COVID-19 means no more business as usual
We cannot fight 2020 pandemic wars with 1960s poverty ammunition. This COVID-19 pandemic continues to reveal that 2019 media campaigns about momentum were not much more than highly funded fashion shows that sought to cover up increasing poverty. But it worked. Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland won reelection by a landslide and is now (in tandem with County Mayor Lee Harris) trying to lead us through the worst pandemic in since early last century. Mayors Strickland and Harris (and most of our elected officials) are conditioned by a culture of politics that render them victims of what sociologist Thorstein Veblen calls “trained incapacity.” This is when we know something so well it functions as a blind spot and causes us to neglect or reject necessary assistance. Elected officials and civic leaders need us all to help by pushing them to rethink how to best respond in this moment. None of us have all the answers. We need all hands, ears, eyes, and hearts on deck. We must be willing to work with and learn from each other. I’ve reached out to both mayors and every elected official I know over the past few weeks pledging my support and offering my help. Here is what I think we need to do now: Memphis and Shelby County can’t afford to impose old paradigms of problem solving onto this modern infection that exposes the neglect and disinvestment that keeps ravishing black communities. We must do something different. Now. We must restructure our economic and political infrastructure. Trickle-down economics, kowtowing to corporate oligarchs, and pandering to political elites has contaminated our city and county with socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the rest. Gov. Bill Lee’s push to reopen the state — a maneuver authorized by the most powerful politician in the country — is another example that we’re more concerned with profit margins than people living on the margins. Premature opening not only subjects more people to infection and death, it also shifts the burden of economic responsibility from the most powerful to the powerless. Clio Chang wrote, “If people in (reopening states) are offered their jobs back, but refuse to take them out of fear for their safety, they will likely no longer qualify for unemployment benefits — even though they’re taking the same precautions as people one state over.” This is business as usual. This won’t solve poverty. This will exacerbate it. This will place poor, working-class people in the pinch of deciding whether to go to work and risk infection or stay at home and risk termination and eviction. Weeks ago, I warned that the economic impact of this pandemic will likely be more intense than the medical impact. I pleaded with leaders to disaggregate infection data by race (not simply ZIP code) so we could decode the hot spot maps which, at a glance, veiled how black people are being disproportionately impacted by the virus. We must flatten the curve of racial and economic inequity with the same level of tenacity we seek to flatten the curve of infection and contamination. We have a chance to do this now if
we reorient and restructure our society towards economic and racial equity.
For starters, we need more data. We need to know the extent of the economic impact the pandemic is having on the most vulnerable among us. We need statistics that calculate and reveal the number of people laid off, how many have filed for unemployment, the average wage loss and other economic factors.
These numbers should be disaggregated by county (state-wide), city, ZIP code and race. The Shelby County Health Department was slow to the fire regarding racial data. This likely caused a ripple effect in our inability to get testing and other medical resources to black communities.
Let’s not do the same thing with economic resources.
The federal government has allocated over $113 million to aid Memphis in economic relief. The city has guidelines to follow on how that money can be appropriated.
I pray we can avoid the types of mismanagement that happened with the SBA loans.
I hope the money doesn’t end up in a trickle-down loop with Memphis Tomorrow
or the EDGE Board. We must ensure those funds are allocated to assist communities being most negatively impacted by COVID-19.
If we cannot find the political will, collective courage and fierce faith to shift from a paradigm of poverty to a paradigm of equity now, we are not likely to see it in this generation.
The Rev. Earle J. Fisher is an activist and senior pastor at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Memphis.