Health Care/Joan Retsinas

The True Demons

Black skin. Or brown skin. Yellow hair. Green hair (thank you, Mel Brooks). A funny-sounding language. A strange god with strange precepts. Multiple gods. No gods.

It doesn’t take much for a majority to marginalize, then demonize, a minority. A glance backward documents the savage schisms buried beneath civilization. Within months multi-cultural cities devolved into battlefields, forced migrations, and genocide. Rwanda. Sarajevo. Constantinople. Calcutta. We too readily yield to our dark sides when nationalist chants drown out our better angels.

A government can quash those cleavages: Tito capped the Serb-Croat schism in Yugoslavia; Saddam Hussein kept Sunnis and Shiites from slaughtering each other. A govenrment can also inflame cleavages: think Hitler. Sadly, sometimes “democracy” can run amok, distancing, if not expelling, “others.”

Our country has its own saga of demonship, beginning with slavery, when “the others” were property. With slavery outlawed, Jim Crow, voting suppression, and “separate but equal” rules followed. Eventually the federal government intervened, with civil rights legislation, affirmative action, and Fair Housing strictures. But a glance at recent headlines, from Ferguson to Charlottesville, shows the depth of racism.

Today’s president has turned his zenophobic ire on “foreigners.” We are plunging Iranians into soup lines. Ditto for Cuba, where the embargo has blocked Americans from trade. We are punishing-starving Venezuelans for their corrupt dictator by pushing Cubans closer to starvation. In countries that desperately need contraception, we are blocking American aid from non-governmental healthcare organizations that mention “abortion.”

The headlines on children languishing in immigration concentration camps (a.k.a. detention centers) have not alarmed our solons enough to act. We are making those children not just miserable, but ill. We are not overtly killing them, but occasionally a not-so-hardy child will succumb to conditions that would decimate Congress if it lived under those conditions for a few weeks.

For the most recent egregious labelling of immigrants as “others,” look to this Administration’s ruling on toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, and beds. Children don’t need them in the concentration camps where they wait and wait. Not worth it. Detention is short-term anyway, at least supposed to be short-term. So explained a Department of Justice attorney in testimony before US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco.

Once here, immigrants face a rough road. Nevertheless, lured by the prospect of safety, a chance to educate their children, and jobs (that native-born Americans, often the Trump constituency, refuse), they come. Once here, even legally, with green cards in hand, they face hurdles to the “benefits” that contribute to health. Consider health insurance. We require legal immigrants to live in this country for five years before they can receive Supplemental Children’s Health Insurance (except for emergencies and labor/delivery) or Medicare.

States have some discretion with Medicaid; yet fourteen states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Wyoming, Wisconsin) rejected Uncle Sam’s offer, under the Affordable Care Act, to subsidize an extension of Medicaid. The Kaiser Foundation estimates that that decision, spurred more by ideology than finances, has left more than four million residents without health insurance (and, consequently, without hospitals and physicians in rural areas). Many of those people left in the lurch are brown or black-skinned.

Not surprisingly, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) raids have made many immigrants, documented and undocumented, fearful of going to the hospital or a clinic. Will “immigration” arrest them, or a family member, putting them on the path to deportation. Young adults in DACA — ironically labelled “dreamers” — hesitate to seek care.

The final indignity: this administration wants to drop the requirement that hospitals post notices in a flurry of languages, as well as the requirement that hospitals offer interpreters to patients who request them. The supposed purported savings? $3.5 billion. The rationale? “Real” Americans should speak English. (“Non-English Speakers Face Health Setback If Trump Loosens Language Rules,” Carmen Heredia Rodriguez, Kaiser Health News, June 24, 2019).

The impetus to demonize “them” lies buried, not so deep, within a nationalist psyche. This President invokes national security: we must secure the border, repel an invasion of foreigners, safeguard ourselves from the influx of darker people speaking strange tongues (we don’t have a polyglot president). Sound eerily evocative of Germany in the ’30s?

The “demons” among us don’t have dark skin, speak in foreign tongues, or live in urban ghettoes. They are white; they speak English; they live among. One lives in the White House.

Joan Retsinas is a sociologist who writes about health care in Providence, R.I. Email retsinas@verizon.net.

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2019

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