April 24, 2022

"... I can understand some of the sentiments animating the 'Unmask Our Toddlers' demonstrations. But the protesters at these events are predominantly white women..."

"... and, in a city as diverse as ours, it’s worth pausing over why that might be. I think it’s a reflection, at least in part, of the disproportionate toll of the coronavirus. Black and brown families... are more likely to have lost a loved one to covid and more likely to have suffered financial hardship, school disruptions, and child-care crises.... According to data from the Harvard Medical School, a Black child is more than five times as likely as a white child to die of the coronavirus. These statistics are not necessarily front of mind for the people who gathered outside the Ethel Barrymore Theatre to yell at the city’s Black mayor about his covid policies for kids. The toddler mask mandate in New York City will almost certainly end soon, which will count as a victory, however belated, for the parents who have been protesting against it. One might hope that some of them can use that momentum to pursue a more holistic and inclusive brand of advocacy for health and safety standards in schools, one that does not necessarily zero in on a single policy for a single age group."

From "Why Are Preschoolers Subject to the Strictest COVID Rules in New York City? Masks are no longer required at sporting events, in offices, or on planes, but toddlers still have to wear them at school" (The New Yorker). The article is written by Jessica Winter (who, if I may judge from the illustration, is a white woman).

47 comments:

Yancey Ward said...

Toddlers are being masked for only one fucking reason- they can't complain or fight back.

Sebastian said...

"a Black child is more than five times as likely as a white child to die of the coronavirus"

So, black kids were 5 times more likely to die while school kids wore masks.

By the way, in absolute terms, the numbers were . . .? Adjusted for comorbidities, the numbers were . . .? Compared to young blacks killed by "gun violence," Covid claimed how many victims . . .?

Yancey Ward said...

The people masking these children are sadists, full stop.

Iman said...

White MOTHERS may not be pressured as much as POC to follow the Dimocrat plantation narrative.

exhelodrvr1 said...

We already learned today that restaurants not checking vax cards causes people to get the virus, so this is very reasonable

Jupiter said...

So her complaint is that white women with children are concerned about the concerns of white women with children, instead of about the concerns of BlacK and brown "families". Maybe she should start getting used to it. In fact, she might want to reconsider lumping the brown families in with the BlacK ones.

Amadeus 48 said...

Read this. It is written by a woman, too.

https://thedispatch.com/p/our-failed-covid-response?s=r

Rabel said...

She's stressed.

She rants at length in the mag for relief.

Those of us who read the whole thing have suffered for her pain.

Jersey Fled said...

980 people ages 0-17 have died of covid in the U.S. to date.

Jersey Fled said...

There are roughly 75 million people under the age of 17 in the U.S.

Enigma said...

This echoes a routine left wing analytical failing (since the 1970s): Express Despair about overall group differences but ignore the intermediary and underlying factors that largely or fully explain these differences in behaviors that go beyond race or ethnicity.

What about poor dietary choices? For all.
What about poor physical fitness? For all.
What about alcohol and drug use? For all.
What about vaccination rates? For all.
What about self-isolation rates? For all.

Equality of outcomes (aka equity) requires equality of choices and equality of lifestyle for success.

Lurker21 said...

Maybe the non-White moms aren't taking the whole masking thing seriously to begin with.

David Begley said...

Why can’t these Leftists understand that masks don’t work? Are they all idiots?

Drago said...

Yancey Ward: "The people masking these children are sadists, full stop."

There are a lot of Howards in democratical controlled cities.

farmgirl said...

Is it: masks work only if everyone wears a mask?
Or is it- I wear a mask: I take care of myself.
B/c there’s always been the confusion of that PLUS that cloth masks are crap. But all the smart ppl wear cloth masks.
I’m grateful to be where I am, work in the elements w/no one but my husband. When mandated, I wore to the grocery store. Or wherever. And drs offices. And church, briefly.

After all this time- it’s still an eff/d up message.

mccullough said...

Where’s the evidence that blacks mask as much as whites?

The vaccine evidence is that blacks are the lowest vaccinated group in the US and in NYC in particular.

And 5 * 0 = 0.

The number of kids who’ve died from Covid is close to 0.

This lady needs to drop her White Savior Complex.

madAsHell said...

One might hope that some of them can use that momentum to pursue a more holistic and inclusive brand of advocacy for health and safety standards in schools, one that does not necessarily zero in on a single policy for a single age group.

Let me paraphrase........I'm not saying you're wrong, but you are.

What a chicken shit thing to say!!

chuck said...

She cites Harvard without giving us the actual data. I mean, 5 times what, zero? Other cites are of "authority". The article may go well with a glass of wine, but isn't very informative.

I liked this interview with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, I learned things from it.

DanTheMan said...

>>who, if I may judge from the illustration, is a white woman

Ann Althouse... Internet biologist. :)

Not Sure said...

One might hope that some of them can use that momentum to pursue a more holistic and inclusive brand of advocacy for health and safety standards in schools, one that does not necessarily zero in on a single policy for a single age group.

So Jessica Winter is advocating school segregation? How perfect is the name "Winter" for a stone cold racist?

J Scott said...

The data can be found here.

https://www.covkidproject.org/disparities

The 5.5x claim seems to be from over a year ago, early in the pandemic.

http://info.primarycare.hms.harvard.edu/review/racial-disparity-mortality-covid-children

If I can read that first link correctly, it's now 2.6x, blacks versus whites.

William said...

"...a Black child is more than five times as likely as a white child to die of the coronavirus".....Talk about begging the question. Why is a Black child more than five times as likely? Does the coronavirus discriminate and target Black children? Can there be any possible explanation for this other than white racism?....Black adolescents murder each other at a brisk rate. Can there be any possible explanation for this carnage other than the NRA and the gun manufacturers? Any other explanation will get you cancelled.

effinayright said...

"Thirty-six children under the age of eighteen have died of covid in New York City since the pandemic began, including a four-month-old, a four-year-old, and a five-year-old. A child dying of covid is rare, but rarity is irrelevant to that child’s parents, siblings, teachers, and friends."
***************************

So...three unlucky kids of unnamed race in the age group she is mewling about. THREE. Among tens of thousands of such kids.

And Yes, rarity SHOULD be relevant to whether the fears of parents, siblings, teachers and friends of kids who don't have covid are RATIONAL.

Innumeracy plus FEEELZ = Bullshit to the nth power.

Gahrie said...

By the way, in absolute terms, the numbers were . . .? Adjusted for comorbidities, the numbers were . . .? Compared to young blacks killed by "gun violence," Covid claimed how many victims . . .?

My first thought was that young Black kids are much more than 5x as likely to die from gang violence in the inner city and no one gives a shit, especially not Black Lives Matter.

Gahrie said...

Why can’t these Leftists understand that masks don’t work? Are they all idiots?

It's mostly ignorance and a complete lack of intellectual curiosity. The worst part is they all think they're super educated experts.

wildswan said...

The Harvard study of children who die of Covid found that 75% of the children who died had a pre-existing condition. In Milwaukee all the kids had pre-existing conditions. Milwaukee has one of the best hospital systems in the country in terms of the ratio between cases and deaths. Perhaps the Harvard Public Health should look at the different treatment regimes in different hospitals which have to a much higher case to death ratio in general - and then do something about that. Masking toddlers rather than working to correct the failure of treatment regimes in hospitals in the black community is just what I expect from the practice of promoting incompetents who meet woke criteria to high places in public health.

Curious George said...

Whitefish Bay, a white and very progressive suburb north of Milwaukee, just went back to masks in schools. Because of an uptick in cases.

stephen cooper said...

I don't think anyone cares what this poor lady says.

Tomcc said...

The best way to support a specious argument is to use specious statistics.

chuck said...

>> The worst part is they all think they're super educated experts.

The few people I saw wearing masks on my walks on a riverside trail tended to be young hipsters. It was strange. "Fear is the mind killer."

natatomic said...

Aren’t white women the ones putting the “We Believe” signs in their yard and going to BLM marches?

Sounds to me like white women are the only ones fighting for anything at all today.

nbks said...

I'm betting the avg white mom has greater freedom to engage in protest, due the luxury of free time & $$$. The absence of black/brown moms doesn't prove they want unnecessary masks for kids.

Furthermore, if black/brown moms saw the covid threat as that present, the vaccination numbers in their communities would be much higher than they are. The article is just more #WhiteLadyProjecting.

Ampersand said...

Covid incubated and unleashed mind viruses that have by now transcended pandemic status. The difficulty with these mind viruses is that it's difficult to persuade someone that they are suffering from a mind virus, since the most significant symptom of the virus is resistance to reason. And there is no vaccine.

Bruce Hayden said...

“ Why can’t these Leftists understand that masks don’t work? Are they all idiots?”

It’s virtue signaling, and little more. Just think back to when we first saw widespread masking - it was the summer of 2020, with the planned riots engulfing the country with BLM and esp AntiFA. AntiFA was using masks to evade face recognition software and for their in terrorem effect. A lot of places still had Klan laws in effect that forbid masking while rioting. Just as authorities stated to crack down this way on the rioting, we got governmental masking mandates. Now you couldn’t tell the domestic terrorists from the law abiding because we were all supposed to look like AntiFA. I remember at the time, marveling at how convenient the masking mandates were, just as I marveled at how everyone across the country could determine, all at once that we had to move to mail in balloting across the country, and eliminate almost all fraud prevention measures while doing so.

tim maguire said...

Maybe black women aren’t out protesting because they don’t have the kinds of jobs that let them take a morning off to attend a protest. Did the white lady desk-jockey think of that?

Leland said...

zero in on a single policy for a single age group.

1) The specific policy "toddlers to wear masks" singles out a specific age group. The parents didn't make that policy.

2) The parents are asking for all toddlers not to wear masks. Jessica Winter is singling out people by race to make an argument, and further she is singling people out by race to judge the legitimacy of their cause.

3) The racial strife of the 1960's are well behind us, but the left still segregates people by race and then pits them against each other.

MayBee said...

One might hope that some of them can use that momentum to pursue a more holistic and inclusive brand of advocacy for health and safety standards in schools, one that does not necessarily zero in on a single policy for a single age group

I admit I often feel like I don't even know what people are talking about anymore. That said, "holistic" is joining "sustainable" as a word that's becoming overused by activists, and is irksome.

iowan2 said...

covid zero has always been a fallacy.

More kids die from flu than covid.

All this article points out, the media is still selectively writing stories to advance a narrative.
A real dog bites man story.

Eddie said...

In Georgia pretty much the only people still wearing masks are black, except in certain spaces where masks are still required. I'm guessing this is due to a combination of the black community generally being left-of-center but also more vaccine hesitant.

MikeR said...

"a Black child is more than five times as likely as a white child to die of the coronavirus" Both chances are very close to zero, and are only part of the discussion because you have no sensible arguments.
A black child (i.e., a proxy for a poor child) is more than five times as likely as a white child to be harmed by a disruption to their schools, I bet. You didn't care.

Bill R said...

If I were writing an AI algorithm to detect if a text contained complete twaddle, the first test would be the word "holistic". If the word "holistic" appears, the rest is nonsense.

Examples:
"Yes, Mr. Wong has near perfect grades and SAT scores and he won the competition in the statewide science fair but IvySnoot University practices a holistic admissions policy."

"Yes, Mr. Washington did fail the voter literacy test. It's true he has memorized the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and yes, he his a well known author but here in Boll Weevil County, we practice a holistic literacy policy."

Robert Cook said...

With all the sturm und drang about "lost freedoms" and "tyranny," and other stupidities, I still cannot understand how or why wearing a face mask is such a fucking imposition or violation.

We live in an age of entitled elderly infants, wah-wah-wahing over the slightest inconveniences to their lives.

Hey Skipper said...

With all the sturm und drang about "lost freedoms" and "tyranny," and other stupidities, I still cannot understand how or why wearing a face mask is such a fucking imposition or violation.

Two guesses, either you are a wannabe tyrant, or enjoy submission.

Let me help you understand from a different point of view: I hate useless impositions, especially where the imposers have never felt the need to justify themselves. Forcing people to do something completely pointless is, by definition, a fucking imposition and violation. Your failure to understand is irrelevant.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-failed-covid-policy-of-mask-mandates>And it isn't like masks complete uselessness against a highly contagious upper respiratory virus hasn't been blindingly obvious since long before C-19.

Oh, and one other thing. Your position has no limiting principle. You want to wear a mask, or two, or five. Fine, go for it. But leave the rest of us out of your nonsensical safetyism.

Real American said...

Not forcing other people to wear a pretend magic rag (or 5) on their face requires even less effort than putting one on. In fact, it requires absolutely no effort at all. All you have to do is absolutely nothing.

For budding totalitarians, not micromanaging the lives of others may feel like a great imposition or, at best, a minor inconvenience, but it's not.

Pianoman said...

It's the Politician's Syllogism in action:

* Something must be done;
* This is something;
* Therefore, this must be done.

Chris Lopes said...

"...a Black child is more than five times as likely as a white child to die of the coronavirus"

It can't possibly be that the mothers have concluded that masking their children doesn't really reduce the (increasingly decreasing) risk of getting COVID. Nope, they are just racist fucks who want to see black kids die.

n.n said...

"...a Black child is more than five times as likely as a white child to die of the coronavirus"

A low and lower risk. Vitamin D is a primary indicator of risk. Also, fat is beautiful, healthy at any weight, are first-order comborbidities. The science of masks is that they offer progressive risk with time, space, and sanitary habits.