Blaming African-Americans

Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population but have 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.  The victim-blaming of black Americans has come from the highest levels of government.

Alex Azar, told CNN on 17 May, America “unfortunately” has a “very diverse” population, and black Americans and minorities “in particular” have “significant underlying disease”.

The CNN anchor interviewing Azar, paused asked, surely Azar was not arguing that “the reason that there were so many dead Americans is because we’re unhealthier than the rest of the world?”

Azar doubled down: “These are demonstrated facts.”

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”.  Blaming dead people of color for being sinful, rather than trying to fix underlying problems, only leads to many more people dying.

Suggesting that people lose weight did not actually make sense, said Finn Gardiner, an advocate at the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy at Brandeis University. On what time frame were at-risk Americans supposed to become thinner in order to protect themselves from a pandemic already in their communities? But Cassidy’s fat-shaming was familiar, Gardiner said, a way for some Americans to watch the unfolding death while avoiding any responsibility. Americans of all races with larger bodies were left feeling “expendable”, that they were “an acceptable sacrifice”, he wrote.

Blaming black Americans for dying from a novel virus because they had diabetes or high blood pressure was precisely what Azar was doing. Someone had to be held responsible for an American death toll approaching 100,000 people, worse than any other country’s reported deaths. In order for the Trump administration to remain blameless, someone else had to be blamed, and the administration was now blaming the dead.

This impulse to blame other people for getting sick is rooted in fear, said Jonathan Metzl, a professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University.

“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.”

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.

“The capitalist class, those who benefit most from the unequal system, they know it’s not sustainable,” she said. “They’re desperate not to stay locked down too long, so people get used to fresh air, breathing air without carbon in it,” she said. “People might get ideas of a different kind of world.”

To Dunbar-Ortiz and other historians, Americans’ push to reopen the economy during a pandemic, and some Americans’ willingness to hold armed demonstrations in order to do so, looks like a case of almost psychotic repetition.

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.

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.

Today, “who is being asked to die for the market to be open?”  Patrick Blanchfield, the author of a forthcoming 500-year history of American gun violence,  said. “It’s black people. It’s Native American tribal communities.” 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.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/21/all-the-psychoses-of-us-history-how-america-is-victim-blaming-the-coronavirus-dead