ACADEMIA Letters Justice for 2020 and Public Pandemics- Layers of Burden Jonathan Andrew Perez, Esq. 1 Abstract The following article proposes three major points to bolster the work of law practitioners, legal historians, social justice researchers and members of the public dedicated to fairness, justice and public safety. (1) First, the article introduces the need for a broader and more inter-disciplinary understanding of structural inequity as an invisible form of violence that necessitates a more holistic understanding of communities impacted, namely to communities of color who have been historically marginalized. By studying the basic barometers of healthy communities and how a history of systemic inequity has translated to disparate outcomes – 1 * Copyright © 2021 by Jonathan Andrew Perez, Visiting Assistant Professor, Wesleyan University, Founder of Justice Equity Design, LLC (www.justiceequitydesign.com), and criminal justice attorney. B.A. Bowdoin College; M.A. University of Virginia; J.D. American University Washington College of Law; Senior Assistant District Attorney, Kings County District Attorney’s Office, New York, June 2017-Sept. 2020. The author took the racial issue personally and at great risk to his role brought attention to racial injustice in this country. The Author lost his job over speaking out. This Article was born out of this moment. This Article benefited from presentations at the New York City Bar, a colloquium paper at the Northeast Modern Language Association Annual conference, and the development of “D-BIAS: Designing and Building Institutional Anti-Racist Spaces” on Coursera, funded by a grant awarded to Wesleyan for an online course to counter structural racism. A great deal of gratitude for comments, conversations and inspiration is owed to: Anton Robinson, Sherman Jones, Bennett Capers, Brian Buckmire, Emily LaGratta, Zaheer Ali, my parents, and partner. I also owe a special thanks to Academia.edu. See TheAmerican Bar Foundation, Dr. Traci Birch’s Study, The Old Jim Crow: Racial Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Imprisonment. Available here: < https://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/ media/_media/working_papers/Burch_Old_Jim%20Crow.pdf> stating, “…research has shown that high imprisonment at the neighborhood level can have devastating collateral consequences for economic stability, marriage opportunities, public health, crime, and other phenomena at the neighborhood level.”) Academia Letters, April 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Jonathan Andrew Perez, Esq., jonathan.aperez@gmail.com Citation: Perez, Esq., J.A. (2021). Justice for 2020 and Public Pandemics- Layers of Burden. Academia Letters, Article 228. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL228. 1 educational, economic, and housing sustainability – the work of criminal law practitioners will be more attune to the people they serve. (2) Second, the article considers the current COVID-19 public pandemic, and highlights the urgency of our work at a time when vulnerable neighborhoods, which have been disproportionately impacted by the virus, cannot risk further disruption by a high rate of imprisonment that would amplify the collateral consequences. (3) Third, this paper aims to re-frame the conversation in line with criminal justice reform and the tenets of fairness and justice to all and maintaining public safety, by incorporating the term systemic inequity, and the understanding of its importance, to the work of criminal law practitioners, defenders, and Judges, through the use of a broader lexicon using sociology, history, and public policy. The maintenance of “law and order”2 is at the forefront of many conversations related to considerations of criminal justice reform, social equity, public policy and “racial” equality – however nowhere has the overlay of “law and order”3 and “public safety” been as prominently showcased as during 2020’s twin pandemics of mass-policing and police brutality, and the impact of COVID-194 on historically-underrepresented communities of color. In fact, it was right in the middle of the most brutal pandemic large cities have ever seen in the past century, that the President of the United States declared he was a “law and order” president, making the connection between the governance of society and the health of communities by implication.5 However, COVID-19 has shaken the foundations of our democracy, to its core, and exposed the large gaping structural inequities that have been in existence for centuries.6 Much 2 “Trump says he’s ‘president of law and order,’ declares aggressive action on violent protests” CBS News (June 2, 2020) (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-protest-president-law-and-order/) 3 Arguably, the definition of public order and safety throughout the nineteenth century depended on whom you asked—and mostly it was maintaining the status quo. (see Olivia B. Waxman, How the U.S. Got Its Police Force, TIME (May 18, 2017, 9:00 AM), https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/. (stating, “So it’s no coincidence that by the late 1880s, all major U.S. cities had police forces. Fears of labor-union organizers and of large waves of Catholic, Irish, Italian, German, and Eastern European immigrants, who looked and acted differently from the people who dominated cities before, drove the call for the preservation of law and order, or at least the version of it promoted by dominant interests”). It is not a historical coincidence that, in the late 1880s, all major police forces were in cities. (Id). The preservation of law and order at the time was driven by fears of labor-union organizers and new waves of ethnic immigrants of Irish, Italian, German and Eastern European origin. (Waxman article: Id. One example was the idea that people drinking at taverns and living in smaller homes were somehow more “dangerous.” Id. However, as Potter points out, those people, who profited off the commercial sale of alcohol in public, were businessmen. Id.) 4 COVID-19 Cases in New York City, a Neighborhood-Level Analysis, N.Y.U. Furman Ctr. Blog (Apr. 10, 2020), https://furmancenter.org/thestoop/entry/covid-19-cases-in-new-york-city-a-neighborhood-level-analysis. 5 See Supra note 2. 6 See Earl Fitzhugh et al., COVID-19: Investing in Black Lives and Livelihoods (2020) (discussing health Academia Letters, April 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Jonathan Andrew Perez, Esq., jonathan.aperez@gmail.com Citation: Perez, Esq., J.A. (2021). Justice for 2020 and Public Pandemics- Layers of Burden. Academia Letters, Article 228. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL228. 2 of the U.S.’s policies have been about exclusion as they have been inclusion. By considering case-studies of specific policies through time, in and through the lens of COVID-19, one thing becomes clear: that the equity America has achieved in the civil rights movement – the voting rights act, the equal protection clause, and Supreme Courts cases like Brown v. Board of Education (overturning legalized segregation) and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (banning discrimination in public accommodations) and Title VII, is not enough. Indeed, prior to COVID-19, the fault-lines of systemic inequity by financial disparity and its impact on historically-underrepresented communities of color after Emancipation has been the single biggest barrier to equality, despite the U.S. Constitution and federal statutes attempts to protect individual rights throughout our history, after slavery.7 At a time when the fault-lines of America have become clearer,8 public safety has become a critical piece of the American lexicon. Public safety and “justice” are becoming one in the same. Illness and crime include health, wellness, safety, and equity in communities and neighborhoods across the country is key. Arundhati Roy wrote in a recent essay titled, The Pandemic is a Portal,9 “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” Roy speaks about India, the pandemic’s wreckage on the poor, and vulnerable is similar to what is happening to the United States. She writes about states being forced to bid against one another for ventilators, overwhelmed hospitals in the U.S., underpaid, overworked nurses having to make masks out of garbage liner bags and old raincoats, and the videos that have appeared online of “patient dumping” sick people, surreptitiously dumped onto street corners who could not disparities between African American and white populations and its relationship with economic sustainability.) (https://www.mckinsey.com/ /media/McKinsey/Industries/Public%20and%20Social%20Sector/Our%20Insights/ COVID%2019%20Investing%20in%20black%20lives%20and%20livelihoods/COVID-19-Investing-in-blacklives-and-livelihoods-report.pdf) 7 See See Danyelle Solomon, Connor Maxwell & Abril Castro, Ctr. for Am. Progress, Systematic Inequality and Economic Opportunity 2 (2019), https://cdn.americanprogress.org/content/uploads/2019/08/06141408/ StructuralRacismEconOpp-report.pdf.at page 2. (arguing that Despite the abolition of slavery in 1863, after Reconstruction, state and local governments doubled down on the efforts to oppress and codify the role of African Americans in the labor of agriculture, domestic service and the legacy of slavery in the area of employment.) 8 The effect on amplifying U.S. systemic inequity fault lines for BIPOC America was also exposed in the racial disparities by Zip Code in a place such as New York—often hitting hardest in low-income BIPOC communities.See Total Count of COVID-19 Cases Based on Patient Address by ZIP Code, City N.Y. (Apr. 12, 2020), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-cases-by-zip-04122020-1.pdf (showing that COVID-19’s impact hit hardest on population-dense areas, which, not unsurprisingly, had higher numbers of BIPOC neighborhoods due to the distinct histories of U.S. systemic inequity 9 Roy, Arundhati: The Pandemic is a Portal, Financial Times, April 3, 2020. Available here: < https:// www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca> Academia Letters, April 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Jonathan Andrew Perez, Esq., jonathan.aperez@gmail.com Citation: Perez, Esq., J.A. (2021). Justice for 2020 and Public Pandemics- Layers of Burden. Academia Letters, Article 228. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL228. 3 be helped by hospitals. At the heart of her article is the disconcerting premise that this is America, and that pandemic has exposed the delicate imbalance in U.S. economic, political, and access-to-power structures. The goal and mission now is not just to “flatten the curve” but to find real solutions based in equity, public safety, health, and to counter the very real possibility that entire segments of our population must risk death to return our citizens to safety.10 Beyond Flattening the Curve: Structural Inequity American criminal justice history cannot be understood without a holistic consideration of the law, legislation, and policy that has resulted in structural difference and inequity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, local and state governments have worked together as key actors in protecting the United States’ most vulnerable residents. The key to “flattening the curve” has been a lever that hinged on the oversight of more humane jails and prisons – holding cells for court that do not risk death11 –as well as overseeing the court systems, providing homeless services, deciding where and whether to enforce evictions and utility shut offs and more. While the COVID-19 virus can afflict anyone, America’s long history of racially discriminatory political, economic and social policies creates conditions that put African Americans at substantially greater risk of contracting and dying from the coronavirus. The disproportionate impact on African Americans - and all marginalized communities - is front and center. Because at the time of this article, the statistics for how COVID-19 in New York based on race and ethnicity are not released, others states have shown a trend. In Louisiana (one of the few states that have aggregated and released data-by-race on the COVID19 effects), African Americans make up 70 percent of those who have died in the state, while comprising only 33 percent of the entire population.12 Around the same time, areas with 10 As a thought experiment, consider what is meant by public safety, and which publics are kept more safe in a social environment that administers the vaccine at a slower pace. Now compare this definition of public safety to what is discussed in criminal justice reform as “public safety” and how there needs to be a more socially-integrative approach and solution to how we speak about “safety” “health” and “opportunity” as part of equity. 11 Timothy Williams, et. al, “ ‘Our Jails Are Petri Dishes’: Inmates Freed as the Virus Spreads Behind Bars” N.Y.Times, March 30, 2020, Updated Nov. 30, 2020 (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/us/coronavirusprisons-jails.html) (arguing for greater human dignity in the oversight of jails and prisons, as coronavirus spread in carceral buildings all across New York State during coronavirus. “Our jails are petri dishes,” said Toni Preckwinkle, president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, comparing them to nursing homes or cruise ships — both places where the virus has spread rapidly. Showcasing the delicate balance between protection of the public and protection of inmates that judges, wardens, and defense attorneys and prosecutors were faced with.) 12 Linda Villarosa, “ ‘A Terrible Price’: The Deadly Racial Disparities in COVID-19 America” N.Y. Times Magazine May 1, 2020. Academia Letters, April 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Jonathan Andrew Perez, Esq., jonathan.aperez@gmail.com Citation: Perez, Esq., J.A. (2021). Justice for 2020 and Public Pandemics- Layers of Burden. Academia Letters, Article 228. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL228. 4 larger populations of African Americans revealed to have disproportionate, devastating death rates. In Michigan, African Americans make up 14 percent of the population but 40 percent of the deaths. In Wisconsin, African Americans make up 7 percent of the population but 33 percent of the deaths. In Mississippi, African Americans are 38 percent of the population but 16 percent of the deaths. IN Milwaukee, African Americans are 39 percent of the population but 61 percent of the deaths. In Chicago African Americans are 30 percent of the population but 56 percent of the deaths. And in New York, the epicenter of the virus, African Ameri cans were twice as white people of the virus.13 The conditions of inequity have been in existence well before the pandemic - the coming shortages, in terms of financial sustainability, food systems, and subpar environmental conditions. African Americans are among some of the most vulnerable and entirely “outside” the conventional social systems.14 Indeed, the population of African Americans in prison is 33 % compared to 12 %of the adult U.S. Population.15 Additionally, the African American population who are homeless in the U.S. is disproportionately African American: comprising nearly 40% of the U.S. homeless population. Thus, the result is a failure of the intersecting economic systems, as well as the healthcare system, which both contribute to reflect a disadvantaged group, that automatically becomes more vulnerable during the pandemic. Homelessness also exposes persons to a slew of other healthrelated and socioeconomic concerns. Homeless people tend to have poor access to healthcare, delayed care, and higher rates of hospitalization, all of these which contribute to increased spread and severity of infection.16 Lastly, homeless shelters tend to be overcrowded, which is deadly during the pandemic. U.S. housing policies that has intentionally and unintentionally resulted in segregation and 13 Id. Brittany Packnett Cunningham, “The Coronavirus Doesn’t Have a Race Problem—America’s System’s Do: This Country’s institutions treat Blackness like the most toxic comorbidity of all” Cosmpolitan, April 10, 2020 (https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/amp32096062/coronavirus-black-people/?__twitter_ impression=true) (stating that if you are an African American in St. Louis at the time of the article, you are “painfully aware: every single person who has died from COVID-19 in the city so far has been Black.” The Article also points to other public crisis, the pre-existing conditions of structural inequity before covid, that have been the product of years of invisible violence resulting in structural inequity in communities of color: more prevalent environmental impacts of pollution in low-income communities, health impacts of food deserts such as diabetes and lack of access to sustenance, housing insecurity, and disproportionate low-wage jobs.) 15 See Id. McKinsey’sarticle citing Pew Research, April 30, 2019, pewresearch.org stating that though the gap is shrinking between blacks and whites, it is still quite a large gap. Article by John Gramlich. 16 Id. Citing to Joy Moses, “Demographic data project: Race, ethnicity and homelessness,” Homelessness Research Institute, July 2019 & “(Limitations) The Unmet Health Care Needs of Homeless Adults – A National Study,” American Journal of Public Health, July 2010, Volume 100, Number 7, pp. 1,326-33. 14 Academia Letters, April 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Jonathan Andrew Perez, Esq., jonathan.aperez@gmail.com Citation: Perez, Esq., J.A. (2021). Justice for 2020 and Public Pandemics- Layers of Burden. Academia Letters, Article 228. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL228. 5 population density (the New Urbanist policies) have had a very real health effect on the Brooklyn population. Housing segregation and redlining have disproportionately forced African Americans into communities that have been systematically under-resourced – limiting access to quality schools, food, medical care, jobs, housing and business ventures. Segregation is worsened by “environmental racism”,17 which adds another layer of vulnerability as these communities are likely to be near sites of contamination – landfills, incinerators, refineries, chemical plants – and further away from clean water, air and soil. Structural inequity is a form of invisible violence depriving communities of healthy living by food deserts, air quality and pollution, and unequal access to health care. These conditions intensify the risk of chronic conditions that compromise immune systems like asthma, diabetes and hypertension. According to the C.D.C. the rate of diabetes is 66 percent higher in African Americans than those numbers among white Americans. Likewise, the rate of hypertension is 49 percent higher. These statistics showing inequity have weaponized the coronavirus against the black community to catastrophic proportions across the tri-state area and Kings County.18 But this is not a new trend in America, the historical legal and social policies that have gotten us here and created the foundation to this as we see in our study of Justiceology in Kings County, have always existed. The resulting impact now is fatal. Public Housing and Dense Urban Planning Centers Public housing projects and dense urban landscapes are exposing millions of families with the elderly and immunodeficient at risk for contracting the virus. Indeed, across the nation, small, post-industrial populations occupy a critical boundary between the polarized metropolis (like Manhattan) and vast ex-urban landscapes. These regions were once the prize of the New Deal,19 envisioned in President Johnson’s administration and the so-called War Against 17 Alina Das, The Asthma Crisis in Low-Income Communities of Color: Using the Law as a Tool for Promoting Public Health, 31 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Soc. Change 273 (2007)(standing for the fact that African Americans and Puerto Ricans have significantly higher rates of asthma prevalence, hospitalization, and mortality, and stating, “the problems that plague low- income communities of color–substandard housing, environmental hazards, inadequate health care access, and the insufficient wages and lack of job opportunities that leave families with low household incomes–all contribute to the prevalence and severity of asthma.”) 18 Linda Villarosa, “ ‘A Terrible Price’: The Deadly Racial Disparities in COVID-19 America” N.Y. Times Magazine 19 This is the unofficial name that President Lyndon B Johnson gave during his State of the Union address on Wednesday January 8, 1964, and which was in response to the poverty rate at the time which amounted to roughly 19 percent. Following his speech, access to sustainable economic programs led by federal government initiatives resulted in Congress’s passing of the Economic Opportunity Act, which established the Office of Economic OpAcademia Letters, April 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Jonathan Andrew Perez, Esq., jonathan.aperez@gmail.com Citation: Perez, Esq., J.A. (2021). Justice for 2020 and Public Pandemics- Layers of Burden. Academia Letters, Article 228. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL228. 6 Poverty, introduced in the mid-1960s as a “solution” to “urban plight” and part of new “urban renewal” programs that were seeking solutions to communities that struggled with poverty. This top-down federal urban planning regimes that produced the large-scale public housing projects we know so well in the Red Hook Houses, the Brownsville densely-packed urban planning, became a source of “one-size-fits-all” Urban Renewal which sought to demolish old infrastructures and solve the problem of poverty, and waves of crime. However, post1960 these community projects were largely abandoned and left to disinvestment, dissolve, and crumble. Because of disinvestment in Urban Renewal and White Flight, these communities have now had to “fend on their own” in a new economy that is blighted by the effects of COVID-19. Racial Inequity and The Workforce The disproportionate representation of communities of color in the “essential” workforce adds an additional layer of burden. While Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1963 sought to reduce racial inequality and prevent discrimination in the marketplace. However, despite the belief that racial discrimination is not as rampant, the progress has led to a private capital market that is disproportionately white. According to the Bureau of Labor, whites are more likely to be employed than blacks or Hispanics, and whites are more likely to hold managerial or professional jobs.20 Overall, the percentage of workers who are managers or professionals increased from 29 percent to 33 percent for whites, from 16 percent to 22 percent for blacks, and from 13 percent to 14 percent for Hispanics. There is a clear decline in the white-collar employment jobs between whites and African American communities. The gap for Hispanics from whites for white-collar jobs is even more pronounced. (Racial Inequalities in Managerial and Professional Jobs (Feb. 1, 2001) Population Reference Bureau21 In a New York Times report from March 2020, as the number of Corona patients increased, exponentially, subway ridership decreased. However, as people were asked to socially-distance, and stay at home, during quarantine. Americans who struggle to live beyond paycheck-toportunity (OEO). (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_poverty) Most prominently this office worked with small community-led corporations like the Bedford Stuyvesant Community groups like the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. Most significantly, Robert F. Kennedy visited the community center in an effort to bridge the divide between federal help and local communities in “urban crisis.” 20 May 1, 2020. Professionals include professional specialists, nurses, and teachers. (Racial Inequalities in Managerial and Professional Jobs (Feb. 1, 2001) Population Reference Bureau; https://www.prb.org/racialinequalitiesinmanagerialandprofessionaljobs/ 21 https://www.prb.org/racialinequalitiesinmanagerialandprofessionaljobs/ Academia Letters, April 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Jonathan Andrew Perez, Esq., jonathan.aperez@gmail.com Citation: Perez, Esq., J.A. (2021). Justice for 2020 and Public Pandemics- Layers of Burden. Academia Letters, Article 228. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL228. 7 paycheck, are given a false “choice”: either stay at home, risking losing a month of rent and money for food. The social practice of isolation and distancing is financially unsustainable for many, as well as the implication that every family has high speed internet and who can videoconference.22 African Americas made up a large percentage of the U.S. workforce in nine of the ten lowest-wage jobs considered most high-contact essential services: Psychiatric Aides (39%); Orderlies (38%); Nursing assistants (38%); cooks, restaurant workers (16%); pharmacy aides (15%); Food prep supervisors and servers (15%); Childcare workers (15%); Pharmacy technicians (14%); Medical assistants (14%); funeral attendants (11%).23 Data from New York City show how ridership in the transit system is starkly divided by class and economic income lines. An analysis of M.T.A. data reveals that the most serious decline in subway ridership was in Manhattan where the ridership fell around 75 % while ridership in the Bronx, which has the highest rate of poverty of any of the Boroughs, and the lowest median income at $38,000, dropped by around 55%.24 Ridership was most prominent in an area like the Burnside Avenue station in the Bronx, where, some of the city’s most vulnerable lived, causing less-frequent subway cars that were packed and exposed more people who were deemed “essential” to the virus. In the areas bordering Burnside, roughly half the children live in poverty, 40% of the population as born outside the U.S. and roughly 1 in 4 residents do not have a high school diploma. (See NY Times, “They Can’t Afford to Quarantine. So They Brave the Subway”) The fault-lines of class disparity and the convergence of service-based industries that up until COVID-19 were considered more expendable, suddenly are valued by society placing even more burden on the already vulnerable. A recent McKinsey report shows that African Americans are 1.4 -1.8 times more likely to live in counties where there is a higher risk of contagion. These counties, too, have the highest risk of both condition as well as severe and permanent economic disruption. The report cites the top five indicators of disruption from underlying conditions: underlying health conditions, poverty rate, number of hospital beds, percentage of people in severe housing conditions, and population density.25 African Americans, on average, from birth have a life expectancy of about 3.5 years lower than white life expectancy,26 whose health outcomes are 22 NY Daily News: Coronavirus, A Black Plague. https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-coronavirusa-black-plague-20200407-sho64w6jhrc7fco5exyntrvnmu-story.html 23 McKinsey & Company, “COVID-19: Investing in black lives and livelihoods”, April 2020, a report. 24 Goldbaum, Christina and Cook, Lindsey Rogers. “They Can’t Afford to Quarantine. So they Brave the Subway.” NY Times. March 30, 2020; available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/nyregion/coronavirusmta-subway-riders.html 25 McKinsey & Company, “COVID-19: Investing in black lives and livelihoods”, April 2020, a report. 26 Linda Villarosa, “ ‘A Terrible Price’: The Deadly Racial Disparities in COVID-19 America” N.Y. Times Magazine May 1, 2020. Academia Letters, April 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Jonathan Andrew Perez, Esq., jonathan.aperez@gmail.com Citation: Perez, Esq., J.A. (2021). Justice for 2020 and Public Pandemics- Layers of Burden. Academia Letters, Article 228. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL228. 8 on par with poorer countries in the world, without the benefit of sophisticated medical systems and technology. Race-based harm has not disappeared from the U.S. but has transformed into another form. If argues that discrimination and race-based harm no longer exist after the Civil Rights movement, COVID-19 has shown that this is not the case. In fact, Southern states are experiencing the effects of COVID-19 at a tremendous scale, where the poor have lived through disinvestment and a history of anti-poverty, and anti-state-support carrying on the lineage. Dr. William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, emphasized how the systemic inequity in southern states where the wealthy had showed little empathy and common attitudes to poverty were such that if people were poor, the state and the leaders blamed poor people. The faults lied with the most vulnerable communities, and the government was one of limited government, promoting corporations in states like Georgia. Most of the states that have historically been a stronghold for Jim Crow laws and white supremacy are now poised to be the same governors and state delegates who were almost inevitably against state-supported anti-poverty initiatives are now hardest hit. One has only to look at the South to see the true effect that historical inequity has had on the responses to COVID-19. The South is poised to see more death and economic loss from COVID-19 than any other region in the country. While other state governors issued stay-at-home orders, many Southern Republican governors included extreme religious exemptions that allowed large crowds to continue to gather, and now seem poised (as of April 21, 2020) to open everything from beaches to nail salons long before the curve truly started to flatten. These same policies have existed long before the COVID-19 crisis, in different forms. The South has long been the center of those who believe that “individual responsibility” and deregulation of corporations, go hand in hand. Southern states have long left individuals to fend for themselves, and cut government programs have led to higher poverty rates, gaping holes in the social security safety net and a health care system in which 75 rural hospitals across the region have been shuttering in the last year alone. States where there has been a systemic dismantling and resistance to public services and anti-poverty initiatives are now experiencing the effects of those policies.27 There was the preaching of “individual responsibility” and cutbacks to Medicaid and crucial government programs, in the name of Southern pride and American liberty 27 Opinion from the Poor People’s Campaign. Academia Letters, April 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Jonathan Andrew Perez, Esq., jonathan.aperez@gmail.com Citation: Perez, Esq., J.A. (2021). Justice for 2020 and Public Pandemics- Layers of Burden. Academia Letters, Article 228. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL228. 9 Moving Forward At a time when COVID-19 is exposing these fault-lines in America, over the next couple months Offices across the country need to think about news way to approach Justice, Equity and Frameworks to Design these topics that do not shy away from systemic inequity. Governments and private organizations in the areas of housing, economics, education, and healthcare must expand and come together to address the context of the communities they serve and give a more nuanced approach to equity and disrupt the laws and policies that have led us to this point. Academia Letters, April 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Jonathan Andrew Perez, Esq., jonathan.aperez@gmail.com Citation: Perez, Esq., J.A. (2021). Justice for 2020 and Public Pandemics- Layers of Burden. Academia Letters, Article 228. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL228. 10