Here’s how we’ll know Joe Biden is serious about fighting systemic racism
Joe Biden, pilloried in some circles for his conciliatory tendencies, especially with hard-line racists, won an upset Democratic Party nomination through the Black electorate of South Carolina. Now, alongside Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, he has secured a record-breaking presidential tally of more than 77 million American votes. He has promised to guide the nation by addressing the key areas of the COVID pandemic, economic recovery, climate change and systemic racism.
We will know, based on the appointments he makes, if he is serious about the last category.
What makes the labor exploitation and injury of racism systemic, in a nutshell, is the erasure of genocide and slavery from the foundations of the American democracy. Instead, systemic racism fosters the myth that America was a blank canvas awaiting immigrants of exceptional promise.
When most politicians address “racism,” they approach it as an isolated phenomenon, one that involves promoting discussion and airing grievances — important, yes, but disconnected from their main work of providing services and largescale solutions to immediate problems. Instead of splitting apart the dire problems that Americans face, Biden, if he is serious, will address systemic racism in everything that he does.
He has made moves to address the COVID pandemic with the selections of Drs. David Kessler, Ezekiel Emmanuel, two white men, and Vivek Murthy, who is of Indian descent, for his coronavirus task force, along with Yale School of Medicine professor Marcella Nunez-Smith, a Black woman from the U.S. Virgin Islands, and an expert on diversity and medical inequality. These are all highly lauded doctors and researchers.
But the COVID deaths are disproportionately made up of African Americans, many of whom were, for many reasons, beyond the “normal” range on the body mass index scale. So Biden will need to have many more AfricanAmerican physicians and public-health experts making managerial decisions. While there are many to choose from, someone like the writer and medical ethics issues expert Dorothy Roberts, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, and Morehouse School of Medicine’s Camara
Jones, who has explained racism in medicine, could make an important difference.
Economic recovery that has the eradication of the “wealth gap” at its center will rely on new relationships between education and job creation, new paths for entrepreneurship and reincorporation of formerly incarcerated people. Biden will need to rely upon people like Bridget Terry Long, the dean of Harvard’s graduate school in education, a trained economist who focuses her research on the transition from high school to college.
His climate-change team has to have people speaking directly to the biochemical hazards that minority communities have faced for multiple generations. Climate change is a geopolitical phenomenon and, like COVID, its effects are disproportionate. We cannot ignore Black and Latino communities along America’s waterways that have been polluted by fossil-fuel refineries.
We will need to see the expertise of marine biologist Ayanna Elisabeth
Johnson affecting the personnel chosen to lead the new way. West Africa, the “homeland” of so many Black Americans, needs to have a prominent position in the global discussion, and U.S. might needs to be devoted to that.
So, we will know by the earliest staff selections he makes to address the pandemic, economic recovery and climate change if he is serious about systemic racism. In fact, instead of using the term, he should just talk about “police reform,” which is connected to a return to diplomacy and arms reduction in our foreign policy. If we can back away from Endless War, we can downsize our police state.
But it will require empowering remarkable people like the crime, citizenship and policy expert Vesla Weaver at Johns Hopkins to get us there. Highly regarded Black women visibly working on the issues is what Biden living up to his promises will look like before he is inaugurated. (c) 2020 The Balti
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