It's So Hard...or...Black Exhaustion

It's so hard.

It's already hard to be a Black man in America. I know it's hard to be a Black woman, too, but I don't walk in those shoes. In a world before coronavirus, it was already hard. I could run off a bunch of statistics- make less per dollar, lesser life expectancy, institutional surveillance, and the implications within- the list could go on for weeks without exhaustion. Every time I got in the car, I felt like I was playing Russian Roulette. Any time I left home, a cop could pull me over-  I was playing a game that could, with an unpredictable or sudden move, could have ended my life.

And that was **before** coronavirus.

Now, in the face of an international scourage,  something that will change the way the world functions, all I can see in the response is how little bodies like mine matter in the decision-making process for them- which makes it hard for me to give a fuck about them, either.

Initially, the COVID-19 story was simple- it was a disease that didn't care about race or socioeconomic class or political affiliation, which is **kind of** true- except its not.  It brings forth an analogy my mom used to bring up to describe the difference between my white and Asian friends and me when I moved to California: "you may be in the same storm, but you are **not** in the same boat." What she meant by that was, despite the situation, my friends and I being in could *look* the same to me, she was quick to remind me that people, especially cops, would see differently than my white friends. The storm can be the same (you're both stopped by cops together doing the same things) only to find that your treatment was much harsher and less reasonable- which you only get to tell because you can **see** the difference in treatment (yes-this happened **many many many** times).

The coronavirus attacks everyone in the same way. In the same way that, despite the police stopping my white friends and me for the same reason, I was the only one detained. However, it seems to hold particular vitriol for people of color- well, the group is more substantial than that- people of color, older people, and people in tight quartered marginalized spaces (prisons, nursing homes,  meat processing plants, etc.). I'll be talking about Black (and to some extent,  Brown) people as an example of this.

I'm offering tangential information, let's get back...we are in the same storm, but not the same boat...

If we were all on the same boat, we'd die equally, and as we have seen, that's just not the case. In cities **all over America**- Chicago, New Orleans, Atlanta,  Los Angeles, New York City to start an exhaustive list- the percentage of African Americans who are dying of COVID-19 does not align with the proportions of African American residents. Chicago's was particularly stark- 30% of the population, 70% of the deaths. This data isn't even surprising to me- the very people who are being most hurt by this happens to be a group that has what can only be called "reasonable skepticism" for the medical establishment. We don't even have to look deep in the crates to find an example of this.  In the search for an American panacea for COVID-19, the president pushed a drug called hydroxychloroquine, which they use for ailments like malaria and lupus. I can not say what this drug is like,  but I **have** taken anti-malaria drugs before. My clear recollection was, "how fucking bad could malaria **be** if the drugs are doing **this** to me? The only other time that thought has crossed my mind was during chemotherapy. The president was in a **hurry** to find this drug, so he can get everyone back to work and the economy up and running again. They were in so much in a hurry; they decided to sidestep some of the processes and get it into humans ASAP to see if it worked...and it did...if by working it meant "was more likely to die with it than without." And, if you're going to be rolling the dice with the health and well being of Americans, and you recognize there's a substantial risk that it won't work- find some Black people and do it while making a mockery of informed consent. Which is what they did, and why the tests subjects were described as **mostly** Black people. We run the tests on them to check the medication, and it kills them. These racist health policies didn't happen in 1955, or 1927.

They. Just. Happened.

And when I read about it, only one word came to my mind: Tuskeegee.

And as odd as this sounds, the magnification of racial inequalities based on medical care is horrific, but also dangerously predictable. When we look at African Americans and health care generally, and concerning COVID-19 in particular,  we need to make sure to factor in a couple of things- the medical reasons for someone being more susceptible to the disease but also the social reasons,  and how those reasons interact...we can start with the medical reasons. COVID-19 is a disease that anyone can catch. Still, the likelihood of and quality of your recovery depends on your immune system- this means being immunocompromised is not just some shitty luck, it makes a possible interaction with COVID **way** more dangerous. Here is a simplistic look at the numbers (and these are speculations, as we haven't done anywhere near enough testing to know if these work out over more extensive sets of trials).  Many people will contract the virus, and of those people, 80% will recover with self-isolation. If you're in the hospital and you're in the ICU- your life chances just went to a coin flip. If you end up on a ventilator is a death sentence  5 out of 6 times. That's if you're healthy.

Unfortunately, a lot of Black people are **not** healthy. Black people in spades hold many of the underlying issues that make you susceptible to COVID-19: heart disease, hypertension, obesity- these underlying issues run through the African American community like COVID-19, with two exceptions: a) it's been running through for generations, and 2) nobody seemed to care. In contrast, the community beat the drum about it. The lack of management of these diseases in the African American community has made it more likely for the virus to do real damage if it gets ahold of one of us...

But like I said before, there are also a lot of **social** determinants to make us more likely to get the virus. And the list here is long, and yet any record I ever produced would be incomplete...let's start with distrust in the field. This can be measured by things like Tuskeegee, but it can also be measured by the information that Black people can tolerate more pain and that half of the medical trainees think that blacks have **literally thicker skin** than whites. If you throw in poverty and lack of opportunities, it's particularly bleak. The jobs that exist are essential service jobs that don't give health care. There is also high-density living (created by HUD), mandating people are always really close to one another. Many of these families need more than 2 incomes to pay rent and bills, which means sometimes houses have 2-3x the expected residency. How do you socially distance if 8 people live in an 800sq foot apartment? And why are heart disease, hypertension, and obesity issues? Well, not having access to healthy food will do that to you. If you don't have a grocery store in your neighborhood, and the place where you get to do your shopping is the local liquor store, if you're not lucky and the Dollar General if you are, your options are what they sell. Or maybe you have a McDonalds in the neighborhood- where they offer cheap, and they offer "healthy," but they don't offer both.

And as frustrated as all of this makes me, the reason why the song at the top is "It's So Hard" isn't because of the depravity of the health system. I'm a grown-ass man, heading on a bullet train to 50 years old- the government fucking Black people over is depressing, but by no means **will breaking**- hard to have your will broken over something fully expected...

What's getting to me is that it is becoming apparent I think, to a lot of pro-Trump white people, that they believe going back to work is necessary, and if "some" people have to die for that to happen, so be it. At the very beginning, when we thought it was **just** old people- lots of people wanted us to act- can't have grandma and grandpa die- they matter to us. Then the second wave of stories came out about nurses and doctors getting the disease en masse- and it stirred up a national discussion on  PPE  (which most people didn't know what they fuck that even stood for at the beginning of February and now it's as much of the American lexicon as immunocompromised is now (a word I'd seen on paper maybe 3 times before COVID-19). When the wave of stories about the racial disparities with COVID-19, a couple of things happened: a) the stories that I call the "it be like that sometimes" stories- these just said "well, Black and brown people are less healthy in general, so..." or "well if they didn't live like *that* (in close quarters) or "they had better education they could get jobs that mean they can work at home." As offensive as these are, they are a) not the only comments I read, and b) not even **close** to the worst comments I got to read. 
Finally, the wave of "we need to stop staying at home" movement began, and in it, white people began showing their asses. When this started, I decided to start reading the comment section, and that was my biggest mistake. 

I read more than one comment from people who were out with a firm belief that it was more likely for them "to give it to some nigger or illegal" than for them to get it themselves. I had more than one person comment that if they could bottle it and spray it on "those fuckin porch monkeys" they would. That they **hoped**  COVID-19 was a chemical weapon to kill all non-white people. 

And that's when I just collapsed. I closed the door to the Mancave and just cried. Uncontrollably. 

I can deal with the world sucking. I can deal with the government not giving a fuck. I can even deal with shitty anti-black racism. I'm having a hard time dealing with the kind of hatred that thinks like that. I'm having a hard time not looking at people and assuming they **all** think like that. I'm having a hard time not letting all the hate and anger get to me. I'm trying really hard to not let myself "go" there. Samuel L., at the end of Pulp Fiction, says it best..."The truth is...I'm the tyranny of evil men."

But I'm trying real hard, to be the shepherd.

why i have a hard time sleeping at night...or...we're probably pwned

We're heading into the forty-day plus period of the stay at home orders established as a response to the coronavirus. And as the deaths in New York City begin to decrease and the national curve stops its essentially vertical ascent, there are moves pretty much everywhere to begin to take the reigns off of the country and let people get back to living their normal lives.

It's like these motherfuckers have **literally no idea** of the kind of dilemma we're in.  I sit around and listen to the media, the medical professionals, and when I'm in the need for some straight humor or to be openly deceived, the President. And if you listen to them all, you'd have no idea what to do, or who to believe, or when to believe them.

To be clear, there will be some meandering as this comes along- it's not an article,  but more a stream of thought that may have value to **someone** and even if the only someone it has value to is me, that shit matters too...

This stay at home order has gotten me to do be more in my own head than I like. I think the official term our state uses is Shelter-In-Place, but as an old high school teacher, that term has a very specific, and pretty terrifying meaning- it's how one is trained to respond to a school shooter- both shitty but by no means analogous...but I digress. When I've been sitting at home, I've been fortunate enough to be able to keep working- the only difference is now I can consume copious amounts of information while I work on writing grants or doing reports. And the more news I consume, the more concerned I get that we may be getting an illegitimate bag. I understand everyone wants to be optimistic, but it seems there are a few things that make that projection of confidence particularly complicated...I'll talk about just a few of them here...

1) As of April 26, 2020, we have no immunity, treatment, or vaccine. We don't **really** know how efficiently it spreads.

2) Every conversation about vaccines I've seen is 12-18 months. I find that peculiar, as there has literally **never** been a vaccine produced that fast and the fastest, from samples to a licensed drug, took four years with the Mumps in 1967.

3) Even if we could produce the vaccine in 12-18 months, we'd need to produce **way** more vaccine than we're used to. In an average year, for average vaccines, we need to vaccinate kids under 5 and adults over 65 which ends up being about 5 million a year. This is a different motherfucker- almost everyone will want to get vaccinated- even some of those old-school anti-vaxxers from both parties (kale eating progressives and slack-jawed yokels who both believe the Lancet article (that's been discredited for like over a decade now). We have 350 million people...we don't have the kinds of labs to do the kinds of scale necessary to create that much vaccine. You know who does?

China.

Probably makes you wish we hadn't called it the Wuhan virus now...

4) All of this presupposes something-  that we could make a working vaccine for this. We've tried to make vaccines for **other** coronaviruses, and we're zero for every time we've ever tried. The vaccines we've made that have sometimes had some success in animals have also been known to make the disease more likely which makes it a really really shitty vaccine.

5) Treatments require study and trials, too. We've FDA fast-tracked some drugs and tested them on humans (overwhelming African-American you say?? I call shenanigans!!!) and turns out the studies indicate the drug was more likely to kill you **if you took it than if you didn't** which makes it a particularly ineffective treatment.

6) Immunity- we have no fuckin idea. People who have had the disease are being tracked with really low to no antibodies- this would mean that **even catching the disease would not make you immune- which with no treatment or vaccine means...

The disease, if all this is true, would have no check. The only natural resolution would be international herd immunity- which a) isn't particularly fast and b) has the kinds of death totals that sound like they destroyed Houston or Los Angeles or Chicago. This is grim as fuck- I get it. And maybe I've up too late and have just missed some simple shit. But as of now, I don't see this shit getting any better.

I haven't even cracked the door on the economy or mental health, both of which are essentially nuclear explosions as well...which is probably why I don't sleep well anymore...