Racial Disparities

#Sarah Remick, "Double Exposure," The New Yorker, June 22, 2020. 

"From the antebellum period until the end of Jim Crow, countless black Americans crossed the color line to pass as whites -- to escape slavery, or threats of racial violence, or to gain access to the social, political, and economic benefits conferred by whiteness."

#Luke Mogelson, "The Uprising," The New Yorker, June 22, 2020.

"Today, Minneapolis appears on lists of the 'best places to live,' even as its racial disparities ran among the worst in the country. The medium annual income of black residents in the Twin Cities is less than half that of whites, and, though about seventy-five percent own their homes, only about a quarter of black families do."

#Jelani Cobb, "American Spring," The New Yorker, June 22, 2020.

"Today, the weight of grief and poverty in this country still falls disproportionally on black shoulders." "Race, to the degree that it represents anything coherent in the United States, is shorthand for a specific set of life probabilities." "Seventy-one per cent of white Americans now say that racial discrimination is a 'big problem.' "

#Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery, "It's All Out in the Open," Mother Jones, September/October 2020.

Part of that underlying cadence is white supremacy, the foundational injustice of our country and the core of our president's reelection message." "His [Trump's] determination to enrich himself and his cronies at the country's expense is so brazen, it has made visible what previously hid behind a veneer of legality." "Yes, our political system's were designed by and for the advantage of the rich, white, and well-connected."

#Patricia Williams, "The Color of Contagion," The Nation, September 7/14, 2020.

"One may wonder, in other words, why minority's disproportionally lower survival rates couldn't be more accurately attributed to homelessness or dense living or lack of health insurance or inadequate food supplies or environmental toxins or the ratio of acute care facilities to the numbers of residents in the ghettoized locations that have become such petri dishes of contagion." "Needless to say, Black and Latinx patients with the same symptoms as their white counterparts, end up being referred for specialized care much less often." "The reconfigured overlay of race as a debilitating, resource- consuming morbidity risk worsens the situation."

#Charlotte Alter, "Down the Rabbit Hole," TIME, September 21-28, 2020.

"When enslaved people were freed after the Civil War, they had  reason to expect that the government would grant them land as delayed payment for generations of labor exploitation. The phrase '40 acres and a mule' derives from General William T. Sherman's 1815 field order to distribute 400,000 acres of land to newly freed families in 40-acre plots." "Everyone involved carefully avoided using the  word 'reparations,' even though [there was a reparations law from 1988,] in which Congress awarded $20,000 to each Japanese American who was forced into an internment camp during World War II."

ADDENDUMS:

*Lara Friedman, president of the non-profit Foundation for Middle East Peace, is pessimistic about a Biden administration's willingness to listen to pro-Palestinian activists.

*A Jama Cardiology study published in July suggested that many recently recovered patients have lingering heart abnormalities, with inflammation the most common.

*The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute demanded [in early September] that President Trump's reelection campaign stop using Reagan's name and likeness to solicit funds. The campaign was issuing commemorative coins to those who donated $45 or more.

*Adam Ramsay, "Scotland would fare better alone," THE WEEK, August 7, 2020. "When Scotland held its independence referendum in 2014, 55 percent voted to remain part of the U.K. Now, 54 percent of Scottish voters back secession..."

*"Back to School," The Nation, September 7/14, 2020. "Of 13 countries analyzed by the Kaiser Family Foundation -- including Germany, South Korea, and Israel -- all but two had positivity rates below 4 percent when they resumed classes. In the US the rate was approaching 8 percent as schools began to reopen, with some states -- including Georgia, Florida, and Arizona -- topping 10 and even 15 percent."