Please Don't Let Me Die

An essay on COVID written in April 2020

Before I publish a new essay reflecting on the grim one-year-anniversary of our COVID-informed lives, I would like to first share a piece that I wrote in April of 2020, right when it became clear what this virus was going to do and to whom.

Over the past few weeks, reports from across the country have begun to confirm what seemed inevitable from the earliest days of the Coronavirus pandemic: Black residents of the United States are being hit hard, and we are dying as a result.

As the old saying goes, “When White folks catch a cold, Black folks catch the flu,” so it comes as little surprise that as both of us are encountering a devastating new virus, we’re the primary ones catching an express ride to meet our maker.

Much of the reporting has and will continue to center around the preexisting conditions common among Black Americans that impact one’s ability to survive COVID-19. Some will even take into account the environmental factors— born of racism—that make those conditions so omnipresent in our communities, or how a lack of access to quality medical facilities and a shortage of available tests contributes to our death rates.

The dire conditions of newly-minted “essential workers,” both on the frontlines of the overcrowded medical facilities, as well those as in the business of keeping homebound people fed and stocked with necessary supplies (and less essential needs) will be critical to the discussion, as will the poverty that prevents many of these people from staying indoors themselves.

But what will be largely missing from the pervasive narratives about why so many Black people have and will continue to die at the hands of this illness is the part that keeps me up late at night—the most haunting reality in the midst of a moment that is more terrifying than any I’ve known in my thirty-something years.

If I find myself in the hospital competing with sick white folks for attention, care, and life-saving equipment, such as a ventilator, I have very little confidence that I’d make it home alive.

Without a pandemic complicating matters, Black people die, at home, in hospital beds, in waiting rooms before we’ve even been checked, thanks in part to the failure of medical professionals to deliver the care that we deserve. We die, we hurt, we fail to heal properly because doctors, nurses, and others who have been tasked with tending to our health look at us and see higher pain thresholds than they do in our white counterparts.

Highly-trained professionals believe that we are exaggerating or being dramatic when we complain, or that we won’t heed their advice anyway because we’re stupid, irresponsible and/or convinced that Jesus will fix all that ails us, so they needn’t trouble themselves with investing in our care. We can be experimented upon in order to learn how to save those who “matter” more, but there is little investment in addressing the issues that impact us almost exclusively. And, inevitably, there are simply those who’d prefer to see us hurt than to see us heal, those who’d rather see us die than see us alive. 

When I hear “Doctors are having to make devastating decisions,” it chills me to my core because I know some of those doctors would not choose me under any circumstances. Letting them know that I have a young daughter in hopes of compelling sympathy may simply trigger their discontent for unmarried Black mothers; letting me expire is cutting off one more baby machine that may be draining the proverbial system for “free stuff.”

Speaking up about the disparities in how Black people are treated by hospital staff, something I’ve had to resort to in the recent past, may piss them off and make things worse for me. How dare you play “the race card” at a time like this? What I understand, that most of these essential workers would not, is that they needn’t be able to recognize any internal animus towards Black people to treat us poorly. It’s just what White folks, and non-Black people of color who have gotten their education on how to view us from White folks, do. They treat us bad, they let us die.

We can, and should, affirm the valor of those medical professionals on the frontlines while also raging about the fact that race, complexion, sexual orientation, gender expression, ability, age, socio-economic status, and other variables will impact who is provided access to the empathy and care that all patients deserve. 

Consider how easy it is for people to ignore or justify disparities that are made plain by data. Now think about how difficult it may be convincing those who’d do such a thing, in this moment, to recognize the racism that is typically only observable by those who experience it, and those rare “allies” who’ve worked to train their eyes accordingly.

Paramedics can fail to hasten accordingly once they’ve seen the person they’ve been tasked with transporting to a hospital. A nurse needn’t wear a Confederate flag pin to make it plain to me that he doesn’t care much for Black women. A seemingly kind and attentive doctor can nod her way through a check-up with me while consciously or subconsciously disengaging from everything I’ve shared, absent even the slightest hint that she wouldn’t treat me in a manner befitting the oath to serve she took at the start of her career. Few of them would ever admit to being less than suited to serve Black patients.

Racism is often relegated merely to the eye of the beholder; if those with the power to impact it refuse to or cannot recognize it, then it is allowed to fester and wreak havoc on our lives without cessation. Black folks may observe it with all of our senses, but when we speak about it to those who do not, we might as well be telling ghost stories or tall-tales.  We know what discrimination looks and feels like, and trying to paint a picture of it for those who benefit from it existing is like trying to explain algebra to a 4-year-old.

Living with this understanding is gut-wrenching under normal circumstances; being trapped indoors with such during a deadly pandemic is akin to living in a movie that wasn’t directed by Jordan Peele: trying to make it to the end alive when we all know that Black death is treated as little more than a necessary plot point. If that were unclear, look at how the reporting on Black COVID-19 deaths was quickly followed by increased calls to reopen the country for business as usual. Our lives alone are not enough to warrant the disruption to the lives of those who benefit from our suffering more than they do from our survival or success.

I didn’t write this essay as an appeal to the humanity of White and non-Black POC people—a losing strategy over, and over again—but instead, to appeal to something far more reliable: their desire to prove Black folks wrong. Show me how “colorblind” you are, medical workers. Fail to “see race” when we fill your emergency rooms and intensive care units and treat those Colored patients with the same regard you’d want for your own loved ones.

Make a point of putting me and my race-baiting, divisive talk in my place by demonstrating just how humane you can be, and please be sure to do so if one of my senior citizen parents, or my Afropuffed little girl, or her tall, dreadlocked father shows up in need. Do the same for me, with my purse that reeks of marijuana and my many tattoos, and keep it going for all of us who may represent just what you hate most about Black people in one way or another, or how “different” we may be from what you have identified to be worthy of life.

Dignity is a privilege that is frequently denied to those who are seen as second-class citizens. Our triumphs and talents are often marginalized by our oppressors; even when those things are lauded, they are often identified as somehow incongruous with the true nature of our people. We often robbed of the ability to speak freely about our experiences with racism, less we risk danger to our personal or professional reputations (if not worse) and we’re often called upon to “love” our enemies and to either place them on some sort of pedestal, or forgive them like petulant children who are simply incapable of doing the right things. It is often on us to soften ourselves, to become as likable, sympathetic, non-threatening, and agreeable as we can, as a tactic for survival.

I’ve rejected all of that as much as I humanly could for the majority of my life, where I’ve often chosen the peace of Black/mostly Black spaces over the spoils of those made with others in mind and sacrificed some of the capital that is available to those among us who can contort to the wills of whiteness. It is only in fleeting moments of desperation where I’ve run afoul of these decisions, such as the time I got pulled over by the NYPD while riding super dirty some years ago and became the sort of Negro I felt I needed to be to survive (I’ll spare you the details and simply share that a passenger in the car told me that I sounded like “a slave,” and perhaps that is part of the reason I was able to avoid presenting my expired insurance card.)

I don’t know if I can tap dance and “Yessuh, no’suh” my way into recovering from a case of COVID-19 that lands me in a hospital, or if there’s anything I can do to increase the capacity of medical professionals to see me as vulnerable as they ought to in order for me to make it home. I only know that I do not wish to die and that the fear of doing so is more omnipresent than it ever has been in my life. If begging and pleading is all I can do, well, here I am in this moment, begging and pleading.

Please, don’t let me die.