Infectious Dose

Americans are dealing with two deadly diseases right now: COVID-19, a brand new virus, and racism, which has infected this country for 400 years. Both are contagious.

“Infectious dose” means the smallest quantity of infectious material that regularly produces a disease. Scientists don’t yet know how many viruses it takes to create a new case of COVID-19. They know masks and distance help cut the number that reach another person. Nobody can tell us the lowest amount of racism necessary to create a new racist.

There might not be a vaccine to prevent COVID-19 for another year or more. There is, however, a vaccine to prevent racism. It’s called education. People of color don’t need to be educated on what racism is or how it operates. Most white people have been ignorant. It has taken video after video of police killing unarmed black people to begin to educate white Americans.

Signs of this disease are everywhere in popular culture. Often racism is so unconscious that it manifests in advertisements which have to pass in front of many (white) eyes before they run. A 2017 Dove ad showed a smiling black woman turning white. In 2018, H&M ran an ad featuring a black child in a hoodie with the motto “coolest monkey in the jungle.” Gucci sold a blackface sweater in 2019. In May of this year, according to CNN, a Volkswagen ad showed “an outsized white hand pushing a black man away from a parked VW Golf, before flicking him into a restaurant called Petit Colon, which translates from French as the Little Colonist.”

In the 1921 Tulsa massacre, white mobs killed as many as 300 black residents and burned a thriving black business district to the ground. Most white Americans never heard of it until Trump tried to hold a rally there on the anniversary of this atrocity. My own kids’ middle school history text spent 17 pages on the Civil War without once mentioning slavery.

We will not see the end of either COVID-19 or racism in the foreseeable future. We do have the tools, however, to get the presence of these killers below the infectious dose.

Privilege Unmasked

I’ve been noticing a trend among people lucky enough to frequent our local public green space. More people are wearing masks lately. The holdouts, however, seem to be mostly young to middle-aged white people.

People of color understand how vulnerable they are to random, undeserved misfortune. Ahmaud Arbery was only the most recent victim of homicidal racism to get the nation’s attention. No one knows the true count of unarmed people killed for doing normal things while black.

My city is fortunate enough to contain immigrants from many parts of the world. They wear masks. Like native-born people of color, they know that life can be cruel and unfair. They take what precautions they can.

A couple of months ago, when I first started nagging store clerks to insist their employers give them masks, they looked at me like I was crazy. Now they’re wearing masks. But these people are not rich. They know life is full of inconvenient and uncomfortable requirements.

Women should know how fragile our bodies are, and how subject to change. But our culture has taught women that how we look is the most important thing about us. So a pretty face is too powerful to cover up, and some young women will be pretty if it kills them — which, these days, it might.

Young white people with money have led protected, easy lives until now. They have little experience with real danger, much less with danger in public places. They feel invulnerable. What is far worse for the rest of us is that many seem to believe they have a right to do whatever they want, no matter how it affects other people. That’s what privilege is all about.

When a young person without a mask bikes past you, or brushes by you running on the path, or just saunters along as though “social distance” referred to the difference in your class status rather than a life-saving space, you are seeing the literal face of privilege.

In a democracy, privilege is a long-term threat to the idea that we are all equal before the law. During this pandemic, privilege can be deadly.