This article was published in partnership with The 19th, a nonpartisan, non-profit newsroom that deals with gender, politics and politics.
The first time Dr. NanaEfua Afoh-Manin published his coronavirus verification pop-up on the edge of a “Black Lives Matter” event, George Floyd’s face looked at her from the wall of a plank construction in West Oakland. The words “cannot be in vain” flowed red on his forehead.
This season of suffering infuriated Afoh-Manin, 43. Other black people, in poor health and alone, filled the Los Angeles hospital where she worked. You have installed control pop-ups in the area, looking to help others before they end up in your emergency room. Then George Floyd’s death plunged the country into confusion due to some other kind of black death. So he took his pop-ups from parking masses to prochecks, recruiting volunteers to rub their nostrils and distributing “procheck survival kits” full of glasses and facial protectors.
A long time ago, she herself was a protester, fighting for affirmative action in California. She had chosen to examine the medicine after seeing her mother, a renowned nurse with cervical cancer, who dealt with apathy through her oncologist. And Afoh-Manin had experienced the concern of the police, the first time as a 15-year-old woman in the back of a patrol.
Standing among the protesters this summer, he returned to the memory, the one he had repressed. When it comes to prevention and interrogation. Handcuffs pushing his bracelet, cutting off his wrist.
He had cried so loudly that he fainted. Driving a license, authorities later said.
Afoh-Manin’s journey, like that of many blacks in America, has been a story of endurance and perseverance. But this year he brought a new brake when two pandemics converged at the same time.
The original pandemic, racism, has put black women at a disadvantage in each and every domain (hiring, education, physical care, banking services), victims of the incomplete ramp of change. Now, the economic problems induced by coronaviruses have rotten the small safety net on which many of these women may depend.
Black women account for about 11% of the essential workers, while representing only 6% of the workforce. It is also one of the only teams where pandemic shutdown increases from month to month, while for others it has decreased. Approximately 1.4 million jobs filled by black women have disappeared since February.
And yet many make it a moment of action, to dominate its economic destiny, to ask for respect for the lives of other black people and, in some cases, to advance the course of progress. This replacement is not slow or imperceptible, but tangible and genuine and now.
Afoh-Manin felt this urgency when a black mother and daughter entered their Los Angeles emergency room in March with a coronavirus in her lungs.
The mother went straight to the intensive care unit. The woman, a single mother with two young children, had turned away from the worst, but was asthmatic. Afoh-Manin knew she had to keep her in the hospital, but the young mother had no one to take care of her children.
Afoh-Manin realized that the hospital was going to bankrupt this woman because he didn’t have any plans either. They had to resort to child cover, a traditionally punitive formula for many black mothers.
“That’s when I thought, “No. Not on my shift. “I can’t live with myself, and I can’t be a component of that, ” said Afoh-Manin. “You know something’s going on and there’s an explanation for why all my reports have led me to this point, and it’s to get me out and say, ‘No, you’re not going to take this mother’s children.'”
In the short term, Afoh-Manin and his team have developed a way for young people to stay in the hospital so that they are placed in foster homes. The experiment encouraged her and two other black doctors to raise $16,000 to create myCovidTM, a nonprofit that provides evidence for communities devastated by the virus.
But like many black-owned companies, they were rejected by the federal government’s stimulus opposed to coronaviruses, the loan of the paycheck coverage program. In fact, its first 39 grant programmes for small business investments, women-led enterprises and emergency reaction were rejected.
It was only through Afoh-Manin’s seven-day punitive paintings that weeks between the hospital and its fundraising program, that he was able to raise enough donations for his program, however, to take off, serving more than 3,000 other people in Queens in July. Los Angeles.
To get there, he lives according to his mother’s mantra: “Mountain, get out of my way.”
Afoh-Manin has an idea of the mountains that await him this year. Her idea of Breonna Taylor – the 26-year-old EMT was “one of ours” – a fitness worker who didn’t go through the virus, but was in the hands of the police. She devised the faces of the murals.
“I’ll put my knee on my neck, ” he said. “It doesn’t matter what.”
A damaged system
For decades, black women have been fighting for their monetary future.
Traditionally they have had the highest participation in the labour market of all women’s teams: 63% in early 2020 to 58% of white women. And they’re catching voters, who are running at ever higher rates than other teams.
But slavery systems relegated many to working in agriculture and as domestic servants in the early 20th century, and racism halted them long after emancipation. During the New Deal era in the 1930s, Southern Democrats in Congress worked to exclude agricultural and domestic staff from hard-work protections, such as the minimum wage, overtime pay, and collective bargaining rights.
It was not until the 1970s that black women, however, began to revel in a certain diversity in favor. But they were, and still are, focused on low-wage service jobs, the types of jobs that are now described as “essential” but still lacking in paint coverage, such as absentee pay for poor physical condition or even access to physical care. Today, black women are more than twice as likely as white women in terms of paintings at services.
Despite the challenges, black women are launching new business at the fastest pace of any group. Over the past decade, the number of black women with a degree of more than 4 years has increased to 37%, compared to 23% of white women, even though black women continue to have the highest student debt rate.
This means that black women, who have been in the workforce at higher rates than other teams and spend more on education, are much less likely to reap the benefits of these paintings, even in higher-wage positions.
Now, even this marginal progress is in danger of eroding, as coronavirus threatens the entire socio-economic spectrum, from commercial owners to frontline workers.
“When you think about the progress made through black women, this progress is precarious. It’s based on a set of points that, if removed, you realize that the progress you think you’ve made is something illusory,” Jocelyn Frye said. , principal investigator at the Center for American Progress, left-wing thinker. Tank. “When an alteration of the magnitude of the pandemic occurs, we have to go back to the drawing board and some of the underlying systemic disorders arise.”
In some cases, the pandemic has expelled black women altogether, cutting the last line for women like Anastancia Cuna, a Boston-area nanny who has lived with little financial coverage for years.
When the pandemic hit, she ran out of fitness insurance: only one in five domestic employees in the country, equivalent to 92% of women and 52% of women of color, has fitness insurance from their employer. Their task was to move to people’s homes when everyone was invited to distance themselves from the community. Cradle feared the physical effects of COVID-19, yes, but more importantly to her, “she couldn’t get sick.”
She resigned in March.
Now that her husband is unemployed too, the family circle has had to decrease their purchases of meat, poultry and seafood to save money. Instead, they’re buying tofu. They don’t have enough to buy from their 12-year-old daughter, Nyeleti, a new pair of sneakers.
“It’s hard to see the pandemic, for which we weren’t prepared, and especially the racial injustice we’re going through,” said Cuna, 38. “It’s too hard.
Across the country, blacks bear a higher percentage of this burden as head of households. Nearly 70% of blacks are the only breadwinner or breadwinner, according to a report from the Center for American Progress. That’s about double the rate of whiteArray
Black families have less banking activity in the case, for example, of a global economic crisis pandemic. In general, they have approximately five times fewer liquid assets (current and savings accounts, money and stocks directly, bonds and mutual budget) than white families: about $8,800 compared to $49,500, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
And black families also earn less overall. A black family’s median source of income is about $41,700, 70% less than that of a white family, according to the knowledge of the U.S. Census Bureau. This is partly due to the fact that black women take until August to make up for the salaries of white men last year.
Like the Cradle, many black families also have fewer benefits to depend on. Black staff are 60% more likely to be uninsured than white staff.
All of these points provide a precarious basis for black families that is incredibly vulnerable to disruption. The effect is evident in the numbers: in May, for example, unemployment among black women rose to 16.5%, while it fell for white and Latino women. (For Asian women, it is also older from month to month, from 15.6% in April to 16.4% in May).
The reason, Fatima Goss Graves, president and ceo of the National Women’s Law Center, said, is systemic racism that has put black women in the most vulnerable jobs. For example, black women are the only organization whose percentage of the first line is at most double the percentage of the total.
“I’m afraid other people may not be able to understand what confuses them,” Graves Goss said. “There is a threat that others will misunderstand the link between racial justice and economic justice, so we must take only one and not the other. But the economy won’t recover if black women lose more jobs.”
Black women are threatened with losing their balance in the labor market if their role in American families is not taken into account, as the primary breadwinner and guardians, in particular.
This includes women like Bettie Douglas, a McDonald’s worker, the only source of income for her home in St. Louis. Douglas earns $10 an hour and cares for his disabled brother, his eldest son, who is recovering from a brain tumor, and his youngest son, who has just graduated from high school.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, he has struggled to maintain the hours and prestige at a full-time time he received recently after 14 years at the company.
“I worked from the grill, the box, the lobby, everything,” said Douglas, 62. “I make the burgers. I’m everywhere. I’m cleaning the fridge. I take things out of the bathroom, I’m a plumber. You call him. I did it there.”
And yet you still can’t scratch enough to buy a refrigerator. So take the bus every day to the grocery store, a task that costs you more long term.
For months of this year, you’ve noticed that expenses accrue.
“I didn’t even open the expenses because I’m afraid. I only charged them,” he says. “Life shouldn’t be so difficult. I’m just looking to live a fair life.”
And then there’s the relentless racism with which he says he lives “every day.” Douglas said he hopes this will be the moment he moves the needle, with dual pandemics advancing verbal exchange to solve disorders that have long plagued black women.
“What I can say is that this moment is different from any I’ve ever experienced in my life,” said Nina Banks, an associate professor of economics at Bucknell University and an expert in the labor market.
He fears that some adjustments will be more symbolic than seismic. But he knows that really important adjustments are coming. She sees it and hears it from her college academics.
“It’s generational,” Banks said. “Other young people understand.”
That comes after the protest
The way to replace begins with intent. Intentionality in gathering knowledge about race and ethnicity can simply help lead to policies that highlight long-standing mobility barriers for communities of color, Frye said of the Center for American Progress. It was only when the New York Times sued the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to learn more about the racial effect on coronavirus, for example, that the extent of the aggression of the opposite virus to other people of color became apparent.
Once not an education against prejudice, Frye said, but it’s a series of long-term policies that target resources in spaces that create disparities.
“It is not a simple task, of course, but it is a very intentional task that aims to highlight the disparities that happen not only to women in general, but also to women of color in particular, and to outline them as fundamental measures.” Frye said. “If you don’t correctly classify the pay hole for black women, it doesn’t adjust the pay hole correctly.”
It also looks at how national crises, such as a shortage of child care centres, seriously affect women of color. A recent proposal through senate Democrats, for example, to spend $350 billion over five years to address economic inequalities in communities of color that have been highlighted through the coronavirus, adding cash spending to stabilize child care and giving more families access to child care.
And a recent Lean In survey found that blacks spend about 12 hours more consistent with the week in everyday childcare jobs than whites.
“In the United States, White has been socially valued as mothers, yet Black has been noted primarily for not taking into account her desires for care as mothers,” Banks said.
The Senate’s proposal is to gain bipartisan support.
In the Bronx, Brigette Brantley grew up knowing that the formula was never designed to help others like her. When her mother lost her homework in the last recession, for example, a local human resources management worker tried to convince her that she would have no problem with unemployment insurance and that she deserved not to have access to any other public assistance.
It took Brantley’s defense to get what he needed.
Today, Brantley, 30, is also unemployed after his eighth-grade social science coaching contract was not renewed when the pandemic hit. He has unemployment insurance for the first time in his life. She’s already cut the cord and wonders if she’ll be able to send your 8-year-old to school in the fall if she doesn’t even know how to buy shoes or do her laundry.
This summer, Brantley observed the bubble of anger in his community, among his academics who have nothing to do in a season full of anger. He walked with those who turn his anger into action. Something has been replaced for her too.
A clip of her talking to a reporter at a protest in the Bronx went viral in June and amplified how so many black women, and black mothers in particular, felt.
“I’m a black mother and I’m a social science instructor and I’m raising a black son in America, so I don’t yet have a selection to fight and walk,” Brantley says in the video, answering questions about protest times. have become violent. “The government gave other people $1,200 in March, what did you think was going to happen? You took the young summers from the young, what did you think was going to happen? They want a job. Feed our young children and we don’t have that problem.”
Encouraged through his students, Brantley created a GoFundMe to launch a five-city tour, talking to organizers across the country to fight systemic racism. The fund raised more than $55,000. But with the coronavirus threatening those plans, she will take youth-filled buses from her network on August 28 in Washington, the 57th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Brantley, who proudly says she has the same birthday as activist Angela Davis, believes this is her Angela Davis moment. This is yours to see what happens after everything collapses and a movement rises from the ashes.
Is it changing? Is it the world?
She wants to see for herself.
“When the press leaves, does activism die because it is not observed? This deserves not to be the case, it deserves to be observed. I was tired of seeing it on my TV screen. I want to see it physically,” Brantley said. . “I want to pass and physically see the consequences of what’s going on.”