A little less than four years ago, the president tried to get black votes with the question, “What do you have to lose?”
The coronavirus offers a bleak answer.
President Trump was notified of the danger of the pandemic in January, but didn’t begin to address the issue until late February. Hospitals ran short on supplies such as gowns, masks and
tests. Governors had to ask then plead with the president for ventilators and other supplies. And in the beginning, the president dismissed the seriousness of the virus, claiming it would “go away.” After weeks of people “staying in place” and wearing masks, the daily death toll has not yet stabilized.
Of course, the black community, along with Native Ameri- cans and Latinos, are hardest hit because of differences in spatial location, income and age. With some of the nonsense President Trump has spouted, one might also think that he is deliberately targeting the black community for damage.
What do we have to lose? Our jobs or our lives.
Consider the U.S. Postal Service, which has been a staple employer in the African- American community. Back in the day, my mom used to talk about “Ph.D.s working at the post office” because academic employment was scarce and segregated, and the post office paid decently.
Many a black families made it to the middle class through postal wages. And now the president is declaring war on the USPS.
Why? No. 45 has incorrectly said that fees for mailing pack- ages are “too low,” that the USPS is subsidizing internet companies — he means Amazon — with low package fees. But studies have shown that the prices paid for mailing packages more than cover their actual costs.
Twenty-one percent of the USPS’ roughly 625,000 employees are African-American and nearly 17 percent are other people of color. Might this be one of the reasons that No. 45 keeps lashing out at the USPS?
He says that unless the USPS raises its fees for package delivery, he will deny the USPS any COVID-19 aid.
I’m not suggesting that his animus toward the USPS in general, and Jeff Bezos and Amazon in particular, is precisely because so many people of color work for the postal service. Still, I do not think that his attitude toward black people is unrelated to his ire at the USPS.
What do we have to lose? Some black women have found their lives at risk because of President Trump’s touting of hydroxychloroquine as a “game-changing” coronavirus cure. People with lupus also need hydroxychloroquine for their disease, but President Trump’s unseemly huckstering a drug that is not likely to cure the coro- navirus has created shortages for hydroxychloroquine. Black women get lupus twice as fre- quently as white women, and we get it younger and with more complications than white women. Because lupus is more likely to hit black women at an earlier age, black women also risk complications from pregnancy because of lupus.
Did President Trump enthusiastically embrace hydroxychloroquine because black women are more likely to get the disease and he wanted to punish us? Does he have investments in companies that produce hydroxychloroquine?
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May 08, 2020 at 05:00AM
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What do we have to lose? by Julianne Malveaux - Richmond Free Press
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