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Come On, People, Enough With These Covid Conspiracies
Yes, to be Black is to be gaslit — but now more than ever, we need to do better
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
I think it was the third mass text about the Stafford Act that broke me. You know the text I’m talking about: something about a friend of a friend who works in FEMA who said Donald Trump was preparing the country for a nationwide quarantine in reaction to the coronavirus. Troops would be in place and everything from grocery stores to banks would be closed; in short, the army would have its guns trained on any civilian that dares leave the house for the next two weeks. Each time I got the text, I tried to tell the person that it was a hoax. But they insisted: “[insert friend’s name] said it came from a friend.”
That’s usually the part where my eye twitches and I toss my phone.
The Stafford Act text is just one of the many hoaxes in a hailstorm of misinformation and fake news that’s plaguing the country along with the pandemic itself. One of the virus’ biggest allies, in fact, has been misinformation — but that misinformation seems to be split along racial lines. Trump-supporting White disbelievers are taking their cues from the president, arguing that the pandemic is nothing more than a flu or that more people die from car crashes or that *squints at teleprompter* old people should just die so that the CEO of Spirit Airlines can get a 2% raise or whatever. Polls back this up. Republicans, who, of course, are overwhelmingly White, simply aren’t worried about the coronavirus like anyone else is. This is clearly dangerous.
Black people aren’t off the hook here as we have also been skeptics about the virus. First, there were widespread beliefs that Black people were somehow immune to the virus. There was even a widely shared “CDC source” post about how melanin was somehow a Covid-19 repellent. This was “backed up” by the maps that showed so few cases in Africa. Then Idris Elba announced he had contracted the virus and ended that idea — of course, that was followed by accusations that he was faking the diagnosis to make Black people believe we could catch it. (Since then, of course, everyone from…
