DAVID NEAL: Work to heal the pandemic of poverty and cancer of racism

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic or the uprisings to protest the killing of George Floyd rolled across the United States, our country was suffering from a pandemic of poverty and cancer of racism.

Before the economic upheaval caused by the novel coronavirus and the president’s failed response to the pandemic, some 140 million people—or 43% of our population— already were poor or low-income. Nearly half the country lacked the means to afford a $400 emergency. And millions more Americans have since lost their jobs and been thrust into economic insecurity without the money needed for next month’s rent, the light bill or life-saving medicines.

The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival began in the pre-coronavirus era, a time when too many were already too comfortable with other people’s deaths, as Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, president of Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the campaign, has said.

How else to describe the callousness that we exhibit to our impoverished and working poor brothers and sisters? For decades, we have allowed an obscene concentration of wealth to the richest few among us while hardening our hearts to the resulting impoverishment of those at the bottom half of the economy.

Poverty and lack of health care killed about 700 people a day—250,000 a year—even before the pandemic. Yet neither major political party has done what’s necessary to prevent those deaths.

The pandemic has revealed how essential low-wage jobs have always been. It has revealed a backwards kind of accounting that values corporate executives and Wall Street speculators hundreds of times more than the care-giving work of nursing home aides, the public-health providing work of janitors, the life-saving work of nurse aides, or the sustenance-giving work of farmworkers, food processors and grocery store clerks. We now deem these workers “essential” even as we denigrate them with low wages, lack of sufficient PPE, and health care guarantee.

Meanwhile, another of America’s pre-existing conditions has come to the fore. Racism and poverty are chronic illnesses crippling the heart of our nation. In the wake of the senseless killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, whose names we say in a list that continues to grow far too long, people of all races have risen up to proclaim that Black Lives Matter and to demand an end to police or vigilante violence targeted at African Americans.

North Carolina is the only state I can claim as home; I’ve lived here nearly all my life. It’s a state proud of its transformation from one of the poorest and most racist to a center of technology and research which, until recently, had relatively progressive political leadership. But that transformation was always incomplete.  We always left too many people behind.

As with the nation, about 44% of us are poor or low-income—4.6 million people. This includes over half of our children, 58% of Black people (1.2 million), 67% of Latinx people (699,000), and 36% of white people (2.2 million). From 1979 to 2012, income for the top 1% grew by 129%, while income for the bottom 99% only grew 11%.

The court-ordered end to Jim Crow segregation in the 1960s wasn’t accompanied by a dismantling of the systemic racism that remained in its shadow. That shadow casts itself across most indicators of social well-being and looms over our criminal justice system. Black North Carolinians are incarcerated at over four times the rate of white residents, and data from traffic stops show that law enforcement disproportionately stops African Americans.

As a son of the propertied, white South, I am spared the direct oppression of poverty and racism. But poverty and racism diminish us all, and we all have a role in dismantling both.

When one person lacks health care, paid sick leave, or a home, then all are more at risk. The pandemic has revealed the inseparability among our fates that has always been there. The multiracial Black Lives Matter movement to end the senseless killing of Black mother’s sons and daughters has the promise to make us finally live up to our shared creed of liberty and justice for all.

Epidemiologists tell us that viruses slip into the fissures of society, just as COVID-19 has slipped disproportionately into communities of color. And a cancer can metastasize, spreading to the whole body. But I do not believe that we face a terminal diagnosis.

We must heal from the pandemic of poverty and the cancer of racism if we are to form a more perfect union.