Whiteness and COVID-19

By Deauwand Myers

"White folks be a miracle of affliction ..." — From Alice Walker's "The Color Purple"

COVID-19, as deadly and crippling as it can be, provided, and indeed is providing, an important trove of information by which we can measure the scourge of white supremacist imperialism and the lethal consequences thereof.

But let's go back to the early 1970s. In presidential recordings, then-governor Ronald Reagan joked to President Nixon about the "monkeys," actually high-ranking African diplomats of an envoy sent to America.

Ronald Reagan was old before I was ever born, so Reagan joking to his fellow racist Republican (and anti-Semite) President Nixon that Black people were inhuman primates is an obvious, tired, old racial trope, rather boring and unimaginative. But mediocre, yet powerful white men are the norm, aren't they?

When the release of this damning audio went public earlier this year, many white Americans clutched their pearls, scandalized by such an explicit display of racism. People of conscience and color weren't surprised at all. When Reagan ascended to the presidency, his policies exposed his moral disposition. Recipients of public assistance were "welfare queens," code for lazy, Black women living lives of dissipation and luxury off the grace of the State, or so Reagan pronounced during his campaign.

Reagan made it fashionable to see poverty as a sin of the individual, whilst President Johnson saw poverty as what it is, a sin of the state. (Let's put that lie to rest. People who work the most hours and days for the least pay are statistically the poor, or working poor and are most often women of color).

Worse, as the AIDS epidemic ravaged colored communities and sexual minorities in the 1980s, the Reagan administration didn't advocate for research funding to combat this deadly disease until countless thousands, indeed millions, died or were near death. It was the nasty, gay disease, after all. Let them die. That was the cruelty in his logic.

The Republican Party has been a white supremacist death cult for generations, and so when many in this party are against masks, vaccinations and other health measures to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, I wasn't surprised at all. Whiteness says "I'm above rules and common decency. That's freedom." And just like the vilification of social welfare programs helping people in need, there's an inverse reaction to the deaths caused by this pandemic.

Consider: by percentage, Black people, Latinos and the Indigenous are dying at much higher rates than their white counterparts, as well as the sick and immunocompromised. Indeed, one out of every five African Americans dies of COVID-19, in aggregate, over the course of this terrible pandemic. The death rates for Latinos, the Indigenous and Asians haven't fared much better. For native populations, the statistics can actually be even worse.

Why? Black folks and their colored counterparts are often living in smaller domiciles with more people, particularly the elderly with poor health to begin with. They work in fields facing the public masses: post offices, grocery stores, restaurants, hospice care and hospitals, delivery services, schools, public welfare departments and public transportation.

Some white folks find nothing wrong with that. To paraphrase the disgraced, conservative, republican former Fox News talk show host, Bill O'Reilly, these immunocompromised people were near death anyway, notwithstanding that the immunocompromised are still human beings, and some are young adults and children; "pro-life" indeed.

You'll find, (but please don't search it, I did the work for you), some conservatives making similar arguments. They assert those who died from COVID-19 were meant to die. We all die. We have to live our lives with some risks. It's my right not to get the vaccine. In other words, death is OK for some of the population. Let's drink Courvoisier.

Conservatives arguing this trash betray their true feelings: they are social Darwinists; Ayn Rand fans who believe that the wealthy and successful deserve it; the poor and displaced do not, regardless of the historical, socioeconomic and sociopolitical circumstances therein. I cannot reconcile this with many conservatives' self-proclaimed Christian faith, where we are to "take care of the least of these:" the poor, the widow, the orphan, the migrant, the refugee, the downtrodden and the abused.

But then white, Christian evangelicals are most often white supremacists themselves, so they had very little angst in voting for Trump, a failed businessman who cheated on his first wife with his second, his second wife with his third, and his third pregnant wife with a sex worker, indeed, unprotected.

White supremacy is that good crack cocaine. It's free and a renewable resource. America's answer to COVID-19 matriculated through this lens. Poor access to healthcare and insufficient social benefits to mitigate the disease exacerbated the social inequality inextricably connected to class and race.

If a global pandemic doesn't break the back of whiteness and its fetishizing, I fail to see what will.

Deauwand Myers (deauwand@hotmail.com) holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside of Seoul.