Right now, the prevailing sentiment to defeat the Coronavirus is to stay home, social distance and keep away from people. As there is no vaccine and no way to stop the transmission of the disease through traditional means, the pandemic has been deemed some sort of equalizer, because it has no regard for race or class. Everyone is equally vulnerable.
However, the fact that everyone is equally vulnerable to the Coronavirus is not true. In fact, I would argue it is the opposite.
I have been thinking of this article for about a week, but Charles Blow of the New York Times enunciated these words far better than I personally could have. However, we’re often forgetting the privilege that comes with the ability to social distance. You need a roof over your head to social distance. You need food on your plate for a long period of time. You need water to wash your hands. Above all, you need to have a steady source of income and preferably a job that allows you to work from home.
It doesn’t take an expert to tell you that not everyone has these luxuries. In fact, according to the Economic Policy Institute, less than one in five black workers are able to work from home, as well as roughly only one in six Hispanic workers. So the obvious correlation is that people that can’t work from home aren’t able to social distance as much.
In fact, less than 30% of workers in America can work from home. And the same blog from the Economic Policy Institute shows that the ability to work from home also varies substantially by industry. 8.8% of leisure and hospitality workers can work from home, while over 50% of workers in business and finances can.
I have seen a lot of discussion about social distancing being for the privileged in India, where 80% of the workforce is informal and living off wages of less than $2 or $3 a day. But the same applies in the United States, and I live in a city in Baltimore where these inequities are blatantly obvious.
Blow shares statistics on racial inequalities in afflictions in Coronavirus. He shares a ProPublica report that in Milwaukee County, 81 percent of deaths were black people even though black people only make up 26 percent of the county. Chicago and Detroit.
Do you hear about these trends frequently in the media? No. The study of race or class-specific data on the casualties of Coronavirus has largely gone ignored, which may lead to our perception of the Coronavirus as an equalizing illness. All we see in the news is news of people panic buying toilet paper, hand sanitizer, or other amenities. My Twitter feed of similarly privileged middle-class adults mainly includes people being bored about not having anything to do and watching “Tiger King”.
“The ability to panic becomes a privilege existing among those who rarely have to do it,” Blow says.
And it’s not just about race. It’s also hard to be bored when you’re struggling to put food on the plate. And I will only share some experiences in Baltimore that make some of these striking inequalities come to light.
I have seen Twitter and Facebook feeds about teachers who are complaining about having to do too much work trying to engage students on Zoom and getting transitioning to an online classroom. In Baltimore City, we teachers don’t have those same luxuries because not all of our kids have Internet or computer access. We struggled more with the transition that college classes or the district I went to high school in — and it’s sad that this exposure to technological access interfered with their ability to learn. So far, only one of my many students has been able to log into my Google classroom.
When I have driven to my school building or run through the hood, more kids have been outside, gathered in groups. I saw about 15 people gathered in a circle, while we were on a stay-at-home order, to campaign for a former mayor who was indicted for twelve felonies for the upcoming mayoral race. A friend and I were on a run, and a group of about 10 guys around our age yelled at us to “get out of my hood!” while we were crossing the road.
Social distancing may seem like it’s less effective in an impoverished, lower-income community. And the violence hasn’t subsided either.
In Baltimore, drug dealers haven’t stopped dealing — they’re merely wearing masks and gloves. Baltimore still had 18 murders in the month of March, with robbery numbers still high. If there’s any validation to Baltimore’s notorious reputation of violence and crime, the fact that not even a pandemic has subsided its monumental murder rate is it.
It’s a long-standing historical trend to blame these blights on the people themselves, and look to the violence and less-than-effective social distancing in lower-income communities as a reflection of the people themselves. I’m watching those correlations being assumed in “Show Me A Hero,” a show about the bitter battle to fight residential segregation in Yonkers.
But the truth is that social distancing is for the privileged. Everyone should have the privilege of staying at home, wondering what Netflix show they have to watch, not worried about whether they’ll have enough money to order Grubhub or have enough food in the fridge.
The fact that the socially accepted and prescribed measure to fight the pandemic, social distancing, is not something everyone can do, what message does it send to our marginalized communities when we’re shaming people for not being able to work from home? It’s not that people won’t social distance. It’s because they can’t.
What message does it send that the Coronavirus was brought to the country by people who had the luxury and privilege to travel when some of my students in Baltimore haven’t left this city their entire lives.
To be clear, the privilege to social distancing isn’t a bad thing. Social distancing will save a lot of lives and ease the burden on our health care system. It’s just a shame it isn’t extended to keep every person in this country safe. And there are people in lower-income and predominantly minority communities that aren’t taking social distancing seriously just like privileged suburbanites can.
But what about the most vulnerable of us? What about our homeless? What about the people who don’t have jobs that allow them to work from home, or who lost their jobs because of the pandemic? What about our less privileged neighbors?