Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Progressives put race at the forefront until it’s time to discuss vaccine mandates
There’s a racially charged dog whistle blaring among progressives these days, and nobody is calling it out.
Whether it’s Philip Bump in the Washington Post or David Leonhardt in the New York Times, the conventional wisdom among many pundits is that the decision to get vaccinated cuts tidily along partisan political lines. In their telling, Democrats are paragons of civic virtue, offering up their arms for the sake of their communities while Republicans, especially those who voted for Donald Trump, are selfish and delusional, endangering us all and preventing a return to normalcy.
Like most comic book narratives, the real story is far more complicated.
To say progressives in America are obsessed with race these days wouldn’t quite capture the enormity of the phenomenon. Take the example of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, an ambitious effort to trace a broad range of modern ills — from traffic to prison violence to wealth inequality — to America’s original sins of slavery and racial segregation.
When left-leaning media speak about “those people” who are choosing not to take a COVID-19 vaccine, they become awfully incurious about the racial lens through which they view all other issues.
Fortunately, the Kaiser Family Foundation tracks such data across 43 states. Specifically, they tally the percentage of whites, Blacks, Hispanics and Asians who are vaccinated in each state.
Nationally, Asians are by far the most vaccinated group, at 71%, followed by whites (55%), Hispanics (53%) and Blacks (48%).
These aggregate numbers obscure some major disparities within states.
For much of the summer, Gov. Ron DeSantis was a punching bag as his state faced a viral surge. Hospital capacity was stretched but never collapsed, and as DeSantis correctly predicted the wave quickly abated and Florida now sits 49th in the nation in new COVID cases per capita over the past week and is faring better than eight of Canada’s 13 provinces and territories.
As noted by Dave Seminara in the Wall Street Journal last month, rather than admit these facts DeSantis’ detractors simply dropped the conversation.
They also ignored the racial disparity in vaccination rates in Florida, where 56% of whites, 57% of Hispanics and 37% of Blacks have received a shot. Progressives can bemoan DeSantis’ refusal to impose vaccine mandates and passports all they want, but the steps they favor would exclude nearly two-thirds of Florida’s Black population from performing many jobs or going to school, a movie theatre, nightclub, gym or restaurant.
Not a great look in a state that was segregated not long ago.
Meanwhile, in rising Democratic Party star Gretchen Whitmer’s Michigan, which is home to more than 10 million people and adding new cases at a rate more than six times that of Florida, vaccination rates are low across the board, but Blacks (36%) badly lag behind Hispanics (44%), whites (46%) and Asians (53%).
In all but a handful of states, it is impossible to impose any kind of coercive measures on the unvaccinated population without disproportionately impacting Black citizens.
It is often said that politics make strange bedfellows. Unless their aim is to forge a coalition of Black Americans and Trump Republicans, progressives are going to need to have a more honest conversation about their vaccine policies — one that requires them to check their contempt at the door and put their dog whistles in their pockets.