Opinion: White power is America's endless pandemic. Without a cure, more people will die

Quintez Brown

Opinion contributor

With the recent protests against coronavirus lockdowns, Georgia’s racial lynching of Ahmaud Arbery and the extrajudicial killing of Breonna Taylor, the rush to get back to normal is evident. Even if it’s a “new normal.”

People are still dying, but as long as the bodies of black, indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) are most at risk for premature mortality, white America can continue with business as usual.

However, we should not be going along with the normalization of mass death that we’re witnessing from the Trump administration and pundits across the country.

They’ve compared COVID-19 to the seasonal flu, car accidents and pool drownings, all in an effort to convince us that more than 81,000 American deaths aren’t enough to justify collective grief or stay-at-home orders.

Others use the Sept. 11 attacks and other geopolitical tragedies to juxtapose white America’s response to abnormal collective death. But for some Americans, death and devastation are indeed America’s normal.

While overall crime has declined in the United States, 2,100 people across the nation lost their lives to gun violence between March and late April. In Louisville alone, more than 50 shootings have happened since the city first put in place coronavirus-related orders. This past weekend, there were three double shootings leaving three people dead.

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Gun violence, along with other deadly public health issues such as COVID-19, disproportionately impact black communities. Thus creating the greatest white privilege: life.

Black men, like myself, have the lowest life expectancy in the country. At 19, the leading cause of death among my peers is homicide. And as I grow older, I should expect to live a decade less than my white peers across town perhaps due to being more likely to die from chronic diseases.

This deprivation of life itself is black America’s “normal.” But these inequities alone are not a substantial identifier of the racialized American reality where the violent deposition of black bodies is the status quo.

On Feb. 23, Ahmaud Arbery, was, as he did often, jogging through a Georgia neighborhood. Around 1 p.m. he was tracked down by former police officer Gregory McMichael and his son, Travis McMichael, then subsequently lynched moments later. For the next two months, the McMichaels resumed their life as usual, even after gunning down Arbery.

On March 13, Breonna Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, were in bed in their home when three LMPD officers performed a drug raid on their house. Walker, acting in self-defense, shot one time, and the officers responded with more than 20 bullets into the house. The police slaughtered Breonna Taylor, an aspiring nurse, with at least eight of those 20 shots. Walker was arrested for attempted murder, and for two months, none of the involved officers have been charged with anything after being placed on administrative leave.

For the past two months, the bodies of Arbery, 25, and Taylor, 26 laid lifeless. Walker’s was held captive, and the white bodies of the McMichaels and the LMPD officers reaped the advantage of white freedom.

As the coronavirus destroyed countless black bodies across the country in disproportionate numbers, little to no attention was paid to the bodies of Arbery and Taylor that joined them. Little to no attention was given to the numbers of brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters killed by the street, state and prison violence, which America has deemed as “normal.”

Last summer I asked God in an op-ed, “did I deserve to die for being born black?” Because even then I realized that my blackness felt like a preexisting condition leading to a death sentence.

I consistently feel powerless to change that fate. These past two months have only made it worse.

The stories of Arbery and Taylor would be gone with the wind if it wasn’t for the power of the media. But exposure does not equal justice. America has seen the dead bodies of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sam DuBose, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling and many others circulating the internet. In all the cases, their humanity was publicly debated and their destruction was deemed just by the legal system.

It takes more than privilege and implicit bias to violently kill a black person, then participate in a debate around their humanity. That’s power.

It takes more than privilege to storm state capitols with armed militias demanding that we return to normal after learning that COVID-19 disproportionately kills BIPOC, the poor and the elderly. That’s power.

If we continue to allow the debates to be focused on black culture and black behavior, we will fail to investigate and abolish the deadly, structural foundation of America’s white power.

And if we continue allowing political leaders and pundits to make rhetorical appeals to inclusivity and normalcy, instead of equity and reparation, the government shall continue to send us body bags when we ask for medical supplies.

White power and white supremacy is the normal, everlasting pandemic of America. Until we find a cure, we all will continue to die.

Quintez Brown is a Woodford R. Porter Scholar and MLK Scholar studying political science at the University of Louisville. He's a former Courier Journal editorial intern and a Louisville Youth Voices Against Violence fellow at the Louisville Youth Violence Prevention Research Center. Follow him at @quintez.brown on Instagram and Twitter.