Coronavirus, police brutality exposed massive inequalities in US: Scholar
The coronavirus crisis and the current protests in the United States over racism and police brutality have exposed the country's massive racial and socioeconomic inequalities, an American scholar says.
“The African-American community includes a pretty high proportion of people who are in the working class end of the socioeconomic spectrum,” said Kevin Barrett, an author, journalist and radio host with a Ph.D. in Islamic and Arabic Studies.
“They tend to have smaller places to live and they've been locked down in these small places to live in relatively undesirable neighborhoods; then they're not allowed to even come out into their neighborhood anyway during the lockdown. So this lockdown was pretty horrific for them,” Barrett told Press TV on Wednesday.
“So I think this is a big factor behind these [anti-police brutality] protests,” he added. “It's not only the ongoing wave of police murders and ill treatment of black people, but I think it's also the larger situation, which is a socioeconomic problem and the United States hasn't figured out how to deal with.”
The UN rights chief said Tuesday the coronavirus pandemic's disproportionate impact on ethnic minorities, and protests triggered by George Floyd's death, have laid bare "endemic inequalities" in the United States.
Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, warned that the covid-19 crisis has had a worse impact on racial and ethnic minorities in the United States and a range of other countries.
"This virus is exposing endemic inequalities that have too long been ignored," she said in a statement.
Similar inequalities were also fuelling the widespread protests over the police killing in Minneapolis last week of Floyd, an unarmed black man.
Floyd was killed on May 25 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, when a white police officer knelt on his neck until he suffocated.
Video images of his killing have sparked demonstrations in hundreds of US cities against police brutality and racism. It has been the most widespread unrest in the United States since 1968, when cities went up in flames over the slaying of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
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