Read on Twitter
“How privileged do you have to be to experience a mask as oppression”. A good % of my black immigrant coworkers making 30k/yr are semi-anti-mask because they experience it as a form of control from their boss, not as part of a broader public health effort meant to protect them.
In my experience unless you’re talking healthcare settings, low-wage workplaces sometimes drive resentment of and lower adherence to covid restrictions b/c basically you’re asking a non clinical and poorly compensated workforce to act like they’ve got RN training and salaries.
When people don’t receive income support, don’t receive free healthcare, don’t ever see a public health official step in their communities to actually talk to them, they start to feel that having to wear a mask for 8-10 hrs/day might be about control not their own wellbeing.
The science does indicate that individual preventative measures do have a significant effect in reducing transmission. So I’m far from saying there’s no individual responsibility when it comes to covid. But, there’s a but.
The total abdication of responsibility by the US state, combined with the unequal distribution of who has to work IRL, has led to lots of distrust of covid restrictions not just among white Trump supporters but also among POC working class ppl. It just plays out different ways.
If you want to talk about individual responsibility regarding transmission, please, please, I’m begging you also talk about the total vacuum of social and state responsibility in which people are making these choices.
