The World Is Racist and Covid-19 Is Proof
The last 2 years have been a whirlwind but for black people, in particular, they have been a painful reminder of the reality of being black in an anti-black world.
As a community, black people have always been at the bottom of the proverbial food chain since time immemorial, but the pandemic has taught us that it is possible to reach new lows.
In almost every category of the many damages this pandemic has caused, black people have felt the brunt of it, with many of the preexisting economic and structural conditions before the pandemic began being exacerbated by Covid-19.
Most of the world has been eagerly looking forward to vaccine development since the Covid-19 breakout to manage the pandemic, however, African countries did not know that they would deliberately be pushed far behind with vaccine procurement.
Most African states are classified as third world countries, a western phrase for ‘poor’. This meant many African states could not afford to procure vaccines early, while some states could not even get any vaccines at all until months later.
Besides the obvious fact that vaccines were excessively priced by the pharmaceutical companies that developed them, the major contributing factor to vaccine disenfranchisement was the financial strength and sheer political power of the global west.
You would think that a global pandemic, a once in a millennia event that threatens all of humanity, would bring the world to work together to survive right? Wrong!
The so-called ‘first world’ countries proceeded to procure way more vaccines than their population needed, often from all vaccine manufacturers, thus prejudicing many countries outside the G20, most of which are African states.
To date, almost 2 years into a global pandemic, African countries still have some of the lowest vaccination rates in the world. The only option left for African countries was to do what we are known for all over the world: begging for aid!
As if doing it out of the kindness of their own hearts, the United States and Europe decided to donate what’s left of their vaccines to African countries at the behest of the World Health Organisation, a large chunk of which were rejects; like the J & J vaccine that was reported to cause sporadic health complications to some of those who took it early in the United States.
The news of the omicron variant is the latest example of the overt display of racism by world leaders and first world countries.
Upon announcing the first discovery of the omicron variant, South Africa was quickly hit with travel bans by everyone from the United States to the United Kingdom.
What’s the problem, you ask? Well, this ban was inexplicably extended to all of its neighbouring Southern African countries who had not reported a single Omicron case at the time, including Malawi, which does not share a border with South Africa.
More pointedly, the European countries, like the Netherlands, which found evidence of this variant in their local Covid cases just days after South Africa’s early discovery was announced, were not met with the same contempt by their counterparts. This behaviour went on for weeks.
While it has already been established that the pandemic forced most of the middle class below the poverty line throughout the world, the existing poverty levels among black people before the pandemic began were worsened.
In the United States alone, the pandemic is said to have affected black people the most, particularly black women, with the black community experiencing higher levels of infection, deaths and job losses.
In South Africa, although the official Covid-19 death rate is considered to be conservative compared to other countries of the same population size with the same infection rate, this number is ballooned when you consider the abnormally high numbers of excess deaths, i.e., deaths recorded as caused by natural causes, during the 2-year period of the pandemic.
Even though the country is miles ahead of its African counterparts in terms of data science and statistics, its data capturing mechanisms are well below global standards, largely due to a lack of resources.
The global pandemic may have taught us a lot of things we did not know about the world we live in and how it works, but it has also emphasised the things we have known to be true for a while, one being that anti-black racism is deeply entrenched in how the world works today.
