Imagine a world in which the COVID-19 pandemic has been going on for centuries and you don't have a mask. You can't get one.
Your parents couldn't get a mask. Your grandparents couldn't get a mask. Their grandparents couldn't get a mask. As far back as anyone knows, no one in your family could get a mask. It wasn't allowed.
And all the while – also for as long as people remember – those without masks were treated differently. Hostility. They had fewer rights because they don't wear masks.
About 12 to 15 percent of the population don't have masks and can't get masks. You and people like you will never have a mask.
You don't have the coronavirus. You can't infect anyone. In fact, in this scenario, virtually no one is at risk, but those with masks still fear you. They still consider you different. Lesser.
You can't disguise it: You don't wear a mask. You can't wear a mask and people with masks don't trust you.
Mask-wearing people are in power. During your childhood, you had few, if any, no-mask teachers. Even now, most police officers and judges and jailers and bosses wear masks. Most elected officials wear masks. Wearing masks is the unofficial uniform of power.
When the residents of your town feel danger, they often blame it on those without masks. When law enforcement members stop those of you without masks, they are more suspicious and aggressive than they are when they stop people wearing masks.
You grew up hearing how people like you – people who didn't and couldn't wear masks – were mistreated. How you were enslaved by the mask-wearers until 150 years ago. How there were laws allowing discrimination against no-mask people until about 50 years ago.
You know the statistics: Those without masks receive less schooling, make less money and go to prison at a far greater rate than those with masks. In fact, nearly 20 percent of non-masked men have been in federal or state prison, while only 3 percent of men wearing masks have suffered the same fate. Masked people say that's because people without masks commit more crimes, but that difference – nearly seven times as many non-masked men spent time in prison – makes that explanation ridiculous.
You are angry. Then you see videos – again and again – of non-masked people being abused by powerful people in masks. It happens over and over.
Decade after decade.
In city after city.
How can those with masks not see how the system is set up against those without masks? Are they willingly blind? Do they secretly (or not secretly) hate people without masks?
In this scenario, would you be content? Would you be OK with mask-wearers telling you how fair the system is, how much better it is than it used to be, how they have friends and even bosses who didn't wear masks? Obviously, there's no discrimination against people without masks!
Of course you wouldn't think that was OK.
If you're black in America, you don't have a mask.
Of course in 2020, we wear masks because of a pandemic that will someday be over. After three month, it feels like it's gone on forever. We demand action to find a cure.
The pandemic of American racism is more than 300 years old and as a white, middle-aged male, I'm one of the mask-wearing people in this illustration.
People like me need to care as much about racism as we do about a virus that will likely be eradicated.
Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.
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