Donald Trump Rallies Are Like Story Time — A Horror Story

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Jan 19, 2022

That new treatment policy allows for race to be one among other considerations when dispensing oral antivirals to people at the most risk of severe disease from the coronavirus.

That consideration is based on research such as a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released last week, which found nonwhites to be less likely than whites to receive outpatient antiviral treatment.

That follows, among other research, a CDC finding late last year that Black, Hispanic and Indigenous people were about twice as likely to die from COVID-19 than non-Hispanic whites and were notably more likely to be hospitalized.

Does taking such racially significant information into account amount to unfair and even counterproductive discrimination against whites? That thought-provoking question is raised by the Journal piece, written by two prolific authors on social policy and political science whose evenhandedness I’ve learned to respect over the years, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira.

Judis and Teixeira criticize New York’s guidelines, released in late December, for including not only the standard criteria such as age and medical conditions as risk factors but also simply being of “nonwhite race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity.”

That’s not enough, they argue, for fairness or even, perhaps, legality if the criteria do not also ask about socioeconomic class. When you do ask about income and the incidence of COVID-19, they argue, you find that “the laid-off autoworker might also deserve some consideration from health officials.”

It is here, if we didn’t see it coming, that they bring up the former president. “Liberal political scientists and many Democratic officials seem determined to ignore class divisions, and instead divide the country up by race and ethnicity,” the authors conclude. “If it continues, Democrats could pay a lasting political price, which could threaten the welfare of groups Democrats want to help.”

Unfortunately, as uncomfortable as Americans might feel about race, we seem to be even less comfortable with talk about class. Trump apparently picked up the hint and predictably appears to be running with it, perhaps all the way to another presidential bid.

That’s a challenge to the rest of us. Our problems with health and other issues are more than skin deep. We need to hear the rest of the story.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)