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Trump's Racist Coronavirus Response Foreshadows the Injustice to Come
GIZMODO
Brian Kahn
31 minutes ago
•
Excerpt:
And so here is where I was terribly wrong. The Trump administration has had a care-not attitude about the coronavirus from day one. Now, though, that attitude has melded with its full-on racism. Its coronavirus response is essentially asking American to be okay with not just death generally, but death that continues a cycle of suffering in Black and brown communities. Service workers from Amazon distribution centers to grocery stores to meatpacking plants have all been on the frontlines facing the virus and are staffed in large part by people of color working for low wages. The Trump administration has left them out there without protections, in what is basically the most perfect distillation of a putrid philosophy.
This is a horrific approach to a public health crisis increasingly contained elsewhere by decision-making grounded in science and societies invested in each other. To address the climate crisis will require a similar science-based approach and asking society to protect the most vulnerable over a period of time that will far outlast the time it takes to stamp out the pandemic. That’s why what’s happening with the coronavirus is so disturbing.
Republicans have spent years delaying action on the climate crisis and have no real plan; their response to the anti-police violence protests and coronavirus show they have no plan for actually addressing systemic racism. Mapping that deliberate inaction onto the climate crisis is a nightmare.
<snip>
In my initial warning about the coronavirus and climate response, I focused largely on Republican fetish for the free market and preserving the status quo for the wealthy. But it’s, of course, about much more than that. The reason Republicans laugh off the Green New Deal and the call for justice at its core is precisely the same reason they run to the ramparts to stifle Black-led protests and water down the public health and economic response to the coronavirus. True justice requires reckoning with America’s history of brutal racism and righting that wrong through investment in Black communities, shrinking the carceral system, and cleaning toxic waste sites, among other things. Asking Americans to accept the injustice and consequences of untethered capitalism in the context of the climate crisis is when we truly end up in some dark places.
This is a horrific approach to a public health crisis increasingly contained elsewhere by decision-making grounded in science and societies invested in each other. To address the climate crisis will require a similar science-based approach and asking society to protect the most vulnerable over a period of time that will far outlast the time it takes to stamp out the pandemic. That’s why what’s happening with the coronavirus is so disturbing.
Republicans have spent years delaying action on the climate crisis and have no real plan; their response to the anti-police violence protests and coronavirus show they have no plan for actually addressing systemic racism. Mapping that deliberate inaction onto the climate crisis is a nightmare.
<snip>
In my initial warning about the coronavirus and climate response, I focused largely on Republican fetish for the free market and preserving the status quo for the wealthy. But it’s, of course, about much more than that. The reason Republicans laugh off the Green New Deal and the call for justice at its core is precisely the same reason they run to the ramparts to stifle Black-led protests and water down the public health and economic response to the coronavirus. True justice requires reckoning with America’s history of brutal racism and righting that wrong through investment in Black communities, shrinking the carceral system, and cleaning toxic waste sites, among other things. Asking Americans to accept the injustice and consequences of untethered capitalism in the context of the climate crisis is when we truly end up in some dark places.
Read more: https://earther.gizmodo.com/trump-s-racist-coronavirus-response-foreshadows-the-inj-1844296788/amp
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