Columnas / Transparency

The View from New York: COVID and Protests across the United States


Saturday, June 20, 2020
Victoria Sanford

More than 100 days since its first COVID-19 case was registered, New York City slowly reopens  amid ongoing and growing nationwide protest ignited by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd when he pressed his knee into Mr. Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes setting off worldwide protests for racial justice.

More than 22,000 New Yorkers have died from COVID - many of whom are related to my students in the Bronx who live in the highest concentration of urban poverty in the US and are largely “essential workers,” which means they continue to work with inadequate compensation under dangerous conditions. 

The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the structural inequality of income, education, job security, housing and access to health care. In the first days of New York’s lockdown to slow the spread of the virus, those with resources hoarded food and medical supplies causing a shortage of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for health care workers and citizens alike. 

New York health workers resorted to wearing garbage bags because they had no access to PPE. COVID cases skyrocketed, hospitals were overwhelmed and as many as 800 people died in one day. As we reopen, 17 deaths were reported on June 16 in New York. The pandemic is not over, though its spread has slowed in New York, it is on the rise in other states. Nationwide, 119,000 people have died and 2.21 million people have tested positive for the virus that is now surging in rural areas.

To support our health care workers and all essential workers, on March 27, New Yorkers began a 7pm ritual of clapping and banging pots in solidarity. Last Wednesday, 7 minutes after the 7pm ritual, smart phones jolted New Yorkers pinging alerts of the mandatory 8pm curfew.

White supremacists traveled from Virginia, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Texas, and Georgia to incite violence, break store windows, loot and deface my beautiful city. Among the first 786 people  arrested in NYC for looting and violence, 1 in 7 were from out of the area. This looting and violence along with President Trump’s threats to send in army troops triggered the establishment of a curfew in NYC for the first time since the 1940s (one enacted in 1943 when white police shot a black soldier igniting civil unrest in Harlem).

Undeterred by the curfew, armored vehicles or police violence, peaceful protesters and their numbers swelled each day - as did police brutality. Peaceful protesters and journalists were maced, tazed, beaten with batons, shot with rubber bullets, hit with flash bang stun grenades and knocked to the ground without regard to age or gender.

Health care workers joined in the protests in NYC and around the country. COVID has sickened and killed more black and brown healthcare workers and their family members. Scientific American reported the COVID death rate for African Americans is 2.4 times the rate of white Americans. In an expression of hallucinatory racism, a white Louisiana senator suggested this high death rate is due to genetic differences in black people. The high death rate of African Americans is the product of slavery, historic inequality and structural injustice:  lack of access to health care and nutritious food, hunger, substandard crowded housing in areas of high contamination and toxic waste, fear of being killed because of skin color and daily stress of discrimination to name just a few. 

The median household wealth for a white family is $149,703 – more than ten times the $13,024 median household wealth for black families. It would require 11.5 families pooling their net worth to reach the median household wealth of one white family. Wealth disparities are generational because assets pass to the next generation through inheritance and family wealth affords white children advantage from birth.

Just as we learned a new vocabulary of PPE, social distancing and viral load for the pandemic, we have learned a new vocabulary for police brutality. On the first night of curfew in the Bronx, police used a tactic known as “kettling” where armed police move in on protesters from all directions leaving them with no exit as they run into the group with batons. National Guard helicopters in DC flew low altitude maneuvers known as “persistent presence” with downward blasts of their blades snapping tree branches scattering peaceful protesters as they ran for cover. 

Peaceful protesters organized advance lookouts on bicycles tracking NYPD movements and identifying safe streets to flee. Images of police brutality against peaceful protesters filled social media feeds and rapidly became the topic of people of all ages quarantined in their homes by COVID. Trump’s attempt to invade his own country has been live-streamed on social media and has captured the attention of all our children.

The pandemic emptied the streets of New York making every city street an open site for protest. Across the US, citizens who had quarantined in their homes for 3 months poured into the streets to protest the killing of black men and women. They were met with an unprecedented display of force. 

There is no national register of police brutality or violence. Criminologist Phil Stinson has been tracking the 10,000 cases of individuals killed by police across the country over the past decade. He has also tracked the five convictions of police in this same period. He concluded that police do not pursue crimes committed by police. This is not “immunity from prosecution,” it is impunity – the violation of the law by those charged with upholding it.

In 2019, there were only 27 days when police did not kill civilians. On average, police kill one out of every 1000 black men. Death at the hands of police is now a leading cause of death among young black men according to a study by Cornell William Brooks, former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

In the end, Black Lives Matter is not about politics, it is about morality and its symbols. There have been protests in 50 states and 18 countries. Statues of a confederate soldier, sailor and general were removed in Alabama and Virginia. In Tennessee, the statue of a racist senator was brought down and Philadelphia protesters toppled the statue of a racist mayor. The City of Fredericksburg, Virginia removed a slave auction block from a downtown corner. As the Reverend Al Sharpton noted in his eulogy of Mr. Floyd, the grandchildren of slave masters tore down and rolled a 17th century statue of a slave trader into Bristol Port, England. 

The mayor of Washington DC painted BLACK LIVES MATTER in giant yellow letters on the street leading up to the White House and renamed the plaza where Trump had set troops upon peacefully protesting citizens as Black Lives Matter Plaza. City budgets are now referred to as “moral documents” as mayors and city councils vote to defund or restructure local police agencies and instead fund their communities and schools. Inequality will end with a more equitable distribution of wealth and power. 

In New York City, 100,000 children are homeless and 1 in 4 lives at risk of hunger. There are  1.1 million children in public schools with 5000 police, but only 565 student counselors. Restructuring will take the police out of schools, fund community programs and make counseling available to all our children.

The pandemic and the protests have thrown into relief divisions in the United States and the racial injustice that underpins inequality in every sphere of life. Trump and his Attorney General William Barr continue to declare the president’s unilateral authority to call in troops to occupy their own country. Anywhere else in the world, we would call this a coup or an attempted coup.

One of the pillars of democracy is civilian control of the military – based on structural division between militaries and civilian governments to prevent military dictators. But what of elected officials and their appointees who seek to establish authoritarian rule with military backing? 

AG Barr attempted to create his own militias in Washington DC presumably with agents from immigration and prison systems as well as park services, none of them had an insignia or any identifying information. Further, these unidentified, heavily armed men declined journalist queries to identify themselves, their agency or their commander as they occupied national monuments and various areas on the perimeter of the White House. It looked a lot like the self-coups of President Fujimori in Peru in 1992 and President Serrano in Guatemala in 1993 using military might to eviscerate constitutional rule and concentrate power in their own hands.

On June 5, 89 former US Department of Defense officials published a letter denouncing  President Trump’s abuse of power and unequivocally stated “The military must never be used to violate constitutional rights.” Two days earlier, former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis slammed the president in a public statement denouncing Trump’s divisive calls to the military to “dominate” US cities that Trump referred to as “battlespaces.” Further, he praised the “wholesome and unifying demand” of protesters for “Equal Justice Under the Law.” 

Following Trump’s attack on peaceful protesters, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley hand wrote a memo to US troops reminding them that their “oath was to defend the Constitution and the American people.” On Wednesday, Department of Defense Secretary Mark Esper announced his opposition to Trump’s desire to use US troops against protesters. Both Milley and Esper were with Trump for the photo op in front of the church as troops descended upon peaceful protesters, but appear not to want to be on the wrong side of history. 

Joining this opposition to military intervention against US citizens, retired four-star general and former Republican Secretary of State Colin Powell said on CNN, “The country is wise to Trump, we are not going to put up with him anymore.” He also committed to voting for Joe Biden.

Now, more than 650 diplomats and military officials have signed a letter condemning Trump’s desire to use the military against its own citizens. Each of these officials swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States when they joined the US military and diplomatic services. They did not take the oath to defend the whims of a frightened authoritarian president who admires dictators from Duterte in the Philippines to Bolsonaro in Brazil to Putin in Russia. If this was any other country in the world, we would say that these diplomats and military officials stopped a coup.

This is our country, our world. A world of strife and inequality that we give our children. I sent Secretary Mattis’ statement of loyalty to the Constitution to my family. One of my relatives asked me to stop texting “political stuff”- “I love you, but…I am taking a break from the news and social media.” Many of my friends have similar experiences with their white relatives who seek to isolate themselves from reality. This silencing is a product of Trumpism that divides rather than unites citizens, even family members who love each other.  

Like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, I believe that “unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” White silence is violence.

To those who are “taking a break” from social media and the news because they do not like what it reveals about the man they put in the White House, you can take a break. Your privilege offers this option. I also want a break, but see no option outside of this privilege. I can’t breathe. 

I hope we have a new government in 2021 so we can all breathe. As Martin Luther King Jr. so eloquently said, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

Victoria Sanford is professor of Anthropology and director of the Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies at Lehman College, City University of New York. She is the author of seven books including Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (Palgrave Macmillan) and Violencia y Genocidio en Guatemala (FyG Editores).
Victoria Sanford is professor of Anthropology and director of the Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies at Lehman College, City University of New York. She is the author of seven books including Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (Palgrave Macmillan) and Violencia y Genocidio en Guatemala (FyG Editores).

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