https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-madison-251ffe2672b6c40ca7b8a0a7341959f2The AP today wrote a long an emphatic embrace of institutionalized racism and discrimination based on skin color.
They wrote that white people don't deserve limited covid treatments, blaming "republicans pounce" for any opposition to blatant violations of the civil rights act of 1964 that ended Jim Crow.
Without writing a single word about how its directly violating the ban on discriminating against people based on their race or color, the AP identify the states that used race and color as a reason to deny people life-saving treatment. In Utah and Minnesota, you needed 4 points on a scale to get monoclonal antibodies, and you got 2 points for being "not white". In Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma and Wisconsin, you needed 20 points on a scale that gave "not whites" 7 points automatically. If you had 2/4 or 13/20 points from other factors, you'd get life-saving treatment if you were black, but not white. In response, civil rights groups have brought the threat of lawsuits against the states and health networks who adopted these policies of explicit discrimination based on race, and would obviously win the legal challenges. Utah, Minnesota and the SSM network covering the other four states all dropped their policies when it became public knowledge and the threat of lawsuits loomed. New York, however, has not, and a lawsuit has now been filed today by America First Legal.
Somehow, the AP, the supposedly neutral and credible wire service that serves as the epitome of respectable journalism, has no problem writing entirely one-sided pieces defending
Nuremberg code laws, without any criticism or exploration of the relevant laws that make it wildly unconstitutional. For example, a journalist with integrity might have asked these health providers questions like "
How do you prove you aren't white, do you need a DNA test, or 1 out of 8 white ancestors, or a single drop of white blood, or just hold your face up next to a piece of cheesecake"?
But instead, the headline is a very literal "republicans pounce" trope in the most full throated and shameless fashion, the entire article is just muh republicans pouncing, and any reader with even a semblance of self-awareness is left with the takeaway of 'what, they discriminated based on race, isn't that illegal?'