“You got me workin’, workin’ day and night.” From his 1979 album “Off the Wall,” this is the chorus to Michael Jackson’s “Workin’ Day and Night” and a popular refrain of automatons in a capitalist society.
Still, millions of Americans don’t earn enough money to afford health insurance, the cost of which has been more prominent in news coverage and political pundit discussions after the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, Bryan Thompson.
The lack of health insurance is “to blame for almost 45,000 deaths” annually, according to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health.
The morality of Americans who have spoken in less than sympathetic terms about the loss of Thompson’s life surprised many news anchors. But could this be the result of generations desensitized to violence, who cannot be distracted by sightings of drones or the reality of alien life on Earth?
How are they supposed to feel when Palestinians are reported as “dead” and not “killed”? The tactful employment of language to describe the ongoing genocide positions these unbiased news outlets as pro-Israeli and the deaths of thousands of Palestinians as unknown.
How are they supposed to feel when unarmed school children are killed and the solution is lockdown drills and the arming of teachers? When the political refrain is “thoughts and prayers”?
How are they supposed to feel when an unarmed Jordan Neely is murdered and his killer, Daniel Penny, goes free? When, soon after his release, Penny is seen at a sporting event rubbing shoulders with billionaires Elon Musk and Donald Trump? What message do you think this is sending?
It reminds me of the Casual Killing Act of 1669. This was a Virginia law that stated that if an enslaved person died after resisting their master or while being “corrected” by him or her, as women racialized as white also considered African Americans property (Read “They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South” by Stephanie E. Jones- Rogers.), it was not considered a felony.
So, it comes as no surprise that he gets off scot-free. It is also true that the reason Americans do not have universal healthcare is due to racism and it goes all the way back to slavery.
Janeen Interlandi wrote in an article titled, “Why doesn’t the United States have universal healthcare? The answer has everything to do with race,” “Smallpox was not the only health disparity facing the newly emancipated, who at the close of the Civil War faced a considerably higher mortality rate than that of whites. Despite their urgent pleas for assistance, white leaders were deeply ambivalent about intervening.”
Further, Interlandi stated, “They worried about black epidemics spilling into their own communities and wanted the formerly enslaved to be healthy enough to return to plantation work. But they also feared that free and healthy African-Americans would upend the racial hierarchy, the historian Jim Downs writes in his 2012 book, ‘Sick from Freedom.’”
“Black lives matter(ed)” when? Whose lives really matter then, during this festive season or any other? As far as I can see, this hatred goes way back.
Because why else would an unhoused Neely, who suffered from “severe mental illness,” be restrained by Penny and die after being put in a chokehold? Is shouting on a Manhattan subway that you are hungry and thirsty and, thus, have nothing to live for a crime? No, of course not and neither is walking down the street.
Still, Jordan Neely and Bryan Thompson are both dead, and their killers have their reasons. Pull out that Advent candle, light it and shine it here so that we can see them more clearly and talk more frankly about the meaning and value of life—no matter your employment history.
A TikToker (@wildpolitics) posed a question worth repeating, “If CEOs started to get shot at the same rate that children do, how long do you think it would take before the U.S. government starts regulating guns?” Because it’s not just about race but class.
Because there has been no talk of bulletproof suitcases or arming CEOs. Insurance companies have long been called out for putting profits over people. But what of our social conditioning, of accepting that some lives are more important than others based on their social positioning, their income bracket?
Perhaps we haven’t got much time to think about that because the higher-ups have us “workin’, workin’ day and night.”
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Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.
