Warren Bell, New Orleans Louisiana
Of course there is a disproportion of deaths caused by the virus between black and white people. I mean are we surprised? As much as I love this country, I am not surprised one bit. The death toll is uneven because we live in a society where we are trapped in a cycle of inequality: the way we live, where we live, where we work, the list could go one. There is an underlying factor in this mess: because of the inequality, we are put at risk. My family at risk, my community at risk, my life at risk. My cousin is hospitalized, and my coworker's wife just passed. It surrounds us, trapping us in our communities with nowhere to go, because everywhere we turn something is shut down or not functioning. But its not only the physical ailments affecting our community, the social ones hit just as hard: me and my daughter were recently laid off. So now I have no job, and my cousin who is sick is staying at home with us. I have to try and avoid coming in contact with her while at home, and since I have no job there's no escape. Im struggling to take care of her because its not like I have the skills or money to help her, and I don't have a job to pay for the hospitals because my unemployment check hasn't arrived yet. Stuck in the cycle. Always stuck, with nowhere to turn, because the world we live in gives us nowhere to go, nothing to achieve or reach for. I had become accustomed to this cycle, but the pandemic is beginning to expose it to the real world. Maybe they'll see that African American communities are more at risk from the disease only because of the underlying problems which have been caused by our inability to change or escape our communities for the better. But for now, we keep on living, doing our best to survive in this world we have been given.
