Seventy-two percent of black people in this city from ages 18 to 44 are
unvaccinated. So what is going to stop the Gestapo, I mean the NYPD, from rounding up black people, from snatching them off the train, off the bus?” she added.
Chivona Newsome suggested that if these incidents continue, Black Lives Matter could revolt to exact justice like it did after George Floyd’s death.
“We’re putting this city on notice, that your mandate will not be another racist social-distance practice. Black people are not going to stand by, or you will see another uprising. And that is not a threat; that is a promise,” she said. “The vaccination passport is not a free passport to racism.”
Kimberly Bernard, the co-founder of the Black Women’s March, echoed the charge that COVID restrictions are being weaponized against minorities.
“We are serving notice on the mayor, on the governor, on the restaurant industry that we will not allow for you to use this pandemic, vaccination cards, and masks as another reason to be racist, to put us in prison. Because there’s enough of us in there,” she said.
A man from Rise and Resist, a direct-action group that formed in resistance to the 2016 election of former president Donald Trump, turned the conversation to the partisan blame game that’s exploded amid the pandemic.
“The Republican Party and elected officials and pundits on Fox News try to blame the entirety of the unvaccinated COVID crisis on black people, even though black people are twelve percent of the population,” he said.
But while the speaker said the political Right is guilty of pinning the pandemic on the unvaccinated, of whom many are
blacks, a female African American in the crowd told National Review a different tale.
A college student with experience in the restaurant industry, Maya, who did not provide her last name, said her community is struggling to recognize that Democrats, not Republicans, are spearheading vaccine mandates and therefore resurrecting racial discrimination and conflict.
“Most black people aren’t going to acknowledge that the Democratic Party has disenfranchised us. Malcom X said it’s fox and wolves. The fox pretends to be your friend to your face but passes laws behind your back to harm you. The wolf is not your friend, they don’t like you, and they treat you as such. But who do you respect more? Black people tend to fall for the fox,” Maya said.
She said her job is in jeopardy now because she’s refused the vaccine, another issue of economic equity that she says Democrats are not acknowledging.
“This vaccine mandate is disproportionately affecting people of color. People shouldn’t be forced to do it. It’s ‘for your health,’ but they’re willing to ruin people’s lives to protect against a virus with over a 99 percent survival rate. . . . This is going to be the new Jim Crow, and it’s going to affect mostly people of color,” she said.
So what now from the leftist overlords?
