Racial myths can kill you.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
It has been difficult watching the racism that has affected the Asian-American diaspora, putting members of that global community at risk for violence from ignorant racists. One of the worst offenders is our own impeached POTUS.
His weasel words (lies) are already affecting people in other countries.
Global epidemics are not new, and racist responses aren’t either. Our Black Kos Editor Chitown Kev, has been looking into the history of epidemics and their impact on black communities.
The Crisis, highlighted this story from CityLab by Brentin Mock, “Why You Should Stop Joking That Black People Are Immune to Coronavirus.”
Lining’s medical briefs became the reference manuals for another physician, Dr. Benjamin Rush, when in 1793 a yellow fever outbreak took hold of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which at the time was the nation’s capitol. Close to 20,000 people — half of the population — fled Philly that year, while many African Americans actually stayed in the city at the request of Rush, who wanted to train them to nurse, care-take, and dig graves for the thousands of people dying of yellow fever.
Rush was operating on the belief that black people were immune to the disease, and black Philadelphians believed him when he told them that they were. Rush not only was an outspoken abolitionist, but also friend of the black clergymen Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, founders of the African Methodist Episcopal church, and two of the most influential African Americans of the time.
Jones and Allen helped convince black people to stay behind to assist Rush, telling their congregations that it was their Christian duty to help care for the lives of white Philadelphians. But Rush was wrong. Many of the African Americans in his medical camp contracted the disease. Hundreds of them died. Allen became afflicted and almost died himself. While Rush was a highly respected doctor — the American Psychiatric Association would later title him the “father of American psychiatry” — he was relying on faulty claims about race and health conditions that proved fatally wrong. The Philadelphia massacre became an abject lesson in what happens when race gets bandied about amidst the rages of a major health maelstrom.
I’d like to talk about this dangerous modern day mythology, which needs to be put in check and stopped. The bullshit theory that black people are less susceptible to the coronavirus, is just that — bullshit.
One of the mostly globally well-known black people, actor Idris Elba, made an announcement that he had tested positive. His wife, Sabrina Dhowre Elba, announced that she too is positive. I was glad to see him addressing the lie.
The news last week that NBA player Rudy Gobert, a Frenchman of Caribbean heritage, had tested positive for the coronavirus shattered a myth that some of the world's more conspiracy-minded had circulated online through jokes, news stories and social media posts.
Black people are not, in fact, immune to the coronavirus.
On Tuesday, the Afro-British actor Idris Elba, who lives part time in the United States and tested positive for COVID-19 this week, posted on social media about his early lack of symptoms and subsequent changes, how he managed to be tested, the dangers of the disease — and the myth of black immunity.
"Something that is scaring me, when I read the comments and some of the reactions, my people, black people, please, please understand that coronavirus is ... you can get it," Elba said. "There are so many stupid, ridiculous conspiracy theories about black people not being able to get it. ...That is the quickest way to get more black people killed. And I'm talking about the whole world, wherever we are. ... Just know you have to be just as vigilant as every other race."
Let’s look at some recent numbers from the African continent:
Some good advice from Nigeria:
Even more dangerous are the racial myths, systemic racism, and racial disparities in access and treatment that have an impact on black health outcomes.
University of Pennsylvania legal scholar Dr. Dorothy Roberts, addresses racial mythologies and disparities in health care in her seminal text Fatal Invention
When Americans see people of color doing most of the menial jobs, dying younger from most diseases, and filling most of the prison cells, it seems, to many, that race intrinsically and inevitably divides us into separate types of people. In centuries past, scientists invented a biological concept of race and claimed it was an essential feature of human identity. Though the Human Genome Project proved a decade ago that human beings are not naturally divided by race, an emerging technologically driven science is resuscitating race as a biological category written in our genes.
Examples are both far-reacing and disturbing: Researchers are developing a genetic definition of race based on statistical estimates of gene frequencies--estimates that conveniently mirror eighteenth-century racial typologies. The pharmaceutical industry promotes race-targeted therapies. Law enforcement uses stop and frisks, which disproportionately target African Americans, as a way to capture cheek swabs that build DNA criminal databases. And a proliferation of for-profit ancestry-testing services would have us believe that spitting into a test tube will tell us not only who we are but "what" --that is, what race--we truly are. In this provocative analysis of race, science, and politics, leading legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts exposes how race as an archaic belief system--justified by cutting-edge science--undermines a just society and promotes inequality well into the twenty-first century.
An important related discussion, from Andre Perry, at the Brookings Institution, looks into the racial history of social distancing and the impact on black health:
To mitigate the spread of COVID-19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is recommending social distancing measures: avoiding mass gatherings and maintaining at least six feet of distance from other people. For decades, however, Black people and Native Americans have been subject to a different kind of social distancing in America: segregation, discrimination, and devaluation.
These policies, which were built on a racial hierarchy, isolated Black and indigenous people closer to polluters and in areas more susceptible to natural disasters. History has shown that social distancing through racist housing policies such as redlining extracted wealth from communities of color, eliminating a crucial buffer against the financial shock of a crisis such as today’s. COVID-19 doesn’t discriminate, but U.S. policy has—in ways that now leave Black and brown people more vulnerable to effects of the pandemic.
Segregated housing and schools are manifestations of the United States’ long history of legal discrimination, which have ramifications for our current crisis. Redlining was the practice born of the federally backed Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, which outlined areas with sizable Black populations in red ink on maps as a warning to mortgage lenders, effectively isolating Black people in areas that would suffer lower levels of investment than their white counterparts.
Far from a cure, this form of social distancing created a social disease that has made many of us sick—literally. According to a 2019 study, residential segregation makes Black communities more susceptible to hospital closings. Another study published by Medical Care Research and Review in 2014 found that an increase in the concentration of Black people in a neighborhood is associated with a corresponding decrease in the availability of surgical equipment.
I hope that you will do what you can to dispel and debunk the myths, and work towards developing health care systems that do not continue the history of racist impact on our communities. For that to happen, we cannot avoid and deny the fact that racism is injurious to all of us — not just black folks.
An update:
I saw this news when I woke up this morning. RIP Manu Dibango
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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“We can already predict based on everything we know that the burden of ill health will not be evenly experienced throughout the population,” says epidemiologist Camara Phyllis Jones, M.D., MPH, PhD, the 2019-2020 Evelyn Green Davis Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a past president of the American Public Health Association.
Experts believe that approximately 80 percent of COVID-19 infections are mild—think: sniffles, a cold or a manageable case of the flu. About 20 percent will need to be hospitalized. Between 200,000 and 1.7 million Americans will likely die.
Disproportionate numbers of those hit hard will probably be Black and Brown.
And while public-health advice suggests that the risk of devastating outcomes is low among those younger age 60, “In general, the age concerns and age data that is being promulgated is likely not accurate for the African American community,” says Oscar T. Brooks, MD, president of the National Medical Association.
Nor is it likely to hold for other communities of color.
“Racism has created an uneven playing field in this country,” says Dr. Jones. “COVID-19 is about to expose and wreak havoc on that uneven playing field unless we organize and strategize to act.”
Here’s what places us in such grave danger—along with suggestions about how to protect ourselves and our loved ones:
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A group of doctors in Virginia is calling for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization to release information about whether black communities are being left behind as the shortage of coronavirus tests continues in the US.
They’re concerned that black communities and other underserved groups might be disproportionately missing out on getting tested for COVID-19, in the absence of data breaking down who’s been tested so far by race and ethnicity.
“We know in the US that there are great discrepancies in not only the diagnosis but the treatment that African Americans and other minorities are afforded. So I want to make sure that in this pandemic, that black and brown people are treated in the same way and that these tests are made available in the same pattern as for white people,” said Dr. Ebony Hilton, an associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the University of Virginia.
Currently, the CDC’s coronavirus information site says a total of 66,371 people across the US have been tested for the virus. The latest data on the site says there are 15,219 confirmed cases nationally. The data provided by the CDC does not include a breakdown of who’s been tested by demographics. Johns Hopkins University’s database, which pulls data from global, national, and state-level reporting, says there are more than 26,000 confirmed cases in the US, but doesn’t include statistics on testing.
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Amid the global panic a global pandemic can inspire, it might be easy to forget that it’s still Women’s History Month—and the start of spring, but that’s likely cold comfort if you’re afraid to go outside. As we’ve tried to bright-side this socially isolating situation, we’ve increasingly been looking inward—literally. What joy can we find in the great indoors; pleasures we may have been neglecting in favor of our perpetual FOMO?
As the corner of The Root largely dedicated to black women, we do not intend to let the rest of this precious month go to waste, contagion be damned. So, we’ll be resuming our regularly scheduled programming, albeit undoubtedly influenced by current events. But speaking of corners: during my recent days in seclusion (the first of many to come, since Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzer just announced that our shelter-in-place begins in earnest this weekend) my eyes kept wandering to the magazine table in the corner of my Chicago abode, where a growing stack of issues of The New Yorker awaits my perusal.
No, it’s not what I instinctively consider to be black woman-centric content. But when I saw a flurry of stories over the past few days lauding the magazine’s first black female cartoonist, I took it as a sign that I should dig in.
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“We are going to demonstrate to the world what and how we feel about oppression,” Isaac Boro told his supporters in his speech. “Remember your 70-year-old grandmother who still farms before she eats; remember also your poverty-stricken people; remember too, your petroleum which is being pumped out daily from your veins; and then fight for your freedom.” Nigeria had only been an independent country for six years, after an intense struggle against the British colonial administration.
About 150 volunteer soldiers joined the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force (NDPVF) to wage guerrilla war against the Nigerian government. It was the first of many secession attempts Nigeria would encounter, and it didn’t go well for the secessionists: After 12 days, the experiment was over and the revolutionaries were arrested and jailed.
The wave of independence and nationalism that had swept through Africa in the 1940s and ’50s began to bear fruit in the early ’60s. The year 1960, in particular, was fruitful for 17 different countries as they gained independence from Great Britain, France and a couple of other colonial masters. It has since been known as the Year of Africa.
But that struggle for independence emboldened separatist movements too. Dozens of groups sought freedom from the fragile new states they were nominally part of, and young revolutionaries like Boro — born Isaac Jasper Adaka Boro in 1938 — took that to its logical conclusion. His birthplace, Oloibiri, was the site of Nigeria’s first commercial oil discovery and first industrial oil well in the late ’50s.
His father was the village headmaster and Boro initially followed a similar path, going into teaching. But after serving as a school teacher and later as a policeman, he quit to enroll at the recently founded University of Nigeria to study chemistry. By Feb. 23, 1966, he had dropped out to devote himself full time to declaring an 11,000-square-mile chunk of his country an independent state. Disillusioned by the independent government’s lack of respect for minority groups — a reflection of how the white colonizers had treated Nigerians — Boro saw an opportunity in the Niger Delta’s oil wealth to split off and allow the region to make its own decisions about its natural resources.
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In the corner of a restaurant in Nekemte, a town in western Ethiopia, Fisaha Aberra unfolds a piece of paper on which he has scrawled the names of 11 men he says were shot by soldiers last year. After this came mass arrests. Fisaha and two siblings fled their home in Guliso to Nekemte, leaving one brother behind who was arrested last month, for the second time in a year, and beaten so hard he cannot walk.
Arrests and summary executions have become commonplace in the far-flung reaches of Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest region. The Ethiopian security forces are waging war on armed Oromo separatists. They are also treating civilians brutally. Accounts by witnesses suggest there is indiscriminate repression of local dissent in a country supposedly on the path from one-party rule towards democracy.
This was not what Ethiopians expected from Abiy Ahmed, who became prime minister in 2018. He was a young reformer from Oromia. He promised democracy for all and redress for what Oromos claim is centuries of political and economic marginalisation. Abiy freed thousands of political prisoners and welcomed rebel groups back from exile to contest elections, now scheduled for August.
Abiy made peace with neighbouring Eritrea, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize, as well as with rebel groups including the Oromo Liberation Front (olf), which is now an opposition party. The group’s armed wing, the Oromo Liberation Army (ola), agreed to put down its guns; in return its soldiers were to join Oromia’s police. Many hoped to see the end of an insurgency that began almost 50 years ago.
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
A picture may indeed, be worth a thousand words, but if done with precision, a poem wouldn't nearly require that much verbiage for an image to occur. The poet sets the camera focused on a crowded yet expansive vista. She adjusts the timer on the camera, moves and stands before it. She is determined as she raises her hands high and wide above her head, a moment before the time-trapping whirr and click of the shutter traps a fraction of a second of light.
1.
I waved a gun last night
In a city like some ancient Los Angeles.
It was dusk. There were two girls
I wanted to make apologize,
But the gun was uselessly heavy.
They looked sideways at each other
And tried to flatter me. I was angry.
I wanted to cry. I wanted to bury the pistol,
But I would've had to walk miles.
I would've had to learn to run.
2.
I have finally become that girl
In the photo you keep among your things,
Steadying myself at the prow of a small boat.
It is always summer here, and I am
Always staring into the lens of your camera,
Which has not yet been stolen. Always
With this same expression. Meaning
I see your eye behind the camera's eye.
Meaning that in the time it takes
For the tiny guillotine
To open and fall shut, I will have decided
I am just about ready to love you.
3.
Sun cuts sharp angles
Across the airshaft adjacent.
They kiss. They kiss again.
Faint clouds pass, disband.
Someone left a mirror
At the foot of the fire escape.
They look down. They kiss.
She will never be free
Because she is afraid. He
Will never be free
Because he has always
Been free.
4.
Was kind of a rebel then.
Took two cars. Took
Bad advice. Watched people's
Asses. Sniffed their heads.
Just left, so it looked
Like those half sad cookouts,
Meats never meant to be
Flayed, meant nothing.
Made promises. Kept going.
Prayed for signs. Stooped
For coins. Needed them.
Had two definitions of family.
Had two families. Snooped.
Forgot easily. Well, didn't
Forget, but knew when it was safe
To remember. Woke some nights
Against a wet pillow, other nights
With the lights on, whispering
The truest things
Into the receiver.
5.
A small dog scuttles past, like a wig
Drawn by an invisible cord. It is spring.
The pirates out selling fakes are finally
Able to draw a crowd. College girls,
Inspired by the possibility of sex,
Show bare skin in good faith. They crouch
Over heaps of bright purses, smiling,
Willing to pay. Their arms
Swing forward as they walk away, balancing
That new weight on naked shoulders.
The pirates smile, too, watching
Pair after pair of thighs carved in shadow
As girl after girl glides into the sun.
6.
You are pure appetite. I am pure
Appetite. You are a phantom
In that far-off city where daylight
Climbs cathedral walls, stone by stolen stone.
I am invisible here, like I like it.
The language you taught me rolls
From your mouth into mine
The way kids will pass smoke
Between them. You feed it to me
Until my heart grows fat. I feed you
Tiny black eggs. I feed you
My very own soft truth. We believe.
We stay up talking all kinds of shit.
-- Tracy K. Smith
“Self Portrait as the Letter Y”
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY’S PORCH
IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE BLACK KOS COMMUNITY, GRAB A SEAT, SOME CYBER EATS, RELAX, AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF.