Black People Are Losing Theirs...

White People Are Demanding Their Lives Back In States Where Black People Are Losing Theirs

In nine reopening states, “freedom” is being built on the back of Black vulnerability.

EDWIN RIOS and SINDUJA RANGARAJAN

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has insisted on reopening the state’s economy even in the face of a spike in confirmed COVID cases, not to mention criticism from President Donald Trump, later reversed. Kemp took a sweeping approach to loosening shelter-in-place restrictions starting April 24 by letting nonessential businesses open up. On Tamron Hall’s TV show that day, Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, criticized Kemp’s reopening effort as one “driven purely by economics.”

Three days later, as the nation was fixated on small but raucous right-wing protests defying shelter-in-place orders, a group of protesters in Atlanta, organized by the Georgia Coalition 2 Save Lives, rode in cars and a dozen hearses from a funeral home to the state Capitol and held a mock funeral. The coalition, made up of lawyers, faith leaders, and civil rights groups, wanted to draw attention to what public health experts see as a likely consequence of moving too quickly: a deadly surge in COVID cases.

When Hall asked whether Bottoms was “surprised by those who have decided it is worth the risk to reopen,” the mayor told the talk show host: “It is so surprising to me that people have such a disregard for the science and the data, especially when you look at the African American community, where there is a barbershop and hair salon on every single corner.”

Bottoms was evoking one of the central juxtapositions of the pandemic in the United States: White people are demanding their lives back while Black people are losing theirs altogether. According to a recent poll by Civis Analytics, just under 70 percent of Americans who oppose lockdowns are white workers who have not lost a job in the pandemic. The New York Times recently characterized the question of reopening as a dilemma between “job or health,” but the pairing begs the question at either end: Whose jobs? Whose health?

In fact, a closer look at the data suggests the dubious freedom to work and shop in a plague is being won in places where Black people are most vulnerable. Of the 15 states with the widest disparities between the Black share of the population and the Black share of COVID deaths, nine have reopened or are reopening soon: Missouri, Kansas, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and North Carolina. Of those, seven are run by Republican governors. Just one state with a Republican governor, Maryland, has refused to reopen.

By now the disproportionate effects of the coronavirus on Black people have been well-documented. Recently, in a snapshot of 14 states, the CDC found that Black people accounted for 18 percent of the sample’s population but 33 percent of hospitalizations for COVID-19. In Georgia, where 34 percent of people are Black, the CDC found that Black people made up 83 percent of hospitalizations for COVID-19. State data shows that they also account for half the deaths, though the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has reported that Georgia might be undercounting its deaths.

The reopenings are proceeding on top of these asymmetries. (For this analysis, we used data collected from The COVID Racial Data Tracker, as well as from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) In Missouri, where Black people account for 12 percent of the state’s population but 39 percent of COVID fatalities, Republican Gov. Mike Parsons let the stay-at-home order expire this week. He visited businesses that reopened without a mask, saying simply that he “chose not to” wear one.