Editor’s Note: Peniel Joseph is the Barbara Jordan chair in ethics and political values and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor of history. He is the author of several books, most recently “The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.” The views expressed here are his. View more opinion articles on CNN.
What Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the “promise of American democracy” at the 1963 March On Washington is receding against the twin burdens of a highly racialized pandemic and anti-government sentiment – fueled by no less than the president of the United States – that apes the “states’ rights” rhetoric of the Civil War.
King’s dedication to achieving black citizenship went hand-in-hand with Malcolm X’s quest for black dignity. Despite ideological differences over tactics and strategies, the two leaders found a shared symmetry in speaking truth to power. Their words proved oracular: they became the two biggest critics of white supremacy, racial inequality, war and poverty in American history. This vision made claims of black dignity and citizenship the beating heart of a reimagined American democracy, a society where demonstrations for justice constantly renewed the promise of freedom, justice and liberty for all.
The novel coronavirus’ destruction of black communities – left acutely vulnerable to this virus by decades of willful neglect, policy malfeasance and the criminalization of the poor – directly imperils the vision that they and their generation bequeathed to the nation during the 1960s.
Strewn across the landscape of black death in the time of coronavirus are areas – such as Albany (pronounced Al-benny by locals), Georgia – that were once centers of political conflict and struggle during the civil rights movement’s heroic period. Currently, Dougherty County, Georgia, where Albany stands as the county seat, the death total stood earlier this week at more than 125, with over 1,500 residents having tested positive for Covid-19. A city where Dr. King marched to end racial segregation in 1961 and 1962 has, almost 60 years later, become marked, once again, by the hazards of a racial caste system whose most devastating feature – always – is black death.
Blaming black folk for their own predicament – as the African American surgeon general Jerome Adams has been accused of doing in an embarrassing display during a nationally televised press conference – is another echo from the civil rights era, where courageous sit-in demonstrators were blamed for shocking acts of white violence. In response to criticism for his remarks, Adams said, “We need targeted outreach to the African American community, and I use the language that is used my family.” He continued: “So that was not meant to be offensive.”
Black bodies and behavior remain a historically convenient site of pathology, deployed as a simultaneous explanation of, and excuse for, black suffering.
Black workers – many of whom are disproportionately employed in the public sector, including mass transit, the gig economy and health care – face more risk than their white counterparts as this pandemic continues. African Americans, Latinx Americans, and other communities of color who work in supermarkets, post offices, grocery stores, food processing facilities and delivery services have been on the receiving end of the government – as well as the larger society’s – Janus-faced treatment of them. Rhetorically lionized by conservatives and progressives as essential to the functioning of democracy and the very future of capitalism amid the crisis, they in many cases still bear the brunt of the lack of protective equipment, decent health care and a living wage for their efforts.
Covid-19’s economic impact on the African American community – where fewer than 20% have employment that allows them to work from home – is not simply devastating, but more importantly, revelatory. Black Americans are not only bearing the disproportionate burden of death from this pandemic, they are increasingly becoming the targets of white rage. Recalling the era of Reconstruction, where armed white vigilantes terrorized a newly empowered class of black elected officials and the communities that supported them, anti-shelter-in-place demonstrations have precipitated the reopening of businesses in states, most notably Georgia, where African Americans are more likely to be exposed to Covid-19.
For much of the African American community the time before the pandemic was no bed of roses. Mass incarceration, poverty, unemployment, segregated public schools, and neighborhoods all reflected massive impediments to the very idea of black citizenship, let alone dignity.
Meanwhile, Covid-19 has continued resolutely to decimate hard-earned, painstakingly incremental racial progress by amplifying pre-existing racial disparities in health care access and treatment and so much more. The benchmark feature of 21st century American democracy so far has been our national inability to stem the tide of a growing wealth gap that reveals the depths of how race shapes educational outcomes, prison sentences, unemployment rates, and which neighborhoods and communities thrive and which falter.
But what we euphemistically characterize as “structural racism” really means that premature death and amplified suffering for tens of millions of black Americans is normalized despite hard evidence that policies – and not behaviors – are to blame for widening racial disparities in America.
What Barack Obama famously called the “Joshua generation” seemed poised at the outset of the 21st century to build on the “Moses generation’s” 20th century milestones, to move the nation toward further progress – symbolized by the election of a black president and fully realized at the more granular level of neighborhood politics. The racial dimensions of this pandemic have cast a harsh light on the fate of those signs and symbols. Their very meaning must now be understood against the resumption of an internecine war for the nation’s very soul that continues to be measured in the high cost of black life lost.