COVID-19 death rates among blacks make new fodder for racial politics By John Eidson
As reported by ABC News, black American coronavirus patients in Michigan died of the disease at more than eight times the rate of white people despite making up only 14% of the state’s population. Similar death disparities occurred in other U.S. cities with large black populations, thus creating an opening for racial politics to be injected into the debate over COVID-19 death rates in the black community.
At the Coronavirus Task Force press briefing on April 7, Dr. Anthony Fauci correctly observed that black Americans are disproportionately affected by illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, and asthma, all of which are known to increase the risk of fatal coronavirus complications. The widely respected epidemiologist went on to note that such disparities have “long been prevalent in the African-American community.” With higher coronavirus death rates among black Americans an established medical fact, progressive media outlets are raising the specter that racism is to blame.
The suggestion that the medical profession is rife with racist doctors and nurses is an unfortunate extension of the modern Democratic Party’s identity politics election strategy, which is predicated on the fallacious narrative that even after all the years of racial progress, the America of today is an incurably oppressive place infested with racists who roam the land, including in hospitals and medical facilities that care for all Americans, regardless of the color of their skin.
No intelligent person can deny that residual racism still exists among some unenlightened people in our society, including some who work at health care facilities. But there’s a reason for the health disparities Dr. Fauci talked about that has absolutely nothing to do with racism. I’ll get to that in a minute, but first a small slice of America’s racial history.
Where black lives don’t matter
For most of America’s otherwise storied history, two evil institutions — slavery and segregation — saw to it that black lives didn’t matter. In 1964, hope among Americans of African descent soared when a Democrat president launched a noble war: the war on poverty. Then, in a cruel twist of fate for a people subjected to economic oppression since their country’s founding, that hope was crushed when the war on poverty was turned into what would become a third evil institution in America. As was true of plantations in the Old South, the New Plantation has become a place where black lives don’t matter, except in the lead-up to elections.
Since 1964, $25 trillion in anti-poverty funding has been spent, with the lion’s share going to America’s largest Democrat-run cities. After nearly six decades of uninterrupted Democrat rule, America’s inner cities more resemble bombed-out war zones than suitable places for human beings to live. Despite all that money and all those years, the New Plantation is still defined by an unconscionable number of abandoned buildings, empty houses, and vacant lots surrounded by rampant crime, government dependency, generational poverty, and inexcusably sorry schools, the sum of which has led to chronic despair and hopelessness among the urban poor.
Crumbled infrastructure is bad enough, but the real cost is the human cost. By intentionally pushing welfare policies known to kill the human spirit, the post-1960s Democratic Party has foisted unmitigated havoc on the most vulnerable people in our society, with the destruction of the black family as Exhibit A: seventy-seven percent of black babies in the New Plantation are born out of wedlock. Seventy-seven percent!
Democrats say their motives were pure, and that may have been true a half-century ago. They say they need more time, more money. Another half-century, another $25 trillion? For what? More of the inhumane living conditions that have existed unabated in the New Plantation for six consecutive decades?
Having been addicted to the demeaning lifestyle of government dependency, millions of decent people in our inner cities are economically confined to the squalid living conditions endemic to the New Plantation. Regardless of race, people who live in squalor generally make the kind of poor lifestyle choices — cigarettes, alcoholism, drug addiction, junk food — that lead to the diseases Dr. Fauci cited as causing a disproportionate share of coronavirus deaths among black Americans.
Poor lifestyle choices by residents of the New Plantation aren’t caused by racism; such choices can be laid squarely at the feet of the post-1960s Democratic Party and its cynical welfare-for-votes election strategy.
The good news is that black people are awakening to what Democrats have done to the people in our inner cities, as evidenced by the surge of black support for President Trump and an electrifying 2014 video of four Chicago ex-convicts tearing into President Obama and the Democratic Party for betraying the people of urban America with a half-century of broken promises.
What these four men have to say should be heard by every black person in America and every white person who votes for the party that bears full responsibility for perpetuating the tragic living conditions described in the video below.
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