Sometimes the reality of white privilege pops up and slaps you in the face. There's no masking it, one might say.
As reported January 22 by Abby Haglage for yahoo!life, a study by USC's Center for Economic and Social Research discovered significant ethnic disparities regarding mask wearing. Overall, 51% of those surveyed reported wearing masks consistently when interacting outside of their households. Blacks wore masks 67% of the time under those conditions. Latinos reported 63%, and other races reported 65%. Whites brought up the rear with 46%.
No one should be surprised by the racial disparities in mask wearing because we've all seen the anti-mask protests, and they are overwhelmingly Caucasian. But really, when you ponder this a bit more, the correlation turns a bit ugly. Why should a demographic that went to war to defend its right to own human beings decide to wear masks to protect other human beings? Individual (white) rights would, one should expect, rule the day.
All of the arguments du jour begin to blend together. The U.S. made the decision to not shut down because the priority was to fortify the 401Ks of the 15% of Americans who own 85% of stocks. That's white privilege. Placing an underclass of disproportionally non-white "essential workers" at much greater virus load risk is a version of white privilege. The hell-with-you mask aversion is white privilege.
My thought experiment goes something like this -- if whites were disproportionately vulnerable to Covid-19, would we have mask-wearing laws? What would the national conversation sound like? Would Christian recitations of The Golden Rule be recycled every half hour on Fox News?
At one point during the early summer, my home state of Tennessee was 50th in mask-wearing percentage. Dead last. We're the poster child for wayward white privilege, and we're in awful shape right now. My county has reported a 30% positivity rate, and the more infectious and deadly variants haven't yet arrived in Tennessee.
This is one time in history when white privilege is biting white lives in the ass. We are truly dumb as a box of Saltines.
Bob Dietz
January 25, 2021
