Our community continues to be greatly and disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. The Michigan Coronavirus Task Force on Racial Disparities is a start in addressing this but we must continue this conversation through this crisis and after. Below includes some of the ongoing conversations.
“By failing to heed warnings he received about the crisis Donald Trump has failed black Michiganders,” said Rep. Tyrone Carter. “He didn’t create the virus; he didn’t create racial disparity but he did let it become a crisis.”
Source: Fox 2 Detroit
“Black people’s lives haven’t changed in many ways because everyday was always a grind to survive,” said Adam Hollier, a state senator from Detroit, adding that “grocery store clerk, home health care, bus drivers, sanitation, custodial staff — the people who are often deemed most replaceable are the ones we actually can’t live without.”
Source: The New York Times
Interview with Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist discussing the TaskForce.
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“Today, the racial disparities are undeniable. But Americans don’t know for sure that there is racism behind those racial disparities. The racism itself remains deniable. So yet again, our voices are crying out in the wilderness for a miracle to save America from its original sin—the sin Americans can’t ever seem to confess.”
Source: The Atlantic
“This outbreak is exposing the deep structural inequities that make communities pushed to the margins more vulnerable to health crises in good times and in bad,” Dorianne Mason, the director of health equity at the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement. “These structural inequities in our health care system do not ignore racial and gender disparities — and neither should our response to this pandemic.”
Source: Washington Post