Costs of racism in Trump's coronavirus response

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The daylight torture, strangulation, and murder of George Floyd under the color of authority has brought home to millions what some of the costs of white supremacy have been for African Americans. He was one of the many killed by the cops this year. Beyond the growing wave of violence by organs of state security is the “American carnage,” to use Trump's happy phrase, brought on by his incompetent handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Over a hundred thousand Americans have been killed in just a few months, and as usual, people of color have paid the highest price. But COVAD-19 has killed people of all colors at a higher rate because of white supremacy.

Unlike the cops, the novel coronavirus itself doesn't discriminate. It has infected all the nations of the planet. Yet one country, less than one-twentieth of the whole by population, has suffered more than one-quarter of the deaths. What's more, this is not the poorest country on Earth, but the richest; not a country with few doctors and hospitals, but one possessing the most advanced medical technology; not one relying on dirt roads, pack animals, and old trucks for transport, but one with the most developed infrastructure on Earth. What epidemic failure explains this?

I think the white supremacist outlook of our national leadership has been largely responsible for this massive, and unnecessary loss of life. By understanding this we can recognize the huge cost of white supremacy, not only within the current pandemic, but in our long history of tragic mistakes along these lines.

Here are some of its main contributing factors:

1) Trump doesn't believe in science.

This has had a profound and multifaceted effect on the failure of his coronavirus response. To understand why Donald Trump and his ilk so loath science we must take look at how white supremacy has always had a corrupting influence on science under capitalism.

Capitalism & Science

Even though they grew up in the same neighborhood, capitalism has always had something of a love-hate relationship with science. Most definitely, the capitalists loved the profits to be made from the inventions of science. So they invested heavily in it, propelled its development, and expanded its domain into every sphere. But they never liked all of its conclusions, and the more capitalism has decayed, the more apprehensive they have become about what science has to say about their system, and what “best practices” should be for the social organization of humanity. That is how the matter stands with regards to capitalism in general.

White supremacy & Science

However, even from the very beginning, those capitalists that made their profits most directly through the exploitation of people of color had a special bone to pick with science. From a philosophical point of view, they based their system on the decidedly unscientific view that the self-proclaimed “white” people were superior to all people with darker skin, and this gave them the right to “own” these people, as well as their land and resources. They were able to do this because of the uneven development of geographically separated groups of humanity at the dawn of the capitalist era. By 1619 enough uneven development had accumulated in the 3.3 million years since we started making tools in Kenya, that some groups of humanity were hundreds and even thousands of years behind others. Since those that got to capitalism first lived in parts of the globe that received less sunlight, their skin was lighter. In the eight decades following 1619, they fraudulently misappropriated the name given to the composite colors of sunlight as their own, and on that basis proclaimed that they were superior to all others. White supremacy was born, and from the beginning they had a problem with science because, beyond the fact that they really aren't the color white, is the fact that sunlight is made up of all the colors of the rainbow, none of which is white.

White supremacy needed science as sure as the slave plantation needed the cotton gin, but it also richly funded a corruption of science known as “scientific racism.” This is important because while the human mind is capable of concocting many fantastic notions, ones with money behind them have staying power. Thomas Jefferson was one of its practitioners and benefactors. He founded the University of Virginia, as “an institution with slavery at its core,” so that the southern plantation owners wouldn't have to send their sons to the anti-slavery north to get a quality education, saying “we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead.” But he spent many years searching for a biologic basis for white superiority, doing “scientific investigation” and promoting such drivel as Africans “secrete less by the kidnies, & more by glands of the skin...Perhaps too a difference of structure in the pulmonary apparatus.” Jefferson's version of “science” came with certain baked-in conclusions, he owned 607 slaves during his lifetime. Truth had a predetermined destination. And so it went at UVA after he died, and so it went for science as a whole. It corrupted science to its core. A little while ago “scientific racism” was accepted science, and the rot spread far beyond the narrow fields associated with biology.

Effect on Trump's coronavirus approach

Two of Trump's most infamous racist outrages also show us his great disdain for science. They are his enduring opinion that the “Central Park Five”  are guilty, and the birther conspiracy theory that Barack Obama wasn't born in the US. Deep prejudice supports both, and both have been conclusively proven false by solid evidence, and scientific investigation, including DNA in the case of the “Five.” Yet, Trump clings to his prejudice, and refuses to believe the science, putting who-knows-what pseudoscience in its place. Trump's refusal to believe what science has to say about his racist conspiracy theories is harmful, his refusal to believe what science has to say about COVID-19 is deadly.

The more strongly Trump leans on this bastardized “science,” the more likely he is to see all science as a con job in the service of some partisan interest, and to disregard it beyond its ability to deliver his desired results. That's Trump's problem with science, and it undergirds everything else that has been a catastrophe in his novel coronavirus response.

At every step of the way his lack of respect for the science has result policies that cost lives:

• He was slow to respond to the threat.
• He has refused to endorse or promote scientific solutions.
• He failed to ramp up testing.
• He refused to allow a “Manhattan” style project to create a vaccine.
• He promoted dangerous “snake-oil” solutions from his bully pulpit.
• He has disregarded any national health scientists he can't corrupt.

This bring us to Director Robert R. Redfield and the corruption of the CDC. According to CNN:

In the early 1990s, Redfield, then one of the Army's top AIDS researchers, was at the center of a scandal over a purported HIV vaccine. Allegations that Redfield oversold data and cherry-picked results sparked an internal Army investigation into his work.
...
Redfield was also found to be in violation of Army code over his relationship with a conservative AIDS nonprofit run by a prominent evangelical activist who has promoted abstinence-only solutions to the disease.

As you can see, Redfield was the model of scientific integrity. In 2018, Trump put him in charge of the CDC. Now the once renowned Center for Disease Control is a caricature of its former self. Before Trump all but sidelined it, its COVID-19 response was a tale of one failure followed by another, followed by mealy-mouthed advice to meat packers about voluntary steps they might take to keep their employees safe, if it isn't too much trouble, since Trump is forcing them back to work.

This is just one example of how the Trump administration's corrupt of the science has played a big role in its failure to prevent a catastrophic loss of life.

2) Trump didn't believe COVID-19 could hit here.

In his heart of hearts, he thought of it as a disease of “those people.” When he was first warned about it, he was sure it was just some Asian flu that would stay over there. When it became clear that would not be the case:

3) Trump thought banning foreigners coming from China was sufficient.

Don't you just get sick and tired of hearing him brag about that? Before the ban at least 430,000 people had already flown in from China since 31 December, and another 40,000, mostly Americans, came back in the two months after the ban started, with very shaky screening and self-quarantine. It was like he really thought “our” people can't carry it. Then, as the pandemic developed, it became clear that the virus was taking the most lives in the New York-New Jersey hub where it had been imported from Europe. Probably because it took Trump 40 days after the China travel ban to institute the European travel ban, like “those” people can't bring it here.

4) The Trump administration refused the W.H.O. COVID-19 test.

As early as 11 January 2020, Chinese scientists posted the genome of the new unknown virus, and with a week virologists in Berlin had produced the first diagnostic test for the new disease. By the end of February the World Health Organization had distributed the test to 60 countries. The US refused the "foreign" WHO test, and then screwed up attempts to produce an American made test. Trump was depending on his travel ban as the sole means of stopping the virus.

Even after the FDA came out with their own viable test, they were slow in rolling it out, and then with restrictive guidelines that barred people who weren't already sick from getting it.  More recently, Trump has stated publicly that he wants to slow testing down because he lives in a fantasy world in which a tree falling in the forest makes no noise if no one is there to hear it, and COVID-19 cases exist only if you test for them. The US was still trying to roll out a viable test as late as March, and even today most experts say COVID-19 testing in the US is far below what is needed to contain the virus.

5) Trump sees it as a disease of disposable people.

The very concept of “disposable people” developed even more harshly under conditions of slavery than wage labor. Racism made them less than human, and slavery made them property, and property is disposable. Everything we know about Trump from his practice as both an owner and employer tells us that he is of that mind. Since COVID-19 appeared to mainly kill people over 65, especially those in nursing homes, Trump saw those as disposable people not worth a serious effort. When it was revealed to be taking down a growing number of younger people, he downplayed the significance because a disproportionate number have been people of color.

5) Trump scapegoats people of color for COVID-19.

This begins with his blaming China for the pandemic and his annoying attempts to label it the “Chinese Virus”, then on to blaming immigrants, defunding the WHO, and now blaming the home life of meat packing workers for the COVID-19 hotshots in meat packing plants.

6) Trump uses the pandemic to promote his white supremacist agenda.

He has intentionally politicized certain coronavirus counter-measures such as staying home and wearing masks when out, to promote a macho white supremacist image. He has used opposition to state shutdown measures to support the re-emergence of some of his “very fine people” from Charlottesville as the white supremacist wing of the boogaloo movement complete with battle fatigues, Hawaiian shirts, and AR-15s on state house steps demanding “liberty.” He has been utterly consumed with the optics of the fight against the virus, and its effect on his flagging re-election possibilities, and shown a depraved indifference to his duty to limit the human carnage. All that was before his down-right fascist response to the people's just outrage about the murder of George Floyd.

Trump's approach to the pandemic has been greatly influenced by his white supremacist outlook, and the epidemic failure of that policy has cost tens of thousands of American lives of all colors. This shows how racism hurts everybody, and in this present case, Trump's racism has been deadly for all.

Protesters are essential workers in the fight against both racism and COVID-19

One of the objections raised to the massive shows of unity in the US and around the world is that they violate social distancing guidelines, and might lead to more COVID-19 cases. Ironically, some of those objecting were encouraging every state to “open up” two weeks ago. Fortunately, these protests have been outdoors where virus transmission is very rare, and smartly, the vast majority of the protesters have been wearing masks. They are aware of the risk, but know that it is worth it because white supremacy is also sabotaging the fight against COVID-19, and it could easily take another hundred thousand American lives unless this white supremacist regime is removed from the White House.

Clay Claiborne