Urban League should apologize to disabled and immunocompromised people if they’re going to speak as a moral authority. Did they not notice that civil rights have been in jeopardy for months?
The organization Urban League has apparently declared a “state of emergency” for civil rights in the US… But just a few months ago they were a threat to the civil rights of disabled people and anyone trying to not breathe viruses or wildfire smoke; because they were pushing for a right-wing mask ban in Maryland.
Fortunately health professionals and disability advocates had gone to the state committee considering this bill to testify in public comments, and the bill died in committee. One doctor, speaking to the committee, pointed out that the group Jews for Mask Rights in NY had documented harassment against people who wear medical masks in Nassau County. That happened in North Carolina even before the mask ban passed there. And that the California Law Review has noted that laws around masking were sometimes used by politicians who wanted to appear less racist even while supporting racist policies, such as segregated schools. Sounds very familiar.
Urban League had joined with ADL to push for this mask ban, and it was obviously meant to be deployed to target and criminalize protesters of the genocide in Gaza, many who have worn N95s at demonstrations specifically for health reasons, even though the ADL and others claim that protesters wear masks only to supposedly menace or in some cases to evade identification. In the case of evading identification, one could hardly blame them since in some cases young vulnerable ethnic minority students have been doxxed and targeted with menacing threats. Of course it can never be assumed exactly why someone is wearing an N95 in public; that’s the unsolvable problem with mask bans even with medical exceptions. There’s no way to know what medical reason someone is wearing a mask, for themselves, or a family member having cancer treatment, or whatever, without requiring people to disclose their personal and medical information to every stranger in public, which is obviously inappropriate and intolerable for a plethora of reasons. But it is something that some weirdos have actually suggested should be the case for every disabled person which is super creepy and a sad commentary on our times, and questionable is the newspaper that decided to print those letters to the editor while so many LTEs are rejected, many of my public health related LTEs have been rejected. It should be considered an obvious human right to be able to protect oneself from health threats. It’s also quite unAmerican to shut out disabled and immunocompromised people, who need to avoid viruses, from the ability to seek public redress at public gatherings.
And it’s quite ironic now that the federal government is allowing agents of the state, presumably ICE, but perhaps deputized randos because who really knows since that’s not really surprising or unexpected; and they’re abducting people, not just while covering their faces, but while refusing to identify themselves at all in some cases not even providing evidence of the legal authority on which they’re taking people. While the truth is that any member of the public wearing an N95 mask during the commission of a crime could be arrested and not just unmasked but also fingerprinted at the police station, so the mask won’t stop the police from identifying people. But one wonders why all these so-called immigration law enforcement people aren’t being locked up “by accident” in North Carolina since they have a mask ban with only a medical exemption that ICE has admitted is not the purpose, but yet there are US citizens with IDs being arrested by mistake. None of that makes any sense.
But oh my yes, civil rights are most definitely under threat. I thought many of us had noticed this months before now. The mayor of Scranton was hedging back in January, but a lot of us recognized the problem early, and some of us even expected it.
And so many of us are at risk. I wish all these anti-discrimination organizations would show more solidarity and not pick and choose who to defend. It’s like they never read that poem about them coming for the communists first, so they seem to have no clue that in fact in Nazi Germany they actually came for the disabled first. And so it has been with the pandemic.