Progressives have a big blind spot when it comes to racial justice: their own policies.
Progressives have a big blind spot when it comes to racial justice: their own policies.
P rogressives have made ending “systemic racism” their most prominent cause. It’s one they believe in fervently, though alas not fervently enough to see how their own policies contribute to the segregation and suffering of poor and minority communities.
The past year has given us another case in point: the grossly regressive and racially disparate impact of heavy-handed lockdown measures.
The most important metric for judging the success of any policy is cost-benefit analysis. So let’s look first at the benefits of heavy-handed lockdown measures in California versus the much lighter approach taken in Florida, particularly since the summer of 2020.
The following two graphs give CDC’s comparison of daily mortality rate and cumulative mortality rate:
This pattern holds around the world. In fact, one Stanford study of the effect of lockdown measures around the world shows a negative correlation between lockdown severity and the rate of new cases: There was significantly more spread in France, which is still enforcing nightmarish stay-at-home lockdowns, curfews, and strict prohibitions on traveling between regions, than in Sweden or South Korea, where lockdown measures have been much lighter.
Every death is a tragedy, but the crucial thing to notice here is the lack of any meaningful statistical correlation between mortality rate and severity of lockdown measures. It should be obvious by now that the major drivers of differential rates of infection in different jurisdictions are factors other than differential severity of lockdowns.
Now for the cost side of our cost-benefit analysis. Here we see a much stronger correlation: the COVID-19 disease and the severe lockdown measures taken in response have had a disproportionate impact on working-class people, those below the poverty line — and people of color.
The impact of COVID-19 on black people has been particularly disheartening. According to one study of the early pandemic (April 2020), the overall death rate in the United States from all causes increased by perhaps a third — a staggering fact in and of itself. But blacks were much worse hit than other racial or ethnic groups and were hit several times worse than whites.
As my CEI colleague Dr. Joel Zinberg relates, several reasons have been posited for this racial disparity. Blacks are only two-thirds as likely to be able to work from home and were therefore exposed to the pandemic in the workplace at higher rates (even if the data on the impact of lockdowns remains the subject of debate). Second, they are disproportionately concentrated in urban centers where the virus has been more prevalent. And third, they have higher levels of comorbidities such as obesity and hypertension.
Some have argued that other factors, such as systemic racism in our health-care system, have also contributed to racially disparate health impacts. Maybe so. But there is no doubt that the lockdown measures have contributed to racially disparate economic impacts.
According to a survey of the University of New Hampshire, employment has dropped by 10.2 percent in California since the start of the pandemic lockdowns, and in New York by 10.9 percent. Meanwhile, employment in Florida has fallen by only 6.4 percent during that time, and in Texas by just 4.4 percent. And this pattern holds across the country: Even adjusting for areas where employment is heavily concentrated in the hard-hit hospitality sector (such as Florida), states with heavy lockdown measures appear to have suffered twice the job losses of states with a lighter touch.
And those job losses have been grossly regressive against poor minorities. According to the Census Bureau, as of March 3, 2021, fully 59 percent of Hispanics reported experiencing a loss of employment income in their households since March 13, 2020. The comparable figure for blacks was also high, at 52 percent, while 41 percent of non-Hispanic whites reported a loss of employment income. This means that where lockdown measures have resulted in excessive job losses, as in California and New York, the job losses have been disproportionately concentrated among people of color.
Severe lockdown measures are regressive against poor minorities in some obvious ways. First, upper-income workers have been able to transition to telework much more smoothly than workers lower down on the income ladder. As a result, your chances of losing your job because of mandatory business shutdowns drop significantly the higher you are on the income ladder.
Relatedly, the school-shutdown orders have been devastating for those lower down on the income ladder — parents and children alike. True enough, upper-income parents have had to juggle at-home schooling with their telework, but that is a problem many people of color would love to have. Lower-income parents rely heavily on schools for basic childcare. They have struggled to find anyone to watch their kids while they work, resulting either in a significant added expense they often can’t afford, or giving up jobs they desperately need. How parents manage at-home schooling in such circumstances is anyone’s guess. Increasing the disparity, upper-income parents are also more likely to have their kids in private schools not affected by the refusal of public-school teachers’ unions to show up for work.
A less-noticed, but more “systemically racist,” aspect of the lockdowns is that those lower-income workers who don’t lose their jobs and can’t telework are forced to go to a workplace where they are significantly more likely to get infected, such as restaurants and other occupations deemed “essential” by upper-income people.
Nor are such “essential” occupations limited to official designations. Most upper-income people in states with heavy lockdown measures haven’t stopped to think that the food-takeout and delivery services they rely on to telework in the comfortable safety of their homes have required more people to work in restaurants and delivery services, which has increased those workers’ risk of infection in the workplace. Moreover, those workers tend to be disproportionately people of color.
Peter Yared, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who recently moved to Miami, puts the matter starkly:
The California lockdown has been systematically racist and benefited the tele-working rich hiding in their homes. The truancy rate among Hispanic and Black students is enormous, while teachers’ unions in California implore that teachers Zoom from home, unnecessarily participating in the work from home Zoom life of their college-educated peers. Small businesses with large proportions of minority ownership, like nail and hair salons, have been decimated.
Minorities make up a large proportion of essential workers and have died in much greater proportions than Whites. The essential workers in the back of a restaurant are making the food whether it’s meant to go to the front of the restaurant or for delivery, and then they go home and infect their inter-generational households. In Los Angeles, Hispanics are dying at three times the rate of Whites.
The most infuriating aspect of the systemic racism in lockdown measures is the attitude of political elites. Those state officials most likely to impose heavy lockdown diktats have never missed a paycheck (indeed, some have received COVID-related bonus pay), and they have also been the most likely to get caught blowing off their own orders.
You could almost do a remake of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis based just on our elite’s pandemic lockdowns, and their heartless attitude to the workers toiling to support their luxuries in frightful conditions far below.