Jay Rosen on the resistance to getting vaccinated among Republicans:
We're still underplaying what a bizarre result this is. https://t.co/AFM5LQx85F
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) June 14, 2021
"Bizarre." Is this also bizarre?
In the case of the Black community, we insist on being understanding about their low vaccination rates. They don't trust the medical community and they've got good reason. So, while we have to work with them to get their vaccination rates up, we also need to display a proper empathy for their fears and history.
But when it comes to conservatives, no such empathy is required despite the fact that conservatives are historically averse to vaccinations too. So even though their vaccination rate is close to that of independents, it's dismissed as "bizarre." They're all just a bunch of idiot Trumpies anyway, amirite?
This is pissing me off. Either show some damn empathy for everyone or stop pretending.¹
¹I plan to make this sentence my personal motto going forward.
I think it's a lot easier to find empathy for a group of people who have, in the past, been subjected to nonconsensual testing and continue to live with disparate health treatment and outcomes, than for a group that has put politics ahead of their own safety.
I think it's a mistake to talk about the "group" here. The issue isn't whether Black people in the 1940's were experimented on. The issue is whether Black people in 2021 have anything to fear from a vaccine that hundreds of millions of people have taken and not died from.
At what point does it become no longer an excuse. If Black Americans are still vaccine hesitant in 2031, can we say it is irrational? In 2121? In 3021?
The fact of the matter is, no rational person, of any skin color, should be hesitant about this vaccine. Indeed, if we did it right, every American would be required to get it, with no exemptions other than a proven, documented medical condition.
The conservatives who dislike this vaccine have a bunch of fears they express about it too. Those fears are BS, and the only reason ANYONE isn't getting it is because they aren't being rational.
If you have health insurance and are in an area where you can easily get health care, then getting the vaccine should be a no -brainer.
If you have to take public transit to get vaccinated, or any type of health care, during a pandemic...then maybe waiting seems reasonable. You hear of side effects, and even though they may be rare, you do not have access to tele-care to evaluate you should you have problems, then hesitancy is understandable.
That's BS. Black people aren't little children who can't locate the vaccine. It's everywhere.
You really think the BIDEN administration isn't out in Black communities offering the vaccine?
It's hesitancy.
So you don't have empathy, got it.
Nor do you understand that people who don't have broad access to their own vehicles, their own time, and might worry about being charged or losing wages due to taking the time off to get the vaccine might be hesitant?
You know, I'll bet there are plenty of instances of non-consensual or non-fully informed 'medical' tests on whitey, but there isn't a cottage industry in making a big deal about it. Didn't the CIA test LSD on simpleton Boomers?
https://healthland.time.com/2012/03/23/the-legacy-of-the-cias-secret-lsd-experiments-on-america/
We’re those “simpleton boomers” all white conservatives? Is that why right-wingers are worked up?
Or is it just the “simpleton boomers” who moronically latch onto every idiotic lie Tucker Carlson spews? (You know, the guy who no doubt cheated his way to the front of the vaccine line but now has “questions” that make him millions from scamming rubes.)
I think the majority of blacks would have no idea what you’re talking about regarding nonconsensual testing.
I don't think either one is bizarre. Without further disaggregating the data by factors strongly predictive of access to vaccines, it means nothing.
If you're poor, you may not get time off from work to get the vaccine. You may not have been able to sit at a computer terminal all day trying a zillion web sites to get an appointment. In rural areas, traveling hours to a vaccination site may have been a formidable obstacle. Blacks tend to be poor, and Republicans tend to be rural.
I think we need to stop blaming people who haven't gotten vaccinated and start breaking down the barriers. Yes, there are some people who mistrust the health care system or the government so much that they will refuse no matter how easy we make it for them. But I think that's a small group. For now, we need to ramp up mobile vaccination sites in poor urban and rural areas and eliminate every barrier we can. Bring the vaccines to them, without appointments or rigmarole.
Do that, and then we'll see how many people are really hesitating or resisting.
with local respected community leaders helping to bring people in/together...
And I would observe that Grijalva, at least, who represents a district with a high number of low-income people who also have low rates of vaccination, has said that the problem in his community is not so much "hesitancy" as access.
In other words, Mr. Pissed-Off Kevin, not all communities with low vaccination rates are that way due to "hesitancy." Please dig a little further into the data before attributing rationales to groups or assuming all groups are similar.
Kevin - is "Republican" a protected class?
Trump thinks so. Trump also thinks that Republicans are an endangered class unless polls are rigged.
Did you read the entire quoted tweet and image (hint, it was truncated)
Stop being racist Kevin. It's not like black Americans have equal access to medical facilities. Especially those who live in Red States (which is about half). This isn't hard to figure out.
The coronavirus vaccine is widely available. It seems paternalistic- at best (and at worst, racist)- to claim that Black people can't locate a place to get a shot.
"Widely" on average, perhaps, but certainly not uniformly. In some areas such as the west and midwest, vaccination sites can be many tens of miles away.
Also, just because a vaccine is "available" somewhere doesn't mean everyone is equally able to get TO it. Lower-income people often lack easy access to transportation, so if a site is miles away -- even just across a city -- it can take literally hours to get there and back, assuming public transport is even available, which in many places it's not. Also, information is not as widespread in some areas, particularly sparsely-populated ones, and many people lack access to or facility with online information. AND, perhaps most importantly, many low-income people can't take time off from work -- which may be at more than one job -- either to get vaccinated or to recuperate in case of a reaction.
So it's not a question of availability, or just an issue for Black people. There are a lot of PRACTICAL barriers for some people that more privileged people don't face.
... or choose to ignore (speaking of paternalistic).
That's BS. Lots of low income people get it. It is offered at night. On weekends. It takes a few minutes.
And we have a liberal, pro-Black administration that is promoting it.
This is hesitancy. "They can't get it" is the nice lie people tell themselves to avoid criticizing people they don't want to criticize.
Why did you ignore pretty much everything bbleh posted?
Kevin? Did you read Kevin's post?
Well Kevin, you were looking for examples of systemic racism, how about the assumption that blacks are hesitant or unwilling instead of asking whether they’re more economically disadvantaged so can’t get sick days for possible side effects, or have fewer pharmacies with available hours, or think they might get a surprise bill because they more often have crappy insurance where that happens.
Yup. See my links to stories in match, April and may.
Stop being an indiot.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fewer-black-americans-are-getting-the-covid-19-vaccine-no-its-not-hesitancy/
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/04/26/989962041/why-black-and-latino-people-still-lag-on-covid-vaccines-and-how-to-fix-it
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/vaccination-rates-lag-communities-color-due-hesitancy-experts/story?id=77272753
very true...
Your links seem to agree with Kevin. Is there a super-secret post you read that isn't there?
Kevin, the more time passes, the more that you seem like Tucker Carlson light. Really man, what the hell has happened to you over the past year and change? The depths to which you've lowered yourself to make false equivalencies between right and left, or to defend racism, racists, and in general dismiss as no big deal or an exaggeration the claims of those who have for a long time been abused or treated as 2nd class people, or would scare even Jacques Custeau.
I wonder if that's part of the reason he left MoJo.
What post did you read? Because Kevin says to be empathetic to Blacks?
He made a very narrow point that you should have empathy toward conservatives, like with blacks, because both groups have historically resisted vaccines. That is hardly sounding like Tucker Carlson.
Claiming "false equivalencies between right and left" does not fit here.
The thing is that it is not the first time he says similar things, hence why I said it's been a trend for him. For a while Kevin has been saying that the left (or progressives, or liberals, etc) should be more tolerant of racism and racists, or should stop trying to focus on fixing social issues, usually by pretending they are not such a big deal, or that they aren't as big a problem as they are made to be by those affected by such an issue.
Here his point is particularly egregious because he is just assuming blacks simply don't want to get vaccinated, completely glossing over the issue of access to getting vaccinated, and then saying that a the concerns blacks may have about getting vaccinated(even if his assumption were true), which are founded on a long history of medical lies and abuses towards blacks are somehow deserving of the same sympathy as a group that openly states on a daily basis they are not getting vaccinated because in their minds it's all a hoax and because they don't care about whatever happens to the rest on people they due to their actions.
And he caps it off by staying he is actually pissed at people who try to take that distinction into account.
I think he is becoming he light version of Carlson because he doesn't use the nasty rethoric of him, nor does he exude the same type of jerkiness, but nonetheless, like him, his answer to social questions, especially those dealing with race, tends to be "but what about this...", with arguments defending or downplaying the bigoted point of view, which is the Carlson MO once you look past the hateful rethoric.
"should be more tolerant of racism and racists, or should stop trying to focus on fixing social issues, usually by pretending they are not such a big deal, or that they aren't as big a problem as they are made to be by those affected by such an issue"
I don't think that is what he is getting at. I think it's that he knows that there is a problem of political intolerance on the left. Conservatives are often just seen as terrible people. Trump amplified this thinking greatly on the left. Trump seemed to validate all the bad things attributed to conservatives.
The empathy for conservatives would be due to them foolishly putting themselves and their families in danger due to their misguided beliefs. Many will die as a result of their vaccine hesitancy. I'm guessing Kevin has heard people say too many times that they could care less if conservatives are going to die. That may be why he is pissed.
"I think he is becoming he light version of Carlson"
Oh come on. Kevin is model lefty when going issue by issue. Carlson says crazy, harmful stuff on a daily basis. He shouldn't even have a national platform.
Kevin's push back is about tone and tolerance. As a practical matter, the despising of conservatives is one of the reasons they loved Trump so much. They saw him as their dirty streetfighter. To them, they wanted to fight fire with fire. (BTW, I have zero empathy for conservatives when it comes to supporting Trump. There is no excuse for that after seeing 4 years of him in action.)
And pardon the typos on my comment, writing on my phone and without and edit function it's impossible to fix them after the fact.
Many Trump Republicans are openly refusing to get vaccinated not because of any general aversion to vaccines, but because they still claim the whole pandemic was a globalist hoax to prevent the former guy being re-elected. Damned if I'm going to feel any empathy for people consumed with partisan resentments.
Did you read the same post that I did? Where did Kevin say that?
NYC and surrounding suburbs where Vax could not be easier to get, at least single dose…age 15+
Race
White 47.7%
AA 35.6%
Asian 85%
Ethnicity
Hispanic 54%
Not Hispanic or Latino 54.7%
No idea what to make of it other then Asians are way ahead of the curve and AAs way behind.
A tremendous amount of noodle head antivaxers.
Many Asian-Americans have relatives who have lived through SARS, MERS, and have a cultural tendency to listen to rational leadership rather than buy a gun to defend their freedom to live without a seatbelt, motorcycle helmet, or vaccine.
On the other end of the spectrum is the hopelessness (glass half-empty) / belief that this world is not really rooting for them so it’s not healthy to get too worked up about this or that (glass half full) in which African-Americans have long lived. If the virus doesn’t get them, something else will, so it’s not a high-alert thing as it is for upper middle-class white folks, whose lives are pretty darned good so long as they can avoid this one thing.
In the case of the Black community, we insist on being understanding about their low vaccination rates. They don't trust the medical community and they've got good reason. So, while we have to work with them to get their vaccination rates up, we also need to display a proper empathy for their fears and history.
I’m going to guess that if you substitute “Conservative” for “Black” in the above paragraph, it won’t make much sense when you get to the bolded part. And for good reason, since Black people actually have experienced indifferent-to-appalling (and nowadays illegal) treatment from the medical community, but absolutely nobody has submitted evidence that Conservative people have or had experienced similar levels of treatment to cause their mistrust of the medical community.
Kevin, you’re better than this bothsidesism. One group of people have much more valid reasons than the other group to distrust medical professionals, and you know it. Stop being an asshat.
Also, in Kevin's earlier post, he pointed out that liberals are more willing to take the Covid vaccine than they have in the past, and there's a good reason for it: Covid has killed over half a million people and greatly impacted our daily lives. It's only natural to be more willing to do something to prevent it. That should also apply to conservatives. Even if they remain more skeptical toward vaccines than liberals, they have much more incentive to want this vaccine than the swine flu vaccine.
At no point in our history have liberals or pro-vaxxers put conservative health at risk, so for conservatives to continue to be this skeptical against all evidence and in the midst of a deadly pandemic, with absolutely no history or facts to support their skepticism, yeah, it's weird.
Promoting general harm is what they do, because they think they're clever.
Shouldn't we view this as a public health issue?
The one fly in the ointment is indigenous vaxxx rates are outpacing even Asians.
& smallpox blankets beat Tuskegee any damn day.
The Indian Health Service operates a different distribution system and they were on this from day one. The effort to get vaccines to remote Alaskan villages was nothing short of phenomenal.
Hey, how about no? Why the hell should I have any sympathy for people that won't show it to me and instead will do anything to screw me over? And why is it always on me to show it every time instead of on conservatives' shoulders, where it should be? Kevin, you're the one writing blog posts on how conservatives are trying to stop people from exercising their right to vote and literally getting in the way of the democratic process by any means necessary. Why on earth would I be more sympathetic after learning about that? They are in no way equivalent to Black people who have been marginalized their entire life and it is false equivalence to say they both deserve the same level of empathy and respect.
Who knew Kevin was so pro All Lives Matter (but some lives matter more than others of course, and that includes misunderstood-but-sociopathic conservatives mattering the most of all)?
I think it's probably because yelling at them (which certainly feels good) doesn't get them to change their behavior. More's the pity . . .
That's fine, just tell me what I'm supposed to be empathetic about. Black people, I get--I'm aware there are issues of access, but there are also good reasons for them to be mistrustful of the medical establishment. Now give me a good reason for conservatives' hesitancy and I'll be empathetic about it.
Showing empathy doesn't get the job done. It tells the people who are refusing to get vaccinated that they are right, that there is nothing wrong with going unvaccinated.
This is similar to the biennial calls for Democrats to "reach out" to constituencies that absolutely hate Democrats and will never vote for them under any circumstances.
Vaccinate as many as we can as quickly as we can. Unless and until it becomes really clear that unvaccinated people are more likely to get seriously ill & die, no one is going to change the minds of the resisters.
Thank you, Kevin and hang in there. I had been active in Progressive circles but had to bail out because of exactly what are you are pointing out. Not only should we have empathy for everyone, but is it possible they don't like us because they see and hear the kind of nastiness that some of your commenters are making? The hate is not just living on one side.
I turn to your website because I know you are searching for truth.
I was a regular reader of Kevin his last few years at Mother Jones and now at Jabberwocking. It seems to me that Kevin has been highlighting hypocritical (or potentially hypocritical) actions of the left quite a bit this year. I say good for Kevin….if we on the left can’t stand to have our assumptions challenged from time to time (and judging from many of the comments on this article that seems to be the case), then we are no better than the close-mindedness we accuse the right of.
As you said AlHaqiqqa, I read Kevin not just to affirm my beliefs, but to challenge the beliefs in the hop of better understanding the truth.
I don’t have empathy for Tucker Carlson, who is cynically making millions off of endangering the lives of his viewers, when he no doubt got vaccinated as soon (or, more likely sooner) than he legally could.
And I also don’t have empathy for anyone who listens to his smarmy lies. Sorry, not sorry.
Strong words (being pissed off, that is), Kevin. I can handle an owly day and an irritated comment from anybody. But to be honest, I’m a little surprised that I number/stats wonk like you would make the error of saying the categories Republican-Democrat-Independent measure the same thing as White-Black-Hispanic. One is intended to be ideological. The other is race/ethnicity (however crudely either do their job). I’d take a break and watch one of those sunsets you take such good pictures of (or at least, that’s what I do when I make such a gaffe).
Rosen is right in one regard. We're just looking at things differently. Democrats OVERCAME vaccine hesitancy through a wide ranging mobilization effort. THAT is the unusual piece.
Other cohorts did not act very differently than they have in the past. Each has reasons, some more sympathetic than others. Issues of access or cultural trust or whatever make sense, but gleefully doing the public health equivalent of rolling coal deserves some derision - at least for the instigators.
And then the rest of us need to get back to work figuring out how we can get them all vaccinated anyway.
We're still underplaying what a bizarre thing it is for a self-described liberal blogger to reflexively defend Republicans when someone mildly implies we should be more focused on how their behavior is a threat to public safety.
Where is the empathy? Oh, the humanity!
Is reflexive defense of Republicans now a regular thing among liberal writers? I didn't think so, but if things are changing I would like to know.
It has been said that a liberal is someone who won't take his own side in an argument.
Indeed. In Kevin's case, it's not just that he wants to be even-handed when talking about Republicans, it's that his sympathies lie with the other side.
I will start being concerned about the widdle fee-fees of right wingers when they start being concerned about the feelings of people they disagree with. They are not. They have utter disdain for Hispanics, immigrants, homosexuals, atheists, vegetarians, Muslims, urbanites, you name it. If they stop talking about which parts of America are and are not "real" then we can talk about dialing down our mockery of these obnoxious idiots.
And also maybe they can stop trying to destroy our democracy.
I would stop mocking conservatives if they stopped giving us so many things to mock them over and started solving problems instead of creating them. But they are committed not to it seems.
"This is pissing me off. Either show some damn empathy for everyone or stop pretending."
On the flip side: c'mon, Kevin. We are all of us human, and as such find it a lot easier to extend empathy to people who haven't been telling us for the last five years to "fuck our feelings". I fully extend the empathy to individuals in the Republican community, but the community AS A SOCIAL ENTITY has been a collective raging asshole to everyone, and I'm over them.
So I will and do extend that empathy to individuals, and to the communities that are predominantly Republican. But to communities that SELF-IDENTIFY as Republican, Conservative (in caps!), or Trumpist - those particular communities can go get stuffed.
So, I've been learning about the vaccination raids at the turn of the last century, and I have to say it is sobering. I'm not going to make a case that my (or your) bone-headed wing nut cousin, who rants about "this obseen [sic] power grab" on Facebook has any connection to the people whose homes were raided, who were held down and vaccinated with the very crude (but effective) concoction of cow pus that was then the smallpox vaccine, or whose babies were ripped from their arms in the middle of the night and taken to "pest houses", or even that they (bone-headed wing nut cousins) ever read a book about this or learned the history or know anything that Tucker Carlson doesn't spew from his gaping maw. But it's not a pretty history.
And I think what this history tells us is less about vaccines per se, but rather about how until very, very recently (end even then some), "the government" has often achieved its ends by dehumanization of those in the way. Slaves, Native Americans, immigrants, women, mentally ill, etc. and this dehumanization has often included a violation of body integrity.
And I kinda think my bone-headed cousin (and yes, this is a dehumanization) is triggered by this, buy the idea that the government could FORCE him to put a mask on his face or a needle in his arm. I dunno, maybe as a woman, living with the reality of rape, the public health equation of a needle in my arm vs a novel virus in my lungs seems like a no-brainer. But a white dude who carries in his bone-head the mythology of the god-given right to roam free of harm just can't abide the idea that someone would do something to his body against his will. And this is so triggering that he cant perform the simple, rational equation I mentioned above.
Smallpox is interesting. I was born in the 60's and by that time, the vaccine was no longer a crude concoction of cow pus. But, by the time I was born it was routine to NOT give this routine vaccine to babies born with infantile eczema, as I was. And it was routine because years earlier, someone noticed that babies born with infantile eczema had really bad outcomes, including death, after receiving the smallpox vaccine. So, I never got my smallpox vaccine because the data points, namely dead babies, had accumulated enough to the point of a medical decision being made. I think abut those poor babies, and their families, often. I figure I ow my existence in no small part to them, and to the fact that everyone else around me was vaccinated and smallpox has been pretty much eradicated. It's a strange legacy-I am the beneficiary of both an aggressive vaccination program AND a willingness to ease up on it when circumstances warrant it.
It took years and years and years of adverse reactions to forcible injections of cow pus, and dead babies, to develop the safe and effective strategy that got rid of small pox.
Yes, at some point making personal decisions based on how the US government acted in 1901 or 1792 or 1957 is not rational, and we will all be better off living in a rational world.
But every now and then when my bone-headed cousin is going off on a grammatically incorrect rant, I think about the raids, and those babies. And I thank god and my parents and science that I was born when I was.
You'd better, because I would 100% support that then and 100% support it now.
I knew about this research. I've read Sapolsky's book. But I didn't know about this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrzXE5XttOE
I submit this is relevant to what Kevin wrote above, and to what most of what's happening in this comment section, and in America today.
I am a long-time Robert Sapolsky fan. I've read all of his books. I exchanged an email with him once.
I knew about him, and what he had to say about oxytocin, but I didn't know this video existed until a few minutes ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrzXE5XttOE
I think this is very, very relevant to, well, "partisanship". "Us" and "Them" are easily manipulated categories, and they are being manipulated.
Indeed. Dr. Sapolsky is a treat to read and watch.
It's pretty ridiculous to see all these angry comments after KD made a very narrow point that you should have empathy toward conservatives, like with blacks, because both groups have historically resisted vaccines.
This reminds me of when I comment on right wing blogs. Democrats are evil, period, they say. Well to many on the left, conservatives are evil, period. (They embody white supremacy, they hate trans people, they hate gays, they voted for Trump, etc.)
I'm so sick of the politics of extremes and the hate of others that comes with it. I can't wait for Trumpism and Wokeism to both implode.
But blacks are not resisting or hesitant about the coronavirus vacccine. That's just it, the data show they are no more hesitant than the average white American (political positions aside so both dem amd rep). The chart posted was of actual rates which tells us limited information about hesitancy.
The historical position of both groups is irrelevant to what is happening right now.
"the data show they are no more hesitant than the average white American"
I just checked, and I see that the polls say that.
In Dallas, early on they opened a huge vaccine center in Fair Park next to south Dallas which is predominately black. This was before you could get shots easily in the much whiter north Dallas suburbs. Whites started going to Fair Park for vaccines. My brother in law went and the staff giving vaccines there told him is was fine because they were throwing vaccines away each day.
I think part of the problem is lower education and being generally less informed for people living in south Dallas. A lower percentage of people have internet access. The cost of getting transportation could be a factor.
However, even if polls say blacks are not more hesitant about getting vaccines, this could be misleading. Many may say in theory they want it, but in practice they may be less comfortable getting it so they put it off. Many whites have been excited about getting the vaccine (like me), but to many blacks it may just be something they know makes sense, but they still don't feel good about it. So it could still be tied to history.
Even if blacks are no less hesitant on vaccines than whites, that doesn't mean that conservatives deserve zero empathy regarding not getting vaccines. We try to have empathy for people with different belief systems, such as different religions, even if we think their belief systems are bizarre.
The hesitancy to not go back to Disqus is more problematic.
I'd give a thumbs up if I could.
Bingo!
It's easier to be empathetic to people who say "We've been subjected to years of discrimination and neglect from the medical community and so I'm reluctant to get the vaccine." than it is for folks who say "Bill Gates is trying to inject nanobots into my body so he can control me with 5G."
One day Kevin says that Fox News is a huge influence on Republican voters, hypnotically stuffing their minds with whatever Rupert Murdoch wants. The next day he assumes that the barrage of anti-vax propaganda on the network has no effect.
And yet, just three stories down, Keven tells us:
Well, guess what? I don't think Republicans' vaccine hesitancy is offered in good faith either.
I mean, do I also owe conservatives some empathy for believing covid is a Chinese bioweapon? That the election was stolen from Trump? That the Democratic party is run by pedophiles who drink the blood of children?
Nope. That's crazy talk, and so is much of the conservative resistance to vaccinations.
The empathy would be due to them foolishly putting themselves and their families in danger due to their misguided beliefs. Many will die as a result of their vaccine hesitancy.
Rural whites also have access issues. There is a lot of poverty, and long distances to clinics. There has also been a coordinated disinformation campaign targeting them. It doesn't help that many medical professionals in rural areas come from outside the community.
It's not as if Black Americans are the only group that has suffered from grotesquely unethical medical "treatment." Medical ethics are a pretty new phenomenon for everyone. Google Dr. Brinkley.
I don't tend to compartmentalize my empathy based on a single subject (i.e. vaccine hesitancy). There are so many more reasons to despise the Republican Party and its members that I just can't push that empathy out on this one item. Given the failure of clear leadership from the Republican members of Congress on vaccination (so as not to antagonize the base), we know where they stand - willing to dupe or misinform the masses in order to hang onto power. Fuck 'em.
You say this, after Marjorie Taylor-Greene admitted the holocaust happened.
Why can't you be more openminded?
"Either show some damn empathy for everyone or stop pretending."
That should not even be a remotely controversial statement. The fact that some seem to be interpreting it through the (fairly recent) perspectives of BLM (and "all lives matter") or anti-racism indicates not that a change has taken place in Kevin but that a change has taken place in online discourse.
But, contrary to what a lot of twitter (and a few of the younger folks) might argue: not everything boils down to questions of race. Nor should it. The world is simply more complex than that.
Kevin does of course make his statement in the context of a blog post which references vaccine hesitancy among African Americans; nevertheless, he does not, so far as I can tell, express a prejudice towards those African Americans based on their race. He simply asserts that some human empathy can or should be extended to conservatives (some of whom, believe it or not, may not be white). Hence, I do not see racism here. I see a fairly banal statement that - heaven forbid - we might extend some compassion for people who hold different political/cultural views than us.
In a liberal democracy, in fact, that view is essential. And that's why we will inevitably see a rising tide, possibly building into a tidal wave, of blog posts just like this one:
Current trends such as anti-racism are explicitly and unambiguously illiberal. Proponents such as Kendi have openly declared - in writing (!) - that they want their ideology to be enforced on others. Anti-racism also seems to be pretty clearly racist. Kendi is on record stating that the cure for past discrimination is present and future discrimination. And, yes, black people (just like any other type of people) can be racist.
And these deeply illiberal and racist ideologies can only be pushed so far in a liberal democracy before a backlash develops. And it is coming. One small preview of what is surely on the horizon: the recall effort against the San Francisco School Board (look it up).
And Kevin, I suspect, is just getting started. His frustration, in my view, is entirely understandable after the last few years of self-destructive and illiberal ideologies attempting to masquerade as progressive. More power to him.
"Hence, I do not see racism here."
Of course, you don't. Perhaps all you see is something that "should not even be a remotely controversial statement." But as you say, "not everything boils down to questions of race" -- yet that is exactly what Kevin does in his post.
Let's rewind. Jay Rosen points to a Brian Stelter tweet that shows Democrats are getting vaccinated at far higher rates than Republicans. There's nothing controversial about that datapoint. Rosen doesn't condemn Republicans. He says we should pay more attention to what he calls a "bizarre result." That's all.
(If you wanted to infer more, since Rosen's beat is media, you might draw a connection between right-wing media's antivax propaganda and how it is endangering the consumers of that media and overall public health. That would sync with Kevin's frequent posts about the dangers of Fox News.)
So how does Kevin react to the fairly benign Rosen tweet? With a mini-tirade saying, in short: WHAT ABOUT THE BLACKS!?! He says this stuff is getting him pissed off.
Who's the one injecting race into the discussion? Who's the one hot under the collar with a grievance about race?
You're seem to be calmer than Kevin. But if the original point is Republican resistance to getting vaccinated, and you'd rather talk about THE BLACKS, then I wonder why you'd want to do that?
(I'm not without my own concerns about Kendi and illiberal tendencies of the anti-racism movement, but that's rather far afield, as I see it.)
"I'm not without my own concerns about Kendi and illiberal tendencies of the anti-racism movement, but that's rather far afield, as I see it."
It's not far afield. It explains a potential rationale behind Kevin's response which, as you seem to state, you do not understand.
Anti-racism promotes the idea that it's not just acceptable but even advisable to extend empathy to one group of people (African Americans) and to discriminate against another group of people (white people).
Kevin may be interpreting the comment that Conservative behavior (towards vaccines) is bizarre as an example of the anti-racist sanctioned condemnation of all things white.
And, rather than discriminate against any racial group (whites or otherwise), Kevin advises asking the same question (about vaccines) about all groups of any race.
Again: this is the kind of push-back against the anti-racist approach which we will undoubtedly see more of in the future. So get used to it.
You're so far afield I can hardly see you over there. The point Kevin was responding to had nothing to do with empathy for one group or another. It was about a partisan divide in vaccination rates.
No one was talking about race or antiracism until you and Kevin injected them into the discussion. If you can't understand why partisanship is a separate issue, and an important one, then I'm not sure what to say. For most people, after a year and a half of a pandemic response that has been deeply divided across partisan lines, the relevance of the Rosen tweet seems rather obvious. You've turned it into a textbook case of whataboutism.
If you want to find the most decisive split in the country on vaccinations, you should look at partisanship.
We have 30k interviews from YouGov with actual people and partisanship really is the strongest predictor of behavior
https://twitter.com/gelliottmorris/status/1396914337630019584?s=20
The partisan divide in vaccination rates is stark almost everywhere you look. Charles Gaba has details.
https://twitter.com/charles_gaba
"I can hardly see you over there"
Indeed.
African Americans have a good historical reason to be suspicious of medicine, at least the older population does.
Conservatives don't. They are suspicious of vaccination for the same reason they opposed fluoridation -- Purity of Essence, God's will, an the general belief that science is wrong and the work of Satan.
It is quite a bit easier to be sympathetic to the ones who were used for medical experiments than it is to be sympathetic to those who use dogma to reject data.
I still can't believe Naomi Wolf wants to segregate my feces & urine from the general population.