The heightened publicity in mainstream media of police brutality against people of color, together with the COVID-19 pandemic, has vividly illuminated the inequality within our communities. Both of these “pandemics” have evolved out of structures that uphold a system of profit for the few and exploitation of the many.
Policing - along with its brutality against people of color - has roots in the 1700s, when white folks were recruited, and sometimes forced, to join slave patrols, in order to protect the land and human property of white slave owners.
Tom Cotton, senator from Arkansas, recently suggested defunding public schools that teach the 1619 Project, a New York Times initiative that centers the teaching of U.S. history around how enslaved African labor built the foundations of the U.S. economy. Locally, groups continue to demand a high school change the name of its sports teams from “the Colonels.”
The effects of COVID-19 have been exacerbated by a market economy where everything - food, land, and human bodies - have been commodified for the profit of corporate owners.