'It Conjures Up Every Racial Stereotype.' For Black Men, Homemade Masks May Be a Risk All Their Own

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

For 24-year-old Quinten Hoskins, new federal guidelines suggesting that people wear homemade face coverings in public to fight the coronavirus outbreak seemed like a joke, and not a very funny one at that. “Can y’all imagine me walking in here with a bandana on my face?,” he asked a group of colleagues at the Milwaukee hospital where he works as a unit secretary. “It got extremely quiet,” he says. “Everybody understood where I was coming from.”

Those guidelines, shared by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), now call for Americans to wear cloth masks when in public, fashioned, for instance, from an old t-shirt or bandana. The suggestions are meant to reduce the spread of the virus while dissuading people from buying the medical-grade masks so badly needed in hospitals. But some black men, like Hoskins, are worried about the potential danger in wearing a homemade face covering.

“The image of a black man, especially a tall, dark-skinned black man with a bandana on his face, I just feel like the racial biases that will pop into people’s heads will be something that could very well be the end of my life,” says Hoskins, who’s continuing to wear a mask in public despite his concerns.

A handful of recent encounters between black men and law enforcement around the country have underscored the fraught racial politics of mask-wearing. In one video from Miami, an officer is seen handcuffing a black doctor who was wearing a protective mask outside his own home; the police chief is investigating the episode. Another video shows a police officer following two black men wearing surgical masks out of an Illinois Walmart; the police department later said the officer had asked for the men’s IDs after wrongly telling them that a city ordinance prohibited wearing masks.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/it-conjures-up-every-racial-stereotype-for-black-men-homemade-masks-may-be-a-risk-all-their-own/ar-BB12Jyhg?li=BBnbcA1

[TreasonousBastard]

1. Yeah, that occurred to me when this started. I'm not black, but enough crap has happened...

to make me sensitive to the problem.

Maybe, just maybe, enough black men wearing masks and doing nothing but going about their business might stir the rest of us to realize how very few black men are actually out to get us.

Could this end up being another turning point?

(And how many turning points do we need?)

[MiniMe]

2. Same here

Though I was pretty impressed by the cops yesterday. The ones who went to break up a child's birthday party. No facemasks, but a bunch of black people in a big group, definitely not practicing social distancing, and they were bitching at the cops for interfering with a child's birthday party. I don't know how old the kid was, but that would have been a great way for him to remember his birthday, somebody getting shot. but the cops were calm and kept their shit together.

[Igel]

3. It can be argued two ways.

If they start wearing masks and nothing bad happens ...

1. The perception was wrong and the stereotype wasn't what was assumed

2. Quickly all the racists were re-educated and were forced to accept that blacks (esp. black men) are people, too?


Now, which way do you think most will think is the case?

Hint: Which way makes us feel better about ourselves and keeps those other people as bad appearing as possible? In fact, I'd guess that the first possibility simply wouldn't even occur to many.