‘Whiteness Is A Public Health Crisis’: The Root, NYT Opinion Writer

On Wednesday, responding to the murders in Atlanta of eight people, six of whom were Asian, a writer for The Root who also is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times asserted that “whiteness is a public health crisis.”

Damon Young opined, “It shortens life expectancies, it pollutes air, it constricts equilibrium, it devastates forests, it melts ice caps, it sparks (and funds) wars, it flattens dialects, it infests consciousnesses, and it kills people—white people and people who are not white, my mom included. There will be people who die, in 2050, because of white supremacy-induced decisions from 1850.”

Opining that the murders should be tied to “the relentless anti-Asian rhetoric pollinating national discourse over the past year,” Young posited that former President Trump, as well as the Republican Party, “can and should be blamed for this and the sudden increase of racist violence against Asian Americans.”

Young didn’t stop there; he inveighed against whites in America for the last 400 years, arguing, “The line doesn’t stop there, though. It extends back 400 years and has tentacles clawing everywhere white supremacy exists here, in America, which is everywhere.”

After surmising that there was a “line connecting this act of terror to the 11 people killed at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, and the nine people killed at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015, of course,” Young then segued to his argument that the murders could be tied to “gentrification, to red-lining, to racial profiling, to gerrymandering, to voter oppression, to mass incarceration, to the war on drugs, to the subprime mortgage crisis, to the vast disparities in both COVID deaths and who receives COVID vaccinations, to how the men and women who stormed the capitol just went home and had dinner with their families afterward.”