If Slavery Did Not Heal America, The Coronavirus Tragedy Won’t Either by Robert Covington Jr.
America is the owner of a deep, dark past of history. The institution of American enslavement has rightly placed itself in the discussion of trying to understand the human capacity of evil, brutality, violence and intentional malice. The hundreds of years of slaughter, rape and inhumanity inflicted on black people is our American story. A story that has within its horror, an opportunity to heal through the lens of truth and reconciliation.
Unfortunately, America has pushed the narrative for the past two hundred and fifty years to see this barbaric level of inhumanity as “normal” in the scope of the story it tells itself. America and the sickness of white supremacy, Darwinian and Ayn Rand interpretation of rugged individualism has worked so hard to convince Americans that it was normal to exploit black bodies and inflict individual and systematic pain and suffering. America normalized it in our pulpits, propaganda and our history books.
America has never healed from this tragedy. Instead, we’ve doubled down on our lies, denial and rationalization with the goal of wishing it away and refusing to see the connection to our present day selves and the ravaged state that we find our democracy. Freedom and progress defined through the social arrangements of race, class and inequality. The acceptance and perpetuation of black and brown Americans disproportionate suffering and fragility as human beings within the society as the measuring stick of white power, status, and self-esteem. The legacy of enslavement has not healed the nation, it continues to define it.
Present day America has another defining feature to understanding why its refusal to heal and remake itself into something more loving, humane and exemplary has given us catastrophic consequences. As a nation, with the toxic combination of continued embrace of white supremacy, along with the anti-democratic electoral system that remains in place, America elected Donald Trump, a cruel, heartless and deranged man to be President of the United States. Donald Trump is the antithesis of love, humanity and healing for anything or anybody. As a result, America could not avoid another example of revealing itself before Trump is out of office.
The coronavirus pandemic under Trump and the Republican Party has been nothing short of seismically disastrous, deadly and heartbreaking. From the beginning, Trump tried to do the same thing with the coronavirus response as our history has done as it relates to slavery. Trump knew it was deadly, was consciously dishonest about its potential impact on individuals and the nation, all while engaging in propaganda of denial and normalizing the pain and suffering to come. Sounds familiar??
Trump may not be a student of history, but he has innate sense of understanding history. Trump realized America, white America in particular, has great tolerance and acceptance of black suffering in all its forms. Once it was known that black and brown Americans were dying at disproportionate rates, Trump’s initial effort to address the crisis decreased and the focus became normalizing the consequences. The nation changed when it was known that it was happening in big cities with large black and brown populations. The focus became going back to “normal” again.
Of course, white Americans have and are still getting sick and dying from the coronavirus. But America has always placed a premium on black pain and white proximity to that pain has been viewed as a necessary consequence at times. Although Republicans know millions of white Americans will also suffer from a lack of state and local funding, it’s the price many have to pay. Republicans believe that helping ALL states can’t be done without a rigorous political fight because that means they would have to help big cities where a disproportionate amount of black and brown people live, and those who support or hang around “them” live.
The valiant and brave efforts of healthcare workers in an industry that is predominantly white, can be dismissed or sacrificed by the Republican Party because they are the psychological equivalent to the white union soldiers during the civil war. They are on the wrong side of the ledger of history that fuels their cruel decision making.
Trump and the Republican Party have successfully “normalized” incompetence, criminal negligence and disregard for human life. But it is not possible without the silence and complicity of a still white majority population. Large majorities of white Americans did little to nothing to force Republican elected officials to respond differently. As a result, America’s response to a global pandemic will go down as the biggest failure in public health history. To add insult to injury, large majorities of white Americans re-elected Trump’s biggest enablers (Graham, McConnell, Collins, Sasse, and many others) to remain in office.
America is on the cusp of scientific, pharmacologic and medical breakthrough with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines moving its way through the regulatory process and into our homes and communities. A return to “normalcy” will lead many discussions and human behavior. As with slavery, if the impulse is to view this tragedy through the lens of expediency, denial of its human, psychological and spiritual costs to the nation, and faded memory, at some point in the future, the pendulum will finally swing to democracy dying in broad daylight.
Follow me on twitter: @robcovingtonjr
