The coronavirus is striking black and brown people disproportionately, a prologue for the rest of America if nothing more is done.
George Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead is one of the few films of its kind that not only doesn’t kill the token black character first, but makes him the protagonist. Still, after surviving the flesh-eating undead for nearly two hours, the hero dies at the end. I first saw the film when I was a teenager. It was shortly after the young actor who played Ben, Duane Jones, died of cardiopulmonary arrest. He was only 51.
African Americans are quite used to seeing our own die early, whether in real life or the movies. Now as the world lives out its own horror story with the coronavirus pandemic, the one constant is black death. The coronavirus pandemic is reacquainting the rest of America with our conspicuous morbidity.
COVID-19 is disproportionately affecting African Americans, and that is a truth that not even this president and vice president could dodge. Their nods to the inescapable reality this week were better than the alternative, certainly, but still — didn’t move me at all. Not just because they haven’t proposed solutions to address the problem, but also because they have run an administration flush with racist policies and rhetoric. They’re not just complicit, but accelerants, in the conditions that made black people more vulnerable to the novel coronavirus to begin with…
To read the entire article from Rolling Stone, click https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/coronavirus-black-death-racism-donald-trump-mike-pence-981707/