Farhad Manjoo (New York Times, 3/11/20): “The true embarrassment is that it took a pandemic for leaders to realize that the health of the American work force is important to the strength of the nation.”
It is not lost on some that, all of a sudden, paid sick leave is obviously socially important; understaffed hospitals are an outrage; and, really, shouldn’t the government be paying for this…? I mean, it’s community health we’re talking about! And all it took was a little pandemic—an outbreak that, as it just happens, doesn’t confine itself to low-income or non-white people.
The New York Times‘ Farhad Manjoo (3/11/20) tried wistfully to imagine US companies and politicians taking seriously the coronavirus lesson of the need for a real social safety net and worker protections. Journalists could also themselves keep focus on enduring fissures that a public health crisis throws into relief. For example, as more schools move classes online, we could talk about the minimally 12 million, disproportionately African-American and Latinx students who don’t have internet access at home.
To the extent elite media acknowledge a “digital divide” anymore, they generally foreground differences between rural and urban access to broadband. But as work by Free Press (9/25/19) and others has shown, rural deployment, while important, is still not as significant as the adoption gap—due primarily to cost, not access—for low-income people and people of color.
FCC commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks (Axios, 3/12/20) are calling on the agency to step up in the Covid-19 crisis, by lending hotspots to schools and libraries and setting up mobile hotspots in low-income neighborhoods, for instance.
As elite media go on about how we all should, nay must, tele-work, tele-school, tele-health and so on, we can ask that they try and hold on to what they’re now learning about who can’t do that, and why.
Featured image: Free Press (9/25/19)
This is a particularly bad time to not have internet access in one’s home. Libraries, where you could use free computers and WiFi for schools and businesses, are closed, or will be closing, to reduce the spread of the Corona-19 virus.
It may be of interest that T-mobile, in a recent court decision, must provide free WiFi to low income households for the next 5 years.
These are real issues facing the working class and I commend Ms. Jackson and FAIR for bringing this out. The one flaw is that when you write about who is suffering you feel the need to add “people-of-color” when it is all a matter of income and class. Black billionaires like Aliko Dangote, Mike Adenuga, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan, to name just four, (Forbes Black US Billionaires 2019) are not suffering – just like their white “brother-and-sister” billionaires – from lack of Internet access.
It is an issue of class and there is no need to add race which only serves to divide rather than unite the working class.
Racism remains an issue that must be dealt with an opposed, but the thinking that leads people to conclude that Oprah Winfrey is somehow more oppressed as a black woman than a white, male unemployed coal miner in West Virginia would not only be absurd but deeply harmful.
I am not suggesting that Ms. Jackson has consciously made an effort to do that, but the result is still the same.
Fraternally,
Warren Duzak
WD – yes, I for-one strongly agree that ‘class’ (read: economic/income status) essentially trumps the other ‘isms’ – race, sex, age, etc – especially in the US. If you’re well-heeled, you can pretty easily weather the discrimination and problems that come with those ‘isms’ (by cloistering yourself, if nothing else), but if you’re poor, then you’re in constant danger of ending up on the street (and it’s obviously even more stressful if you ADDITIONALLY face the discrimination problems from race, sex, age, etc). As a rapper once said, “being rich isn’t everything, being poor IS”…
The definition of the term “adoption gap” is unclear.
The definition of the term “adoption gap” is unclear.
Great insight: it is income level, again that determines not only the disribution,but most vitally the ability to buy access to the most vital informationk,even in the innitial stages of this pandemic. During the Bubonic Poague it was the familliar target, Jews, who were murdered or walled up in their homes, in a futile attempt to seal off the”rest of us” from evil. AndEvil, rememberr,was the source of all evil. Got that?
Great insight: it is income level, again that determines not only the disribution,but most vitally the ability to buy access to the most vital informationk,even in the innitial stages of this pandemic. During the Bubonic Poague it was the familliar target, Jews, who were murdered or walled up in their homes, in a futile attempt to seal off the”rest of us” from evil. AndEvil, rememberr,was the source of all evil. Got that?