Okay, no handholding with this poll, no requests for nuance or hypotheticals. Just answer the question in the way you feel is most accurate.
Same with the political divisions.
The Coronavirus is killing more black people than a century’s worth of police brutality.
“Left of center: protesting police brutality”; the Republicans simply* won’t permit *the virus to be stopped, so the question is moot. And the two are intertwined anyway, the virus is hitting people along racial lines thanks to various active and structural racist aspects of our society; so it’s doubly a false dilemma.
Left of center, definitely Corona.
This is me as well.
I really would like to say that stopping the virus should be the priority. However, as stopping the virus is not being taken seriously, then protesting police brutality becomes more important.
There are a lot of people who are not social distancing and are not participating in the protests. Therefore I do not see the protests as the primary reason the virus hasn’t already been stopped.
The left-wing protesters and looters/rioters are doing their damnedest to stop all forms of social distancing, so I’d say the two phenomena are pretty much too intertwined to separate them.
Racism isn’t what’s killed 113,000 Americans in just six months, nor has it devastated our economy.
No, they are trying to maintain social distancing. It’s the police who are generating the protests, forcing people to remove masks with tear gas, and them cramming the people they grab close together.
And the “looters/rioters” mostly don’t appear to* be* left wing; they are right wingers, random criminals and the police.
Left of centre is only meaningful for US posters, since the political geography in many other nations if different, left in the UK is much further left than the US, and Right of centre in UK is probably closer to US left of centre.
We even spell centre differently just to prove it!
I like how every single European comes into any American politics topic to drop this gem then confidently strides away like they just revealed something so shocking that every American in the topic is going to stop posting and run outside because nothing in the world no longer makes any sense.
Hey guys did you also know Greenland isn’t entirely Green and Iceland isn’t entirely Ice?
And plus we need some Canadian to wander into here and then start talking about how Canada is actually the most peaceful country in the world and that they’re actually MORE European than American.
I like how we had a whole large IMHO topic discussing this very subject and turns out it’s completely inconclusive if whether or not the alt-right is actually the ones causing most of the looting and then Der Trihs walks into the topic like a European and just lays this claim out there.
Left of center, stopping coronavirus.
When something’s killing thousands of people each week just here in America, and the numbers are only as low as they are because the whole country’s twisted itself into a pretzel to minimize the chances of catching this plague, it’s certainly the more important of the two right now.
Racism and the systemic structures that propagate it are certainly culpable in a fair number of them. Over the years there is no contest that racism and those structures have contributed to many many more deaths.
Very strange phrasing to the OP. Make it apples to apples: either stopping racism (and the protests are about more than police brutality alone) v stopping COVID-19 (neither of which will happen); or protesting at this critical juncture v staying silent out of fear of worsening COVID-19.
Left of center. Racism more important.
The impacts of the protests have a likelihood of making meaningful positive impacts that will compound over time that is greater than the amount that they risk worsening the course of COVID-19.
Systemic racism is a foundational issue that impacts all other aspects of American life, including our ability to respond to pandemics. We always punt on it because it is too hard to address, but until we do, nothing else is possible.
The protests are not merely about preventing deaths due to police brutality. For a black man, the systemic racism is something that negatively impacts your life every day.
A related question for white people: would you rather take your chances catching coronovirus at a protest (with mask on), or live the next 10 years as a black person in the U.S.?
Yeah, this is a weirdly phrased choice since one of the options is something that is actually possible for me, as an individual, to do, and the other one is impossible. If it actually were possible for an individual to stop coronavirus by staying away from a protest, of course that would be more important, but it isn’t. For the vast majority of protesters, their attendance at a protest is going to have absolutely no impact on the spread of coronavirus. For an unlucky few, it will, although there are ways to mitigate that impact other than not protesting at all (wearing a mask, self-isolating after the protest until you can get a test, etc.) Anyway, we’ve already pretty much decided, as a society, that people aren’t ethically obligated to do literally EVERYTHING in their power to avoid spreading or catching coronavirus, and that, in particular, civic activities like voting and protests are going to go on.
As presented, the OP question is a less-urgent-but-longterm problem versus urgent-but-shorter-term issue.
It’s like asking, which is a bigger problem, the fact that one’s household is a million dollars in debt, or the fact that the living room is on fire right now? The debt is an enormous longterm problem but it can wait; the fire needs to be extinguished ASAP.
Racism is a virus that isn’t going to go away with a vaccine, its needs to be addressed by activily calling it out… Although the number of black deaths by cop is small compared to COVID-19 the overall suffering to the black community as a whole every damn day of their lives is a burden I would not wish to bear myself. I am a half breed Mexican that looks white and has a white last name, so I see a lot of the behind the scences racism that is put out becasue people generally don’t know about my mexican half. And by that I have benifited from white privilage, but that’s my cross to bear.
This is the very definition of white privilege. The long term problem that can wait might not seem that way to someone who experiences the effects on a daily basis.
First of all, I’m not white.
Secondly, the effects of racism and police brutality in America - bad though they are - still do not add up to 113,000 deaths in half a year, two million infected (with many survivors likely to suffer the effects of organ damage for the rest of their lives,) the worst depression we’ve seen since the Great Depression, and tens of millions of jobs lost.