PLAGUE JOURNAL April 2020: Nail Salons, Interchangeable Minorities, Victims Everywhere
As some states allow small businesses to cautiously reopen, reporters cry racism.
[Note: All Plague Journal entries were written as events unfolded. I have edited the drafts for clarity, but the tone and content are original, reflecting what we could see at the time.]
Although I’d never read the New York Times, friends always sent me links, and I recently signed up to receive an NYT daily email digest. One of the first emails I received, on April 28th (2020), contained a link in a paragraph that began, “The push to reopen the U.S. economy is likely to exacerbate longstanding inequalities. . . .” I clicked through, marveling at how many times our mainstream media can repeat the same things. The article, “Job or Health? Restarting the Economy Threatens to Worsen Economic Inequality,” seemed ill-researched, and conveyed a message we have read many times, about disparities, about race, about Trump.
Referring to Georgia’s decision to allow some businesses to open, the story featured the phrase “urged on by President Trump,” which is how we know we are against it. The language is so rote that the Times could have created emojis or other symbols to serve as shortcuts for predictable phrases such as, “That disempowered group is heavily black and Latino, though it includes lower-income white workers as well.” I’m reminded of a story about tellers of tired jokes who saved time by numbering their jokes, allowing them to get a laugh simply by saying “number 3.”
[Update 2021: Notice the quaint lower-case black, before the Times fought racial injustice by making Black a proper noun following George Floyd’s death.]
There is no mention of Asians, of course, which would confuse the message. The article criticizes the decision to open “gyms, nail and hair salons, and bowling alleys,” which are to be followed by movie theaters and restaurants. Using a device common to this genre, the Times quotes a hyperbolic assertion from an activist as if it is fact:
Rashad Robinson, the president of the racial justice advocacy group Color of Change, said Georgia’s governor ‘has targeted a whole set of businesses where black people both work and patronize.’ For those workers and customers, he said, ‘it is an absolute death sentence.’
An absolute death sentence? Saying it doesn’t make it so, but we have become so accustomed to statements like this that we accept them without protest.
The article cites, multiple times, the example of nail salon workers, partly because they rely on tips, which won’t materialize if customers are afraid to venture out, and also because their work puts them in close proximity to customers. The risks may be real, but why does the article imply that salon workers are overwhelmingly black? It employs the usual binary lumping of rich and white versus poor and black (or Latino): “Higher earners and whites are far more likely to say they can work from home during the pandemic than lower earners and black and Latino Americans.”
Again, no mention of Asians, or all the less-than-white groups at or near the top of per capita income scales in the U.S., including Indians, Taiwanese, Iranians, Ethiopians, and many others who earn more than “white” people. If we look at household incomes, we see that six of the top ten ethnic groups are of Asian or Middle-Eastern descent, and none of the top thirty come from Northern Europe or the British Isles.
The article discusses the poor people who will be at risk, those returning to jobs in nail salons or fast-food or maintenance, and cites a finding “by economists” (always vaguely invoked, like “experts”): “Those workers were disproportionately non-white, low income, born outside the United States and not college graduates.”
Nail Salon Workers
Although nail salon workers are indeed low-income, making less than half the national average for full-time work, they are generally not black. Georgia is one of the top five states by number of nail salon workers. Seventy-three percent were born in Vietnam. Vietnamese workers vastly over-index in nail salons not just in Georgia but across the country. Accidents of history and culture create such population anomalies. When Tipi Hedren, the actress famous for her role in Hitchcock’s The Birds (and, later, for being Melanie Griffith’s mother), wanted to help women at a California refugee camp in the 1970s, she asked her personal manicurist to teach a group of twenty Vietnamese women how to work on nails. Now, decades later, Vietnamese people dominate the industry.
Some of them prefer Georgia’s weather to the cold of the North or the heat and aridity of the Southwest or West. They are not black and brown. They are Asian. It’s true that they are “non-white,” but non-white doesn’t mean poor. Asians outperform “white” people on virtually all meaningful socioeconomic measures. Vietnamese people have lower incomes relative to many other Asian groups, but not because of malevolent forces or “structures.”
Vietnamese dominate the nail-salon industry in the same way that Indians and Chinese over-index in technology and Scandinavians over-index in lumberjacking. Vietnamese constitute 76% of nail salon workers nationally. Only two percent of nail salon workers are black.
The obsession with race, with two races (notwithstanding the occasional appendage “and brown”), does not provide a constructive path forward for anyone. The narrative is flawed and incomplete at best, usually fundamentally wrong. The New York Times does not explain how allowing the reopening of an industry whose workforce is two percent black amounts to “an absolute death sentence” for black people, nor does it mention the Vietnamese who actually work in these businesses. We are supposed to take it on faith that Republican governors kill black people. When I mentioned this head-scratcher to a friend, she said, “Well, black people go to nail salons.” Had I missed something? I thought Georgia was allowing nail salons to open, not requiring specific racial groups to visit them.
The Times article reviews all the well-known broad comparisons of black-and-white wealth and jobs: blacks have lower incomes, less wealth, are more vulnerable to job loss, more likely to miss loan payments, and so on. Yet the recitation here, as everywhere from the like-minded outlets, suggests no remedies, only sorrow and anger. The Times is in the business of shaping public opinion, and the logic is: black people suffer; therefore, white people (especially Republicans) are bad. When the logic is wrong, there are no practicable solutions. The Times offers none, acknowledging that closing businesses and schools disproportionally hurts black and brown people—yet the Times aggressively argues for the continued closure of businesses and schools.
Black people, like all people, face risks from the coronavirus in some places, but the stories are misleading. Because we measure only a few broad racial groups and report only the most alarming statistics about black people, we ignore all the other groups that may be at similar or greater risk, and we ignore data that don’t serve the narrative. When the corona racial headlines arrived in a deluge in mid-April, I happened to see two articles about states other than the ones dominating the headlines: one from my state and one from the state of a relative who mentioned a news story in her state. In both cases—Colorado and Massachusetts—white people were dying at disproportionally higher rates than their share of the population, and Asians were dying at lower rates than their share of the population. African-Americans were dying at higher rates than white people in one state, lower in the other. Scores of other racial or ethnic groups were either not measured or not reported on.
Nor should they be. If we were to look for disparities by every possible categorization and then write stories about the “structures” that keep the Pennsylvania Dutch or redheads or left-handed people under the boot, we would lose any ability to make sense of information at all. The two states I happened to look at are not the only two with such scattered results. Scattered results are the norm, not the exception (a topic for another post).
We need a story, and racism sells. Rachel Maddow announced on MSNBC, “Every place that’s reporting racial data is reporting racial disparities in terms of African-Americans in particular having a higher infection rate and having a higher death rate.” The clip was included in an episode of WNYC’s The United States of Anxiety, which was rebroadcast as a bonus episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour. It’s not true that “every place” is reporting such data, although it is almost certainly true that Rachel Maddow is reading and conveying only such reporting.