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We are embarking on a long process of reshaping society, like it or not. Much policy will be made. The inequality I depicted in THE LINES BETWEEN US looks very slow-moving in retrospect now that people are dropping dead disproportionately every day. https://thenewpress.com/books/lines-between-us
There are better ways to help besides reading my book, I know. But if you have read it or care to do so, watch carefully as powerful people encounter inequality and make decisions. Sometimes they pretend it's not there. Sometimes they make small decisions that help many people.
Yesterday, @GovLarryHogan acknowledged racial disparities in COVID data. The national media has portrayed him as a quick and sensitive decision maker. He can distinguish himself now by embracing racial equity in every decision with the goal of eliminating those disparities.
In the early 20th century, as the overcrowded alley streets housing many black Baltimoreans teemed with tuberculosis, segregationists embraced the rhetoric of "Progressive" reformers to carve out white spaces and black spaces. Public health was invoked to segregate the races.
Sometimes folks nakedly admitted they wanted to keep white communities from getting sick, demonizing the "insidious influence of slum conditions into our very midst to defile and destroy."
Sometimes they tried to convince the public that segregation could protect black communities, too. When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the municipal segregation ordinances that Baltimore pioneered, Baltimore doubled down on segregation.
On July 2, 1918, the @baltimoresun reported that Mayor Preston desired to use police powers to create another ordinance to "protect the health of its citizens." The ordinance would "segregate negroes in this city because..."
"...having a much higher rate of tuberculosis among them than there is among the whites, they constitute a menace to the health of the white population."
A year earlier, while the original segregation ordinance was still live, a city report on the health of black communities endorsed enlarging the segregation zone--for black residents' own good, recommending that "small alleys in which negroes live be converted into public parks."
Segregation ordinances fell away, but as I wrote in my book, "Baltimore's white power structure became craftier." The COVID-19 data is just another link in an unbroken century-long chain of structural racism. Discrimination, if not always provable in intent, continues in effect.
This history must be considered in every single decision anyone makes in responding to this outbreak. These are life and death decisions. They always were, but you will see the effects much more immediately than you did before.
The conditions mediating these disparities were created day after day in decisions people made from the tuberculosis panic in white supremacist 1910s Baltimore right up to Friday, April 10, 2020. It's time to make decisions that acknowledge this truth and dismantle inequality.
Again, not to make this about my book, but I spent years chronicling decision makers of many eras confronting inequality and deciding whether or not to dismantle it. Most often, they did not. https://thenewpress.com/books/lines-between-us
