In a Friday morning tweet, freshman Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) wrote that any future relief legislation should be drafted with a view toward providing reparations for minority communities because, she said, the disease has disproportionately affected those communities.
COVID deaths are disproportionately spiking in Black + Brown communities. Why? Because the chronic toll of redlini… https://t.co/SxGO4imQ79
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) 1585926270.0
It is, by and large, true that wealthy people tend to live longer and have better health outcomes, as we have repeatedly emphasized here at TheBlaze as a reason that it is vitally important to get the economy moving again — not so that people can have more money, but so they can live longer.
And it is also true that the economic downturn is at least somewhat disproportionately affecting certain minority communities. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the overall American workforce is 12.3% “Black or African American” and 17.6% “Hispanic or Latino.” Meanwhile, the leisure and hospitality industry, which has been hit the hardest by the coronavirus shutdown by far, is 13.1% black and 27.0% Hispanic.
The question remains, however, whether the proper response to the economic damage caused by coronavirus should be directed to people specifically because of their skin color, or because they work in industries that have been devastated by the shutdown. Presumably, workers of all colors in the leisure and hospitality industries will be devastated by the loss of several weeks’ pay.
Still, as compared with some of her other coronavirus pronouncements, this one is actually not as bad as it could have been. As BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere has pointed out: almost literally every single word that has come out of her mouth about this crisis has been wrong.
*story by The Blaze