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But that's today. Let me go back several years ago when I went down the colorblind road myself. I'm a black dude in South Carolina, the heart of the Deep South. I became convinced the best way to deal with racism was to get rid of race. I fully committed myself to it.
I joined a mostly-white Evangelical church that was trying to diversify; spent 18 years there. I voted for black and white and brown candidates who were Democrats, Republicans and independents; I turned over one of my columns in a local paper to a Tea Party member.
I began writing pieces and holding seminars about how we should stop focusing on race, because race was causing racism. I stopped identifying myself and my kids as black on official documents.
I balked at joining groups like NABJ and the like, challenged area NAACP members to work more closely white white Republicans. I went all in.
The problem, though, was that anytime someone asked me what to do about the clear racial disparities in our local schools when it came to discipline or in our local jails and prisons, I had no real answer for them. How can you solve a problem without naming it clearly?
I could never explain how undoing the decades-long damage of racism, which has left gobs of racial disparities and inequalities in its wake, without mentioning or dealing with race. And I still can't. That's why I asked them the question about covid and black people.
Kmele acknowledges the racial disparities but keeps saying that race isn't genetic. Well, so what? Just because it's not genetic doesn't mean it isn't real nonetheless. What does a debate about the genetic basis of race have to do with dealing with the very real problem at hand?
Kmele, Thomas and others are very concerned that a focus on "racial justice" or "wokeness" might hurt elderly white people, leave them out to dry. I'm glad they are concerned about elderly white people; we all should be, given what covid does.
But the facts on the ground are by now extremely clear: The group being disproportionately harmed by covid AND being left behind by vaccination efforts aren't old white people - it's black and brown people. So the question remains: What should we do about that?
Should we keep doing what we are doing and not factor in race as some kind of purity test? Or should we acknowledge reality and deal with it head on? Race and racism are messy and complex. That's why academic arguments and debate clubs about them won't ever do.
Where is the concern for black people unnecessarily dying as they are being left behind in these vaccination efforts? Don't those lives matter, too? And if they do, what to do about it?
There is no clever turn of phrase that can solve that problem. It will take policy - policy that takes into account our racial reality, which includes the legacy of racism that's still with us and how it continues affecting just about everything, including vaccination efforts.
This is not a call to focus solely or even primarily on race. This is a call to focus on all relevant factors - including race. To do anything short of that is to doom an unnecessarily high number of black and brown people to the wrath of covid. There's nothing moral about that.
