There was a furious backlash over comments by Kamala Harris suggesting that hurricane aid would be prioritized based on race.
“It is our lowest income communities and our communities of color that are most impacted by these extreme conditions,” she said during the Democratic National Committee’s Women’s Leadership Forum.
“We have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity, understanding that we fight for equality, but we also need to fight for equity,” she added.
When I was writing about racial priorities for vaccines, I noted that it had actually come out of disaster relief through the CDC.
The eugenics strategy of public health had been baked in long before the pandemic with the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index. SVI was supposed to help rush aid during a natural disaster to those who might need it the most, but SVI added race as a “vulnerability” to create affirmative action disaster relief. During a hurricane, your odds of getting help increased if you were in a minority area. And it decreased if you ranked higher on the SVI because you had more income.
The research materials included a paper co-authored by Ezekiel Emanuel, an Obamacare architect and a prominent proponent of triage, who had already co-authored another paper, which had warned that while directly prioritizing race “would likely be ruled unconstitutional”, the better approach would be “considering vulnerabilities that, while possible for people of all races, are commonly produced by racism”.
Finally, Emanuel noted that, “disparities could be further reduced by avoiding prioritization strategies, such as age-based preference, that risk widening racial and socioeconomic disparities.”
SVI is already part of the National Risk Index. The NRI is used by the entire federal government. It urgently needs to be taken out. And that is only likely to happen if a competent conservative administration actually drills down and rides herd on the federal bureaucracy instead of being taken for a ride by them. It’s one of thousands of things that need to be done and I’m not optimistic about that happening.
The fact that you don’t hear anyone talking about SVI, but they’ll spend weeks ranting about Ukraine and Russia is part of the problem.
The conservative movement is losing the ability to focus on the things that matter. And Americans are paying the price.
Watching Netflix series about Dahmer has been an eye opener for me. Spoiler alert, it moves from very sick to the usual race baiting, so don’t bother to watch it.
Black neighbourhoods are underserved communities and the police were racist because his neighbour was black they wouldn’t listen to her. They have turned it into a race issue because he targeted young black gays, despite the fact that he murdered white and Asian gays too.
Plus he was excused by the police for being gay, they didn’t investigate the age of one of his victims because he was gay. His status as a victim back in the late 80’s meant that he got away with these awful sick acts.
I’ so agree, Daniel, with your last two sentences. I almost think it’s the only thing that matters anymore.
I feel like the lone voice that has been shouting “Can we focus?”
I even suspect the propagandists of seeding our conversations (on social media and the like) with sensational distractions causing hysterical outrage on one topic so we don’t discuss their blatant responsibility for wrongdoing, often with profound implications, elsewhere.
Conflating supposed ongoing racism with the impact of a natural disaster is just one example. The topic of Covid is another. But I won’t elaborate more on that here.
Am I paranoid? Yeah. Shouldn’t I be these days?
Well said. And if you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean somebody isn’t really out to get you.
Are you paranoid enough? Maybe that’s the question you ought to be asking yourself.
Again, excellent work by Daniel.
Upvote.
upvote too
Love your avatar. I had a cat that looked like that once and he was the best pet of any species I have ever had. I still miss him, even ten years after he died at a great old age.
The left is doing so much to create confusion and distortion on such high scales that even they won’t be able to figure out what they are doing to get back to where they want to go in the end. In short, they are creating a mess they won’t even be able to unravel.