A Leap of Faith
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic reaching American shores, there has been skepticism and misinformation targeting all Americans, including misinformation specifically targeting African Americans.
That specific historical context of what Miss Denise called a system of “racial myths, systemic racism, and racial disparities” has been charted extensively at Black Kos.
And now, with the varied COVID-19 vaccines beginning to be rolled out for mass distribution, systemic racism and medical racial disparities (not so much racial myths...for reasons that I will get to in a minute) are grabbing headlines again.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control shows that Black, Latinx, and Native communities continue to be the communities hardest hit by infections, hospitalizations and deaths, all the while being the communities in the positions most vulnerable in many aspects of daily living during the pandemic.
Lola Fadulu/Washington Post
Black people are nearly three times more likely than Whites to die of covid-19 because of health-care disparities, preexisting conditions and increased exposure at jobs deemed essential. Black children are losing more ground than their peers because of school shutdowns, and Black workers have been devastated by pandemic-related job losses.
But when it comes to actually taking the vaccine, Blacks are less likely to say that they will take a COVID-19 vaccine than other groups.
Yet fewer than half of Black Americans say they would get a coronavirus vaccine, compared with 63 percent of Hispanic people and 61 percent of White people, according to a December report from the Pew Research Center. Many Black people say they do not trust the medical establishment because of glaring inequities in modern-day care and historical examples of mistreatment. The spread of misinformation about the vaccine development process hasn’t helped either.
There’s no “racial myth” involved in those numbers. It’s dark, tragic, and racist medical history.
Rev. Irene Monroe/WickedLocal.com
...no amount of money can assuage or erase the collective trauma of living the history of medical experimentation done on our bodies. It’s in our historical DNA.
Most African Americans — young and old — cannot shake off the Tuskegee Study, a clinical study conducted for four decades, between 1932-1972, to observe untreated syphilis in African-American men under the guise they were receiving free health care. The Tuskegee Study’s deleterious effects on these men, their families, and their offspring have resulted in a lifelong hell of mental and health complications.
In 2010, Americans learned about Henrietta Lacks, a poor tobacco farmer from Virginia, from The New York Times best-seller “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot. Lacks was an African-American woman whose cancer cells are the HeLa cell line source, the first immortalized human cell line in medical research. Lacks’ cells were essential in developing the polio vaccine, the study of leukemia, the AIDS virus, and various cancers. They went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to cells in zero gravity. Her cells were taken without consent, and to this day, the Lacks family is suing Johns Hopkins for compensation.
In 2018, a statue of J. Marion Sims, called the “father of gynecology,” erected in 1890, was removed from New York’s Central Park, finally. The statue stood across from the New York Academy of Medicine. Sims perfected his revolutionary tools like the vaginal speculum, a double-bladed surgical instrument used for examining the vagina and cervix, and other gynecological surgeries on enslaved black women without the use of anesthesia.
Vaccine hesitancy in Black communities is understandable, given this history.
It’s understandable that Blacks were and are hesitant to participate in COVID-19 vaccine trials.
But as the Washington Post’s Michelle Singletary pointed out in late October.
...And the Black economic recovery needs a vaccine.
The economic downturn from the novel coronavirus has had a staggering financial impact on Blacks. Job losses from the pandemic have overwhelmingly affected low-wage, minority workers. Black men and women are among those taking the
longest time to regain their employment.
Black Americans account for about 13 percent of the U.S. population but 24 percent of coronavirus deaths, the Pew Research Center reported in June.
I would go further and say that Black economic, physical health, and mental health recovery needs a COVID-19 vaccine.
I’m convinced of it. In fact, I did sign up for eligibility to take part in COVID 19 clinical vaccine trials but was never contacted.
And I will be taking a COVID-19 vaccine as soon as it is made available to me.
I’m with Andrea K. McDaniels, deputy editorial page editor of the Baltimore Sun on that one.
Where the COVID-19 vaccine is concerned, we should trust science. Times are different from the days of Lacks and Tuskegee. There are disclosure and consent regulations designed to protect patients. And the vaccine isn’t targeted at one group. African Americans don’t have to worry about being the guinea pigs, as some have said, because people of all backgrounds and races will take this vaccine — and the medical professionals will be the first. If it’s good enough for the doctors who treat the disease, it should be good enough for the rest of us. The country has had a sound vaccine system in place for years, with most of the country getting a schedule of vaccines beginning as babies. And plenty of us get the flu shot each year. While a handful of people have complications to various vaccines, for the vast majority of the rest of us, it protects us from measles, mumps, polio and other disease that can kill or disable. Once again, trust the science.
I get the hesitancy but I trust the science and I trust that the incoming Biden-Harris Administration will get this rollout right, for the most part.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Bethlehem Fleming, a native of Ethiopia, has carried around for almost three years President Donald Trump’s vulgar denouncement of African nations as “shithole countries.” It enraged her, but not as much as the president’s scornful sequel from the Oval Office on Oct. 23, when Trump said Egypt might just have to bomb Ethiopia’s $4.6 billion Blue Nile Dam to settle a water dispute.
“I think that galvanized Ethiopians in this country to vote for Joe Biden,” says Fleming, 45, a hospital administrator who lives in DeKalb County, Georgia. “Trump says these things about other countries he has no idea about and makes people mad, and they use their vote against him.”
Fleming, who has been an American citizen since 2008, settled her score with Trump on Nov. 3. Now she wants a more authoritative rebuke of his presidency. Fleming is aiming the grievance vote at his proxies, Republican candidates David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, in the U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia on Jan. 5. Her community could be crucial to deciding which party controls the Senate, as Democrats would take control if they win both races.
Fleming will spend the next six weeks trying to make one-on-one contact with 4,000 Ethiopians and Eritreans in DeKalb County, which includes parts of Atlanta, and plead for them to vote for Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in the runoff. Fleming’s work is a specialized version of former gubernatorial hopeful Stacey Abrams’ high-profile efforts to register and turn out voters of color throughout the state in recent years. These efforts are part of the turnout game required in these pivotal runoffs, which will be decided by which side can lure a bigger proportion of its November voters back to the polls.
Ted Terry, who is on the executive committee of the Georgia Democratic Party, estimates there are 30,000 to 40,000 registered voters who emigrated from Africa, in a state Biden won by just 13,000 votes.
Fleming has a daunting task over the next six weeks because the Georgia voter registration application, which is how most voter data is generated, has a box to check that simply says “Black.”
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Police disproportionately targeted Black residents for "no-knock" search warrants like the one that led officers to Breonna Taylor's door the night they fatally shot her, an analysis shows.
The findings by the Louisville Courier Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network, echo the concerns of civil rights advocates and experts who say no-knock warrants are used more frequently against Black and brown Americans.
"The common factors are the poor and people of color – in a highly disproportionate way," said Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University who has testified before the U.S. Senate on law enforcement's use of military tactics and equipment.
In the past two years, before the city banned them in June, Louisville Metro Police Department officers received court approval for at least 27 no-knock warrants – allowing police to legally break in to homes without first knocking, announcing themselves and waiting for residents to respond, usually about 30 seconds.
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Campaign Zero, a data-driven, activist-led organization focused on ending police brutality, recently launched their ‘End All No-Knocks’ campaign with the goal of reforming the way police search warrants are executed across the country.
Police raids disproportionately impact Black communities, according to research conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). No-knock warrants allow officers to legally force their way into private residences without announcing themselves or their purpose. “These raids, often carried out for low-level drug offenses, are executed at night by forcible entry, which commonly involves breaking through doors with battering rams, military-grade weapons and flash-bang explosives,” Campaign Zero said in its statement. Such practices endanger the community and can severely traumatize (or kill) children in the process—and in the case of Breonna Taylor, these warrants can also tragically lead to death.
“Simply banning No-Knock warrants isn’t going to make us safer and hold police accountable,” stressed Katie Ryan of Campaign Zero in an emailed statement. “In practice, knock-and-announce warrants can be executed like a No-Knock warrant so we must couple banning No-Knock warrants with heavy restrictions on the issuance and execution of all search warrants.”
Campaign Zero is currently assisting 37 city and state governments in passing comprehensive No-Knock legislation, the group said. The campaign recommends three key measures as part of its plan:
- Ban No-Knock Warrants.
- Restrict the way in which all knock-and-announce search warrants are issued and executed.
- Create systems of data collection, transparency and accountability.
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When someone in the building died, a notice was often taped to a window in the lobby: WE REGRET TO ANNOUNCE THE PASSING OF OUR FRIEND. The signs did not say how or where the friend had died, and because they were eventually removed, they could be easy to miss. In March, as these names began to appear more frequently at Bronxwood, an assisted living facility in New York, Varahn Chamblee tried to keep track. Varahn, who had lived at Bronxwood for almost a year, was president of its resident council. Her neighbors admired her poise and quiet confidence. She spoke regularly with management, but as the coronavirus swept through the five-story building, they told her as little about its progress as they told anyone else.
Some residents estimated that 25 people had died—that was the number Varahn had heard—but others thought the toll had to be higher. There was talk that a man on the second floor had been the first to go, followed by a beloved housekeeper. An administrator known as Mr. Stern called in sick. Around the same time, Varahn noticed that the woman who fed the pigeons had also disappeared.
The New York State Department of Health advises adult care facilities to inform residents about confirmed and suspected Covid-19 cases. But inhabitants of Bronxwood said they were kept in the dark. In the absence of official communication, it was difficult to sort out hearsay from fact. “I was told that it was 42 people,” said Renee Johnson, who lived on the floor above Varahn. “But honestly we don’t know. They are not telling us anything.” When for a couple of weeks Renee herself was bedridden—fatigued and wheezing—there were rumors that she, too, had passed away.
Because so many people were missing, and no one knew where they’d gone, life began to feel like a horror film. The dining room, once an outlet for gossip and intrigue, was shuttered, and the theater room padlocked. Staff covered the lobby in tape, as if it were the scene of a crime. The library began filling up with the possessions of those who had vanished: their televisions and computers, their walkers and bags of clothes.
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Timnit Gebru says she was pushed out of the company; now some are worried it will have a chilling effect on academics in tech. The controversy behind a star Google AI researcher’s departure
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Google’s workplace culture is yet again embroiled in controversy.
AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru — a well-respected pioneer in her field and one of the few Black women leaders in the industry — said earlier this week that Google fired her after blocking the publication of her research around bias in AI systems. Days before Gebru’s departure, she sent a scathing internal memo to her colleagues detailing how higher-ups at Google tried to quash her research. She also criticized her department for what she described as a continued lack of diversity among its staff.
In her widely read internal email, which was published by Platformer, Gebru said the company was “silencing in the most fundamental way possible” and claimed that “your life gets worse when you start advocating for underrepresented people” at Google.
After Gebru’s departure, Google’s head of AI research Jeff Dean sent a note to Gebru’s department on Thursday morning saying that, after internal review, her research paper did not meet the company’s standards for publishing. According to Gebru, the company also told her that her critical note to her coworkers was “inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager.”
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It began with a fabulous 19th-century dress and a box of jumbled photographs cleared out of a Guildford attic before a move to the country. It has resulted in being able to tell the true, poignant story of Ranavalona III, the last queen of Madagascar.
Ranavalona’s remarkable life of can be revealed thanks to the auction this week of personal effects unearthed by a descendent of Clara Herbert, who worked for the Madagascan royal family from the 1890s to the 1920s.
Herbert was the paid companion to a queen whose adventures were the stuff of fiction. Widowed at 22, she was made to marry an elderly prime minister, dethroned after a French invasion and exiled to Algiers, never to return.
The auctioneer Kerry Taylor has pieced together Ranavalona’s story from the box of photographs, postcards, souvenirs, receipts and diaries that she is selling on Tuesday.
“It has been the most fascinating detective work,” she said. “The queen I think was a very brave woman. She was very strong in adversity … she had to make the best of what life dealt her.”
Ranavalona’s husband was poisoned when she was about to accede to the throne. The finger has been pointed at the prime minister, a much older man who had been married to two previous queens and wanted Ranavalona as his bride.
“This poor girl had to marry this horrible old man,” said Taylor. “She was told she just needed to do needlework and look nice.”
Bigger trouble was on the horizon. Soon into her reign, in 1895, France invaded and annexed the island. Ranavalona was initially allowed to stay as a puppet queen, but the French authorities accused her influential aunt Ramisindrazana of inciting Malagasy rebels.
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THE VOICES of young Africans calling for a better, more democratic future are growing louder. They demand governments that do not oppress but protect them, and that provide quality health care, education, transparent decision-making and responsible spending. Young people, who make up the majority of the population, want more political participation. One of the best things government leaders can do is to open the door to them—by way of the civil service.
Public leadership is about much more than political power. Effective, equitable public institutions are the product of thousands of small, daily actions by dedicated civil servants who aren’t in the headlines. They ensure access to medicines, classrooms, clean water and safe roads. They are the ones who protect the vital institutions of democracy. A new generation of technocrats must replace the kleptocrats of the past.
But low salaries and lengthy waits for promotion often repel the best and brightest Africans from pursuing employment in the government sector. I know from experience that governments can change the perception that public-sector work is corrupt and uninspired, by creating and supporting civil-service jobs that offer professional development, promotions based on performance and real opportunities to create lasting change. This takes good policy, sufficient funding, bold ideas and creative partnerships.
Instead of trying to work around governments, the aid agencies, foundations and companies operating in Africa could partner with the public sector and commit funds annually to improve the education and training of young Africans and mid-career professionals to improve government effectiveness.
The right investment in talent, with funding from all partners, means that developing countries can establish an honest and effective civil service, so governments can fulfil their mandates. When I took office as the president of Liberia in 2006, we had to rebuild institutions that had been ravaged by conflict, corruption and neglect after a decade of civil war. We invested in people first, creating new ways for diverse, young, talented professionals to serve the country. We knew it would pay dividends for decades.
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