be most expendable by the federal government and by the businesses which employ them.

So many of these “essential” workers have lost their lives and/or their jobs, but from the federal government, I hear little concern. Instead, there is a push to get the economy alive again, with corporations joining forces with the Trump administration to get the people back to work. And the president is apparently being urged to open the country – come what may – by nervous corporations who are losing lots and lots of money as this virus ravages through the country.

In this country, 3.8 million people have lost their jobs. The federal government and big businesses are very concerned about that number.

The latest insult to the lives and dignity of these workers came this week as the president issued an executive order ordering meat-packing plants to stay open, in spite of outbreaks of the coronavirus in several of them. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/28/trump-meat-plants-dpa/) At least 17 people who work in these plants have died of COVID-19, and over 5,000 have been affected by the disease. A report today said that some workers who are afraid to return to the plants or to any businesses opening before the recommended wait time for fear of contracting the virus are facing the possibility of losing their unemployment benefits if they refuse to return to work. (https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/29/847937625/workers-scared-as-trump-orders-meat-plants-to-open-during-coronavirus-crisis) (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/29/unemployment-coronavirus-safety-223216)

The workers are being placated and are being told that there will be extra or adequate protective gear for them, the same necessary gear that health care workers – again, essential workers – have been begging for which they have not been able to get in the numbers they need for the past two months. Not to worry, dear meatpacking workers. The protective gear will keep them safe. If it doesn’t? Unfortunately, the attitude seems to be “well, we tried.” If any of the workers get sick and/or die, the focus will be replacing the deceased by immediately hiring more people to do the work.

Period.

The government feels like it is being run by the president and corporate presidents that consider human beings to be mere commodities, and those not in the highest ranks of the plantation infrastructure – from cabinet members to legislators to some local politicians – are acting as the overseers. Their job is to keep the plantation open and thriving.

It is heartbreaking to see the lack of concern for human life being shown by the president and by big business. In this country, over 60,000 people have died – more than those who died in the Vietnam War – and yet, there has been no outpouring of concern from bedfellows big government and big business, a tawdry partnership if there ever was one. The only thing that matters is the making, accumulation, and sustaining of wealth and power. If some of those who are making these individuals and their businesses wealthy, then so be it. “The partnership” has many supporters, people who are a part of the 99 percent of Americans in this country who are struggling to survive, even as the one percent hoards wealth. Many of the supporters have said that it is no big concern if some people die in the work to save the economy. That must make “the partnership” smile, but the sad reality is that their lives are expendable too, to themselves, apparently, as well as to those whom they support so vehemently. As long as they can work, they matter. When they can no longer help fill the coffers of the wealthy, they, too, will be disregarded and forgotten.

This is none other than slavery by another name.

I have – as have many of us – read about how enslaved Africans were forced to work, regardless of how they felt physically. Pregnant women would work in the fields up to the moment of giving birth, which means they worked while in labor. All of the slaves worked in oppressive heat and humidity; those in the rice fields stood knee-deep in mosquito-infested water for hours each day, which made malaria a common malady. The mortality rate among those enslaved could be as high as 90 percent, but neither the plantation owner nor the overseers cared. The goal was to keep the money coming, and the essential people – the enslaved Africans and their children – were needed and used until they got too sick to work or they died. (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2956.html

We are seeing the same attitude today from the federal government and from some state governments. Yes, the status of the economy is bad and frightening, but the fact that there is no concern for or even gratitude being voiced for the work these people are doing is telling. People, it seems, of all colors, but especially brown and black, are still commodities, objects, not human beings, worth their weight in gold because they make the ruling class wealthy, but at the same time, worth nothing because of their color and economic status.

Bryan Stevenson is right. Slavery never ended. We are seeing its evolution now. The soul of this country is terminal. And that being the case, so is the image and the myth of the “exceptional” United States of America. Essential workers are truly essential – to everyone – but in the eyes of the moneyed class, they are also expendable.

A candid observation …

The Tragedy of Being White, Wealthy, and Privileged

As I have watched and listened to people talk about how it is okay if some people die in order to save the economy, I have literally shuddered. Rep. Trey Hollingsworth (R-IN) said in essence that allowing some people to die in order that the economy might be saved was the “lesser of two evils.” (https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/14/politics/trey-hollingsworth-coronavirus/index.html)

Specifically, he said “…” it is always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life, of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.”

He has not been the only GOP lawmaker to have expressed such sentiments. Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick said that lots of grandparents would be willing to die of the virus in order to save the economy. He also expressed his belief that American adults ought to be “willing” to sacrifice their lives for the economy. (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/dan-patrick-seniors-are-willing-to-die-to-save-economy.html)

The blatant disregard for human life in order to realize political goals has been mind-blowing. Some Americans – mostly, it seems, white, wealthy, and privileged – seem to be totally out of sync with what is going on in the lives of the masses of Americans. Not only are they doggedly determined to maintain their wealth and power, but they are also determined to stack the courts locally and federally who will assure their political points of view and values are instituted and saved. The footage of the GOP lawmaker in Wisconsin, covered from head to foot in protective gear to protect himself from the coronavirus as he assured voters and the media that the people standing in line to vote – not likewise protected – that they were safe, is a haunting image. (https://www.businessinsider.com/wisconsin-gop-leader-says-voting-safe-dressed-ppe-gear-2020-4). People were forced to participate in in-person voting in the middle of a global pandemic because the GOP wanted a Republican to win a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. People risked their lives and went to the polls and were able to keep that candidate from winning, but at what cost? How many Wisconsinians are going to come up sick with the virus because of the lack of care and empathy of the GOP?

Yet another lawmaker, Attorney General William Barr, said that it’s necessary for people to get back to work and to stop running home and “hiding under their beds.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/attorney-general-william-barr-fox-news-coronavirus/2020/04/09/dfda1f94-7a12-11ea-a130-df573469f094_story.html)

What these statements reveal is the complete lack of ability of the wealthy, white, privileged Americans to understand anything other than wealth and privilege. In their remarks can be heard the disparaging criticism of the shelter-in-place orders, and a glaring lack of compassion and empathy for the people who are dropping like flies because of this virus.

I have heard little compassion from any people in this group for the health care workers, for the transit and grocery store workers. Neither have I heard much concern about the fact that so many people are dying alone, leaving their loved ones without the opportunity to say goodbye, nor have I heard concern about the people who will inevitably get sick and possibly die because they cannot afford to stay at home.

It is mind-boggling. The only thing I really hear is a concern about the economy – which is important, surely, but not more important than the lives of the people whose labor has provided the work needed to create the wealth and the privilege of those who seem not to care one iota about what they are going through.

As I have listened to the comments from the president about how the number of ventilators being requested by governors is too high, and have heard reports about how there have been so few ventilators that sometimes one ventilator has had to be used for two patients, I have found myself wondering what he or any of the privileged wealthy would react if they were being treated that way. When I looked at pictures of health care workers wearing garbage bags to protect themselves, and I heard and read about how many of them have had to use the same mask for several days, I again wondered what the privileged would say had they been exposed to that kind of scenario.

Their lack of awareness or concern about the health care workers and their patients again caused me to pause. Because they remain isolated from “the rest of us,” they are too frequently divorced from what the masses go through. They have convinced themselves that crime is relegated almost exclusively to the poor, discounting the white-collar crime that has helped make many of them wealthy or that crimes of sexual deviance and assault are as common within the wealthy privileged set as it is with the poor. They live in a world within “the” world, seeing what’s “out there” as being impossible to ever stain their lives.

But of course, it does.

Wealth, with its attendant privilege, has created a class of spoiled human beings, narcissistic, self- serving humans who seem incapable of caring or even thinking about those less fortunate, instead blaming them for their financial fragility. While not all wealthy people deserve this description, enough of them do. In the case of this pandemic, just as was the case during the Ebola crisis, they seem not to understand that germs and illnesses do not care about one’s wealth, race, or political affiliation. They also do not seem to understand that if the poorest of us are not healthy or free, none of us are. The virus that begins in the slums eventually makes its way to the suburbs. The virus doesn’t care.

It’s strange that they don’t get it. If the president reopens the government on May 1, and people on Navy ships and in senior citizens’ homes, and in prisons, in the grocery stores and pharmacies and on the subway are still getting the virus, the very wealthy are going to get it, too.

Their lack of empathy and concern for others will cause damage to and the deaths of so many humans that this country could have avoided.

But their wealth blinds them to that truth, and because of that, many more people – including them and their families – are going to suffer.

A candid observation.