Black & White: The Inequality of Risk-Taking Through the Eyes of a Pandemic

It’s alarming yet unsurprising, how many events in our lifetime draw focus on the huge divide between a Black life and a White life. From decades of police brutality and wrongful deaths, to the Civil Rights Era-esque segregation in schools, you don’t have to look far to see the fragmentation of two societies.

Photo by Nicole Baster on Unsplash

There are going to be 3 huge truths in this essay that you need to be perfectly okay with if you want to continue reading:

1. I’m going to use the word White and Black so much it might be upsetting. Unfortunately, whatever post-racial society you fooled yourself into thinking we have isn’t quite at our doorstep yet so get used to it.
2. There’s going to be zero science in this essay. Maybe a statistical reference or two, but this is largely about an observation from the eyes of one Black life.
3. No matter what I say, I don’t dislike White people. But I am angry, sad, and frustrated. Some things just have to be said in the spirit of a greater good and to lessen the burden of pain on the soul.

Every 2 or 3 days, I spend about an 1 to 2 hours hauling through and around Manhattan on my bike for exercise. I’ve been doing this, with alternating frequency, for about 3 or 4 years now. You know how you might get your best ideas in the shower; I get mine by throwing myself into chaos. Dodging the opening car door of a taxi or spending hours at a shooting range, I find adding friction adds the opportunity for my neural network to make connections I don’t get by sitting idle and at peace.

These bike rides have brought risk-taking into tack sharp focus for me during the pandemic. First, cycling can be an expensive and elite sport — I don’t see very many men or women that look like me cycling. Second, during the NYC lockdown, we’ve had cold and bad weather days which have brought glimpses of Summer days into brilliant contrast. I see humans of all races following rules, following them partially, and ignoring them altogether. My unscientific thought experiment has calculated that White people have shown the most blatant disregard for our city’s mandated rules. And, like any other time in US history, the wheels of justice trample one race while turning a blind eye to another.

It really begs the question: Why are White people overweight in their disregard for collective safety measures versus their Black compatriots? I could pontificate at length about this but you wouldn’t read it. I’m also sure some scholar out there has tackled this question or something adjacent; so I’m going to take a stab at this answer by looking at 3 factors less than knee-deep.

The Inescapable, Embedded Nature of Blackness as a Collective

Being Black in America can be considered a chronic disease. Black is beautiful; but societally, on the plains of past and present, it has proven to be a disease that Whiteness has tried to abolish, extinguish, or control since the day we were taken off those ships. Our original American condition, slavery, has had a ripple effect on the amount of progress we’ve been able to achieve in the “Free World.” Here’s the part where I introduce some statistics to set the table:

• Nearly 50% of students of color are in high-poverty schools. That statistic is less than 10% for White students. (ColorLines)
• Black households have only 10 cents in wealth for every dollar held by white households. In 2016, the median wealth of non-Hispanic white households was $171,000. That’s 10 times the wealth of black households ($17,100) — a larger gap than in 2007.
• Looking at health outcomes, 46% of maternal deaths of African-American women could have been prevented versus 33% for White women. Some areas of the US are worse than Sub-Saharan Africa. (ColorLines)
• In 2005, 39% of African-American children did not live with their biological father and 28% of African-American children did not live with any father representative, compared to 15% of white children who were without a father representative. (Wikipedia)
• More than 60% of the people in prison today are people of color. Black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men. For Black men in their thirties, about 1 in every 12 is in prison or jail on any given day. (Sentencing Project)

I haven’t even started editorializing this and I feel it gets the point across. It’s gross. Have we made progress? Sure. Are we anywhere close to some statistical measure of equality — no ‘effing way. To be Black in America doesn’t just put you at a disadvantage, it puts you at risk. Self-determination is well and good, but we’re playing against house odds.

I was born to two loving parents, and spent my childhood and teenage years living in a White suburb in Georgia. My schools were on average split evenly between Whites and Blacks. I still managed to find my way into trouble, my sister was the victim of an attempted murder (yes, she made poor decisions but still), and all three of my siblings have sat in a jail cell. My father didn’t know his biological father growing up, and had to defend his mother from the beatings of suitors when he was a child. Both my parents were raised in poverty. These aren’t issues that are completely foreign to White families, but we sure do have to deal with them more often.

My point is that risk for us has been the opposite of subtle. This has been true since we were old enough to understand words. Did you know, some of our mothers and fathers teach us how to interact with police officers even if we’re the ones calling for help? All that self-worth and self-value White kids get from having two parents in the home, and computers and iPad in the classroom…imagine what your self-worth looks like when you’re a kid that gets the bulk of his nutrition from a school that can’t even provide text books to an entire classroom?

By the time we’re ready to break a rule (like ignoring face masks during quarantine or selling drugs), it’s because we’ve either become desperate or rebellious from the exhaustion of disadvantage and disenfranchisement. Black risk is inherently a collective experience, while White risk is as independent and individual as their freedom of choice.

The Red Carpet of Privilege and Elitism

The easiest way I can illustrate this is by linking you to Shaun King’s instagram posts about the enforcement of quarantine in White and Black concentrated neighborhoods — here, here, and here. Long story short, Black neighborhoods actually have enforcement (an aggressive kind), and White neighborhoods have free handouts and not even so much as a warning issued.

Or, for a moment, picture all the arrests of White violent offenders that you can remember and compare that to your recent memories of Black non-violent suspect arrests. Remember when that White guy (doesn’t deserve to be named) shot up a church of peaceful Black elders and they took him out for Burger King before booking him? In Minneapolis, George Floyd (you definitely need to read his name), a Black man, was only suspected of passing a counterfeit bill and they put a knee on his throat and killed him.

I’ve illustrated much of this point with the statistics above, but to hammer it home — White is the default. I understand that White people have to deal with poverty and disadvantages too, but racism for Blacks is overt and institutional. Racism is literally in any direction you look and where you can’t see it. You can be a “down-on-your-luck” White and still expect to not get shot in your back or have an entire magazine of bullets emptied into your chest when reaching for your wallet to provide ID. You can march the halls of your city government with an AR-15 strapped to your back with vitriol and spittle escaping your mouth — We can’t. The bar isn’t that high.

White wealth is such that you can literally segregate yourself from an entire race without even having to try that hard. I have this argument about the American school system all the time. The truth is that any parent would want their kid to go to the best school possible, especially because education and credentialing has proven to be a massive predictor of future income potential. The chain reaction is this:

1. A White family has a child and wants them to go to the best schools.
2. In order to raise their child, they decide to buy a home. They look for schools with good school districts. These schools are already concentrated in, you guessed it, White leaning demographic zones. They may also decide to put their kid in private school if they have enough wealth.
3. Public schools are funded by property taxes, so when the White family moves to a better school district they take their funding with them. The schools in that district have a slow leak that will eventually leave them with less and less resources.
4. This works the same for the family that decides to stay but puts their kid in private school. Yes, their property taxes will go to those public schools, but their time and energy (i.e. their engagement in school) will be transferred to another school; again, depriving an already suffering school from positive engagement and exposure.
5. The cycle repeats itself over and over until scores of school districts (especially in urban settings) are segregated and only serve students of color with limited resources among a slew of other issues.

As I’m typing this, I’m realizing it’s even worse than that. Lower income urban areas in some of our most liberal American cities roll out the red carpet for White people to move in and “revitalize” our neighborhoods. Academically, this is called gentrification; on the streets, this is called stealing. White people are completely fine settling in class C neighborhoods while they’re single or without children. It gives them a chance to save money on seemingly exploitive rents, and tell stories about their new neighborhoods as if they were Christopher Columbus themselves.

They rent and buy up homes in neighborhoods where they’d never let their kids go to school. Slowly, rents and market prices for homes go up. Developers start lobbying for tax subsidies, and buying inhabitants out of their homes or pricing them out — one way or another. And you know, White people aren’t going to stay in a class C neighborhood forever if it doesn’t have amenities. The pillars of a solid gentrification effort — Whole Foods, Starbucks, a Millennial artisanal restaurant upstart, and the promise of future luxury apartment construction. Nobody would have ever thought, in our food desert neighborhoods, that we would want a Whole Foods or a Starbucks? Or, even the opportunity to build our own businesses to serve our own crumbling neighborhoods? Always ignored and left behind; pushed out and forgotten.

Black people start the race a mile behind blindfolded and without shoes. We have to work 2–3x harder to prove ourselves. We have to study 2–3x more to catch up academically. We’re paid the most money in areas where we can entertain White people. We have to be 2–3x more polite at a traffic stop if we want to protect our lives and our freedom. When White children die in a school shooting, it becomes national news and people are motivated into banning an entire class of weapon — a ban that wouldn’t even make a shred of difference. Meanwhile Black children have a choice of gangs or starvation. They have to walk through metal detectors in schools, and a Black death barely registers on the national scale (until most recent history).

Your privilege, your advantages; they start earlier than you’ll ever be able to appreciate. They start at conception, and they continue to snowball until, well, forever — it’s compound interest. I’m not for a minute saying the solution is to rebuke the life your parents gave you… but, we all need to change our perceptions of our own life and success. Much of what you earn and achieve in this life will be a matter of luck and zip code. Your hard work and intelligence matters, but don’t give those more weight than they deserve.

White people freed us from the slavery (after they enslaved us), and then enslaved us again through sharecropping. White people tossed us in prison for drug crimes, and then took the marijuana industry from us — legalized it, profited from it, and left us in prison. When you walk through life with institutional protection, it’s no wonder risk isn’t met with the same caution or respect.

What White Won’t Solve, Green Will

Money talks, and it always has. The economics of subjugation are incredibly clear from slavery to sharecropping to this new system of Black institutionalized oppression. On occasion, I think back to some super generic exchanges I had as a teenager and college student— White kid gets into some fairly serious trouble, then returns to school as if everything is normal. The subtext — “His parents have money.” For the uninitiated, the inference here is that the parents could afford a good attorney or to pay off whoever was harmed by their child’s action. Whether those stories were ever accurate or not, the underlying assumptive thought couldn’t be more applicable to the White life.

Do you want to live in a cheaper neighborhood but want your kid to have a luxury education? The answer is money. Does your child need tutoring or test prep? You want your child to get into a school they’re not qualified to attend? Money. You want to eat clean and only put organic ingredients into your body? Money. Were you arrested for a crime and don’t want to sit in jail until your court date? Money. This list can go on in perpetuity.

Whiteness is the default in this country. History has also provided White people with an incredible head start. Moreover, the laws (and policies too, like financial lending practices) of the land are skewed to disproportionally affect people of color and low income more than those of elite standing. And the only currency that usually helps any human cut through red tape and struggle is owned by White people at a 10:1 ratio. This sends me the message that even if Black people become the majority in the US, it won’t matter because control is actually green when it’s all said and done.

Being poor is incredibly expensive. The poor must exchange an entire day’s worth of hours for minimum wage — time. And when something bad happens, the poor must exchange time which they don’t have to apply for a resolution which they can’t afford. White wealth allows them to use money to protect their time — removing themselves from the hamster wheel. Compound interest works for advantages (Whites) and disadvantages (Blacks) alike. If skin color isn’t a legal way to segregate us, money is the next best means to that end.

TL;DR: Whiteness is a protected class while Blackness is a disease. When a race spends its entire existence as a taker giving itself the ability to set the rules for those it conquers; it becomes hard to see that there is no disconnect between Whiteness and biological humanity (i.e. we are all the same). Whiteness moves through life in a protected bubble picking and choosing what belongs in its default orbit as it amasses more wealth and pretends that its riches are the result of pure intelligence and ingenuity. The ego swells and privilege prevents the truth from being visible.

Then, one day, during a pandemic, Whiteness is asked to do something for the collective good. But, having command over their lives like no other race in America, they get the free will to decide what priority matters to them more — and a huge majority of them raise their hand and say, “Me.” They view risk-taking as singular instead of collective; just like they view they’re self-determined pursuit of asset grabbing as biographical in nature instead of the reality of the collective endeavor. Uber and Uber-like companies had to underpay and disadvantage a lot of people to earn that valuation and pile of cash to burn — read: modern slavery.

There is a reason, even if foolishly, Black people take care of their entourage and their family when success strikes; while White people live in mansions that are practically empty. Risk-taking means different things to us. We live with it daily and it’s not our decision most of the time. When a Black person makes the choice to skip the face mask, or to sit on his apartment stoop, it could be a forfeiture of life even before he is infected by coronavirus. A White person just gets to make a choice, no strings attached — clustering in parks with people they haven’t been in quarantine with and skipping face masks and gloves, because why not? That’s just the nature of risk in a Black and White America.