What Black America Knows About Quarantine

May 15, 2020 2:52 PM

White people are protesting against being trapped at home. Black people know what it feels like to really be trapped.

(If having difficulty with the paywall, please try this Internet Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200515204648/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/opinion/coronavirus-ahmaud-arbery-race.html)

posted by Ahmad Khani (12 comments total)

Ahmaud Arbery and the dangers of running while black -- The threat of being killed merely for existing can shape black men’s lives. (Zack Beauchamp for Vox)

Ahmaud Arbery’s death is the worst fear of many black men, who experience a level of baseline fear and persecution during routine activities like jogging in majority-white neighborhoods that few others in America can understand.

When a Walk Is No Longer Just a Walk -- After Ahmaud Arbery’s death, even stepping out the front door for a walk provokes a protracted mental checklist of how to stay safe in my own neighborhood. (Archie L. Alston II for Citylab)

I walked to my front door, and told my fiancée that I’d be back soon. She said OK, with a tinge of trepidation — just enough to snap me back into reality. I was reminded that I live in America, in a nice neighborhood, and that I am a large negro. My mind flooded with scenarios of everything that could go wrong on my walk, based on everything that had gone wrong for others like me. Others whose nights I imagine began as innocently as my own.

Just when I thought that I had become desensitized to racial violence, the death of Arbery had struck me to my core. Arbery, 25, was shot twice while out for a jog by Travis McMichael, who with father Gregory, chased Arbery in a pickup truck. Gregory told the police that he thought he looked like a man suspected in neighborhood break-ins. There was no way for me to rationalize in the slightest why he was murdered. Arbery’s killing, which happened while he was doing something so seemingly routine — jogging — had me unwittingly fearful of exercising one of the most basic of human rights, the right to simply exist.

While I absolutely have routines that I run through as a black man — i.e. my “police protocol,” my “workforce protocol,” etc. — prior to what happened with Arbery, I did not run through a checklist for something as benign as taking a walk in my neighborhood.

Still, on this particular evening, I grabbed my photo ID and my credit card, just in case. But my ID still had my permanent address in Richmond, Virginia, and I’m in Fredericksburg. That wouldn’t help me. I grabbed the water bill to prove that I live in this neighborhood. I headed back towards the door, only to catch a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror. I probably didn’t look like I lived in this neighborhood. Back upstairs I went. Almost by muscle memory, I threw on a University of Virginia hoodie and a U.Va. hat. Even racists love U.Va., or its home of Charlottesville at least. I contemplated throwing on my U.Va. Law hoodie but feared it may have been too much. Would someone feel intimidated and use that as provocation? My anger began rising.

“It’s just a walk!” I told myself as I left the closet clad in orange and blue. But it wasn’t. For the first time, I had to admit to myself that I may have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)-like symptoms related to the unfettered onslaught of violence against African Americans in America.

Back to the OP:

We ask our cities to be smart, but are we asking them to be just? We talk about access in symbolic ways, but don’t think about the core geographies of inequality that emerge in the making of a mobile, technologically driven city. The creative, progressive city — with its fine dining, bike shares and crowded parks — relies on the same workers of color that it relegates to the margins.

We can even take a lesson from the protesters demanding, wrongly, an end to the quarantine. We can fight for opening our cities — politically, economically and racially — with the same energy they are putting toward opening our streets. We must create solutions that benefit the masses, not a select few. A true end to quarantine demands ending the quarantining city. It may not be the best we can do, but it’s the least we can ask.

An example for hope: Hawaii Introduces COVID-19 ‘Feminist Economic Recovery Plan’ (Feminist.org)

The Hawai’i State Commission on the Status of Women introduced a ‘feminist economic recovery plan’ that is designed to help women recover from the economic hardships created by the coronavirus pandemic. The plan is the first of its’ kind in the nation.

The plan, called “Building Bridges, Not Walking on Backs: A Feminist Economic Recovery Plan for COVID-19” (PDF), centers women from the most marginalized groups that have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19. The plan not only proposes measures that will help aid in recovery from the economic fallout of the virus, but also introduces fundamental changes to the way women’s work is valued and compensated.

posted by filthy light thief at 3:14 PM on May 15, 2020 [29 favorites]

same idea in editorial cartoon format:
https://robrogers.com/2020/05/12/america/
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 3:35 PM on May 15, 2020 [29 favorites]

Thank you for this post.
posted by lauranesson at 5:50 PM on May 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

"Reopen the Economy!!!" protest stuff is pretty much "Economic Anxiety" for 2020.

Same racist tantrum bullshit, new coat of paint to let the media pretend it's something it isn't.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 7:30 PM on May 15, 2020 [16 favorites]

thank you. i get so mad bc i’m willing to acknowledge and check my copious privilege. just acknowledging it seems like such a reach for so many. humility isn’t easy, but it is simple.
posted by ovenmitt at 6:24 AM on May 16, 2020 [3 favorites]

Yeah. It's not just staying at home. White people are protesting altruism. They're protesting the inconvenience of having to think of the wellbeing of others even when death is on the line.

Meanwhile, black people are protesting in the hope of keeping people alive.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 7:58 AM on May 16, 2020 [13 favorites]

Remarkably self-unaware tweet by conservative commentator Tomi Lahren.
posted by splitpeasoup at 9:02 AM on May 16, 2020 [3 favorites]

Articles like this which are then paraphrased as "Staying Home Not Stopping COVID-19" make me livid because they bury the fact that the majority of those who are getting sick are PoC in NYC, whose living conditions do not lend themselves to isolation, whose family members are forced to go out and work because they are "essential." Instead the message, which if I saw it then the FREEEEDOOMMMMM crowd definitely did, is "lockdowns are pointless and dangerous."

Like, I get that it is an interesting datapoint, but it is hardly baffling if you factor in racism and disenfranchisement, and far more harm than good will come from having released it the way it was released.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:10 AM on May 16, 2020 [12 favorites]

Also, the reason there's a stark Sophie's choice between keeping people safe from a pandemic and keeping people safe from financial ruin is that we have consistently dismantled what little the US had by way of a safety net.

And we did that, in a large part, because white supremacists didn't want to spend money on something that would benefit people of color.

If people were earning enough to save for an emergency, and access to healthcare and the ability to maintain housing and buy food weren't entirely contingent on employment, we wouldn't be where we are. And yet.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 10:31 AM on May 16, 2020 [15 favorites]

You ll note that the timing of the spending on these protests come after the urban league, etc held press releases concerned that the deaths were disproportionately african american.

Once that was announced, I'm sure many white Americans sided with the virus. Many more don't recognize the "freedumb" rhetoric for what it is, freedom to hurt people of color and working people, and poor people.

Are bikes considered a white thing, tho? In New Orleans, bikes are disproportionately vehicles for the poor, working people and people of color. Our "critical mass" has always been tiny, but, before the COVID, black bike parades were thousands strong, much bigger than white people's rides, and connected to neighborhood parade traditions and Black motorbike clubs.

The bike lanes are built to protect walking people or cars. Cars kill so many people in New Orleans, and these people tend to be older black folks.

I would agree that the bike infrastructure is evil as much as it is connected to the evils of real estate, but real estate makes any infrastructure improvements, includling bus access, subject to future forced removals.

If you build bike infrastructure sufficiently, all across the city, there s no real estate advantage qua bike roads.

No one would protest investments in clean water pipes maintained on an equitable basis, Or drainage, saying that causes gentrification.

Bit I suppose if you discriminate in where the bike lanes are applied to appeal to the devil of real estate, that s a different issue, and I retract my question.

Atlanta is a probably good example. I remember that white people protested having the train, even though it would save thousands of White lives per year. It wouldn t discount Thw power of DOTD highway Grift, to block construction monies from going to anything but highway kickbacks, but the public rhetoric against transportation was definitely racialized
posted by eustatic at 10:37 AM on May 16, 2020 [6 favorites]

Once that was announced, I'm sure many white Americans sided with the virus. Many more don't recognize the "freedumb" rhetoric for what it is, freedom to hurt people of color and working people, and poor people.

100%. People started classifying it as merely another cause of deaths for "those people" who probably "made bad choices" by living with their families or something, and they are already quite hardened to the idea of a backdrop to the functioning of capitalism and white supremacy of daily unnecessary deaths of people of color and the poor. (As indeed you must be to be a Republican in these days.)
posted by praemunire at 2:33 PM on May 16, 2020 [8 favorites]

Mod note: One deleted. The article is about stark racial disparities in demands, controls, protections, treatment, care, and exploitation wherein Black people are sacrificed for the benefit of the white majority. If you are posting here in sarcastic outrage because in commenting on this people are not being sympathetic enough to white protestors, you are in the wrong place entirely. If you just didn't read the article, read the article.
posted by taz (staff) at 1:40 AM on May 17, 2020 [5 favorites]