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Get Your House In Order, Or Watch It Burn
May. 31st, 2020 06:14 pmIn particular, the White one on Pennsylvania Ave...
A sad, sobering article on the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) news website, highlighting the long-simmering racial tensions which have erupted so 'quickly' in the USA... they've been near the boil for a while now & all leaders have done is season them with salt...
There's an old saying that sums up the disparities in the US with a health metaphor: "When white America catches a cold, black America gets pneumonia". And right now, white America isn't just catching a cold — it's getting ravaged by coronavirus on nearly every front. The virus has claimed the lives of 103,000 Americans, registered 1.7 million positive cases and cost the country 40 million jobs.
By each measure of hardship, black Americans are bearing more of the burden but getting less attention. Most staggering is the mortality rate, which is roughly 2.4 times higher than it is for white Americans.
You'd think that a virus dubbed "the great equaliser" might help some Americans see the morbid risk of sustained racial inequality. But the national conversations around the discrepancy of death rates tend to stop at saying that black Americans are more likely to have pre-existing health conditions such as obesity, in effect putting the blame for catching the virus back on black Americans.
Good health is something that black Americans, 22 per cent of whom live in poverty, disproportionately have less means to achieve. Black Americans are also five times more likely than white Americans to be kept in jails, which have been the sites of the top three biggest outbreaks in the country.
A sad, sobering article on the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) news website, highlighting the long-simmering racial tensions which have erupted so 'quickly' in the USA... they've been near the boil for a while now & all leaders have done is season them with salt...
There's an old saying that sums up the disparities in the US with a health metaphor: "When white America catches a cold, black America gets pneumonia". And right now, white America isn't just catching a cold — it's getting ravaged by coronavirus on nearly every front. The virus has claimed the lives of 103,000 Americans, registered 1.7 million positive cases and cost the country 40 million jobs.
By each measure of hardship, black Americans are bearing more of the burden but getting less attention. Most staggering is the mortality rate, which is roughly 2.4 times higher than it is for white Americans.
You'd think that a virus dubbed "the great equaliser" might help some Americans see the morbid risk of sustained racial inequality. But the national conversations around the discrepancy of death rates tend to stop at saying that black Americans are more likely to have pre-existing health conditions such as obesity, in effect putting the blame for catching the virus back on black Americans.
Good health is something that black Americans, 22 per cent of whom live in poverty, disproportionately have less means to achieve. Black Americans are also five times more likely than white Americans to be kept in jails, which have been the sites of the top three biggest outbreaks in the country.
