The management of this pandemic is racist as hell. I looked back over my emails and some posts, and I was going off on the issue of essential workers and crowded housing back in April of 2020.
This barely ever came up in the media as an important factor in the spread of COVID-19, until very recently. I just saw it on ABC 7. IT TOOK 10 FREAKING MONTHS.
They had to wait until so many Latinos died that it created a statistical anomaly, and then it had to be explained.
Un freaking real.
The only other places I saw this discussed were in some East LA and Boyle Heights groups, and even there, it wasn’t that widespread, and rarely got into any depth. I actually remember one conversation I had about it, because it wasn’t that common.
Also, now, there’s a whole other problem: it’s being treated like a race issue, when it’s really an issue of labor and housing. People are being forced to work, and they are in crowded homes.
So, we’re going to find out that this problem has probably affected all communities, but we just didn’t see it because of statistics: white people who are in crowded situations are a tiny minority of the white population; Asian working class people in crowded situations are more common, but there’s also these upper-middle-class people who have plenty of space, and throw off the stats – there’s no middle there; Black people are seeing the same situation as Latinos, but they have their own dynamics that might mitigate the effects a little bit.
This post was originally on Facebook, and it generated some discussion there, so I posted it here.
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