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Comment by eganist | Hacker News Reader

> there's a certain misery that comes with [...] watching 10,000 people pack together downtown exercising their right to free assembly, and likely undoing all those months of progress.

Yep, that's called privilege.

And I'm not even trying to be snarky. From the perspective of the protesters, taking this opportunity to protest and possibly achieve change means hopefully lowering the general mortality risk for generations to come, not just in the immediate COVID future.

If the first thing that comes to our mind is "ah shit, all that progress" or "I could get sick" and not "I have an opportunity to really make a difference," it's because that difference doesn't matter as much to us compared to the risk of getting sick, and the fact that that difference doesn't matter as much is a product of privilege.

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This is a baffling argument.

Far more lives are threatened by coronavirus today than will be threatened by police brutality over the next several decades [1]. You're basically saying that immunocompromised and elderly persons are acceptable collateral damage.

One thing that's been lost in the noise is that death by police brutality is a vanishingly small problem: less than 0.0003% of the population per year (and most of those are White people).

And the ultimate irony is far more Black people are going to die as a result of these protests (since Black communities are disproportionately affected by the virus) than will be saved by whatever temporary curtailment of police brutality this yields.

Those are the real facts. Not the alternative ones you and people like you would like us to focus on. It's like it suddenly became acceptable to wantonly suspend rationality because it suits certain interests.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use_of_deadly_force_in_...

It is important to not the latter did not mitigating police brutality as a public health interest, but racism in general.

From the letter:

> White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19. Black people are twice as likely to be killed by police compared to white people, but the effects of racism are far more pervasive. Black people suffer from dramatic health disparities in life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, chronic medical conditions, and outcomes from acute illnesses like myocardial infarction and sepsis. Biological determinants are insufficient to explain these disparities. They result from long-standing systems of oppression and bias which have subjected people of color to discrimination in the healthcare setting, decreased access to medical care and healthy food, unsafe working conditions, mass incarceration, exposure to pollution and noise, and the toxic effects of stress. Black people are also more likely to develop COVID-19. Black people with COVID-19 are diagnosed later in the disease course and have a higher rate of hospitalization, mechanical ventilation, and death. COVID-19 among Black patients is yet another lethal manifestation of white supremacy. In addressing demonstrations against white supremacy, our first statement must be one of unwavering support for those who would dismantle, uproot, or reform racist institutions.

The remainder of the letter goes into strategies for mitigating the spread of COVID-19 during protests.

I think it's incorrect to only count deaths as the fallout from police attitude towards minorities. An entire group of people is effectively controlled and held back my the police. As we have already seen, the impacts are generational and have gotten us to where we are today. COVID-19 is the thing will most likely be forgotten next year with some sort of vaccine or herd immunity arising. Even if the protests are successful, it will still be only another step on a long road of equality.

Even if police shooting were brought down to zero, I think it would take like 100 years to save as many lives as we’ve lost to Covid, right?

And some people think that without intervention it would be more like 480,000 in the UD alone.

So ...

> From the perspective of the protesters, taking this opportunity to protest and possibly achieve change means hopefully lowering the general mortality risk for generations to come, not just in the immediate COVID future.

I didn't mention police because this was never just about the police.

It's not clear to me how this protest attempts to solve racism, even if that is a goal of participants. Demands I've seen have exclusively been for changes to policing. The words Black Lives Matter refer to police violence.

I definitely agree that it would be morally acceptable to suffer even a hundred thousand deaths in exchange for a permanent end to racism. And I could even be persuaded to believe that such actions should be taken now, as opposed to say a year from now. But that is not an outcome I expect, as I haven't even heard proposals for how that might be done.

I'm all for the reform people are asking for. But it is not my belief that the net effect of this right now will be positive.

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