The minority community that we belong to
By institutional and infrastructural design any catastrophic event experienced here in the U.S. would disproportionately impact African American communities in both health and economic terms.
“Why is it three or four times more so for the black community as opposed to other people?” Trump said. “It doesn’t make sense, and I don’t like it, and we are going to have statistics over the next probably two to three days.”
Actually, Mr. President, all of this does makes sense if you consider politics to be the pretext of state sanctioned, informal rules of pervasive discrimination that indubitably inform and influence our societal norms with the subtext of prevailing inequality.
We can start by exploring the expectations and beliefs that give way to the development and persistence of such negative racialized norms and conventions— formally rejected publicly or politically, yet informally sanctioned and coordinated in scope and degree to produce disproportionately bad outcomes. This phenomena is explicitly expressed in the disequilibria present in African American communities.
When the stats do come in, as the president as noted, they will mull over it with the feelings that accompany their cognitive dissonance like shame, discomfort, tension, and anxiety and reflexively countenance with a psychological projection of blame shifting as previously done many times before. It is worthy to note that some African Americans as well as some in other respective minority groups are not immune to the infection of this blame shift unto their own community in the most delusional of ways, even though as a minority they could only placate such norms and not mount these strategic norms of privileging and disadvantaging racially among groups in the first place.
And yet somehow, and quite ironically there will be odd comfort finding that blame can be shared in some instance. I’d say this is a clever scheme to shut people up but there is nothing clever about stupidity.
Stupidity is a kind of intellectual stubbornness. A stupid person has access to all the information necessary to make an appropriate judgment, to come up with a set of reasonable and justified beliefs and yet fails to do so. The evidence is staring them right in the face but it makes no difference whatsoever. They believe what they want to believe. Not only do they have no good reasons for thinking that what they believe is true — there are often good reasons for thinking that what they believe is false. They are not acting in a rational manner.
So what pray tell will they do with this apparently redundant information this time?
Will societal norms of discrimination change so that we have equity among health and economic outcomes that are not disproportionate?
My dear Marley K., I hope that you and your loved ones are staying safe and keeping out of harm’s way during this pandemic and beyond. I am doing well and as always it is kind of you to inquire. Let’s continue to fight the good fight.
