White Supremacy Kills.
One of the most ingenious accomplishments of white supremacy, is downplaying the magnitude of death of people of color that follows. By the time our society discovers that it should treat white supremacy as the danger it is, those who lead the charge and profited from it will be long gone. Which I believe has been the point.
Nearly 55 million indigenous people perished after contact with Europeans. in North America from 1692 to the 1600s. Nearly 13 million Africans were taken and brutalized or killed between 1514 and 1866. In 2020 hate crimes in the U.S. rose to the highest level in more than a decade. Some of which were murders! Our top officials have warned for years now that our greatest domestic threat comes from ethnically and racially motivated violent extremists. Yet we continue to treat white supremacists as a mild nuisance in society.
Many times we diminish their behavior as a mental illness or treat them as an attention seeking person who merely needs to be ignored. We act as if these people live isolated from society on some rural farm in the middle of nowhere, saying harmless words and not harming anyone in any way. We treat no other group of people with this level of violent history in this manner.
I know what your thinking, what does this have to do with long Covid? Well we have no mechanism of tracking deaths incurred of people of color from white supremacists except through hate crimes and the even more recent police brutality cases. But the bar is so incredibly high and it ignores that white supremacists come in all ages, income levels and professions. White supremacists walk around our country freely, lawyers, realtors, bankers, CEO's, politicians, nurses and doctors.
We know that black maternal mortality rate is nearly 3x of white women in America. But we don't investigate the individual doctors and nurses involved in the care of black women giving birth who die during or soon after the process, or even other types of care. We could very easily scan their social media or interview coworkers or past patients, for clues if racial bias motivated substandard care that lead to the wrongful and unnecessary death of that black woman. We don't even have a national database that publicly displays the number of discrimination complaints against individual hospitals by patients.
We cant know the REAL reach of white supremacy today because we treat it as an issue from the past even as white supremacists openly march in our streets. Instead we should be creating a means to track the impact properly. I strongly believe even those skeptical would be surprised of just how many deaths a year would be attributed to white supremacy if properly measured.
