Since we've learned more about the virus, it's becoming clear that, because the virus isn't as deadly as the models claim, a complete economic shutdown is not going to save lives.  Armed with that information, the logical thing to do is to reopen the economy as quickly as possible.  The rising number of people protesting, committing civil disobedience, and taking advantage of any exceptions to lockdown (just look at these surfers), shows that Americans are ready and, indeed, desperate to get back to normal.

Democrats, however, are loath to do so.  I posited on Tuesday that, with their draconian lockdown orders, all of which are predicated on successfully erasing the virus with a vaccination (reminder: there's still no AIDS vaccination), the Democrats' real goal is to tank the economy so Trump cannot get re-elected.

I'm even more concerned about a political motive behind the shutdowns now that hardcore Democrat activists are alleging that lifting lockdowns is racist.  Bringing out the "racism" big gun ignores the fact that poverty,  not to mention a complete collapse of the American economy and food supply chains, will kill more blacks than the virus ever could.  The following are just some examples of the effort to block re-opening America by claiming racism.

Brittney Cooper is a professor at Rutgers who specializes in race and feminism.  Here's a sample of her résumé:

She is author of Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (University of Illinois Press, May 2017) and Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (St. Martin's, February 2018).  In particular, this work interrogates the manner in which public Black women have theorized racial identity and gender politics, and the methods they used to operationalize those theories for the uplift of Black communities.

I have no idea what that means.

On Tuesday, Cooper published a Twitter thread stating in unequivocal terms that racist whites are trying to reopen the country to commit genocide against black people:

Not only do white conservatives not care about Black life, but my most cynical negative read of the white supremacists among them is that they welcome this massive winnowing of Black folks in order to slow demographic shifts and shore up political power.

— Brittney Cooper (@ProfessorCrunk) April 28, 2020

They are literally willing to die from this clusterfucked COVID response rather than admit that absolutely anybody other than him would have been a better president. And when whiteness has a death wish, we are all in for a serious problem.

— Brittney Cooper (@ProfessorCrunk) April 28, 2020

I am saying some obvious things this morning because as a country we are too good at skipping over the audience and we might as well say this to people as often as we can. Fuck each and every Trump supporter. You all absolutely did this. You are to blame.

— Brittney Cooper (@ProfessorCrunk) April 28, 2020

Black Lives Matter. Black Lives with hypertension, diabetes, and asthma matter. Fat Black Lives matter. All Black Lives matter.

— Brittney Cooper (@ProfessorCrunk) April 28, 2020

In Hollywood, Tim Robbins, a white guy who is worth $60 million, none of which appears to have gone to poor blacks recently, also claimed a genocidal motive behind lifting the shutdown (and revealed he believes that all blacks work to serve whites, just as they did in slave days):

"My heart hurts. This is an outrage. But hey, reopen the economy because I need poor people to cut my hair, cut my nails, watch my kids and make my lattes," Tim Robbins said in the now-deleted tweet, for which a screenshot has been provided below. "We have become a death cult run by sociopaths [and] fueled by racist self-interested citizens with no sense of shared responsibility."

Vox published a lengthy article entitled "The whiteness of anti-lockdown protests: How ignorance, privilege, and anti-black racism is driving white protesters to risk their lives."  It reads as you would expect:

But what has been most glaringly obvious about these protests isn't the far-right theatrics. It's that almost everyone marching to end stay-at-home orders is white. And if they do return to "regular life" and refuse to distance themselves, their overt disregard will impact the population most vulnerable to the virus — black people.

At Yahoo, we learn that the masks that allow people to escape lockdown are racist, too:

The coronavirus pandemic has created life-and-death dilemmas for people all over the globe — and a particularly devastating one for black men living in America: Wear a mask for protection against COVID-19? Or go without one, simply to lower the risk of being perceived as a criminal?

[snip]

"The criminalization of blackness has spread during this pandemic," Ashton Woods, co-founder and lead organizer of Black Lives Matter Houston, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. "It's disheartening that CDC and our leaders told us that we didn't need to wear masks in public, only to reverse course without providing masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE) to the general population. Now we have to wear whatever is available to us as the data continues to show that black people are disproportionately affected by the coronavirus."

In Congress, Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) claimed during a Biden campaign livestream that Trump's whole management of the Wuhan virus is racist:

"Black people have always been aware of systemic and institutional racism. COVID-19 just proved to the rest of the country that it exists," U.S. Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH) said.

What you see above comes from a narrow class of blacks and whites: academics, journalists, and celebrities.  On the ground, real people, the ones whose livelihoods are affected by the lockdown, have a different outlook.  Taurean Overall, who owns three successful barbershops in Atlanta, was delighted to see the lockdown end:

For the last two months — I speak for myself — I had no income for the last two months. I own three barbershops, I also cut hair myself, and us being out of work is no money coming in at all. In the last few months, I have spent over $20,000 in rent, in mortgages, you know, stuff like that. I applied for the SBAs, applied for the unemployment. I haven't even received the stimulus."

"So my question to people out there: what should we do? Should we just sit back and wait for the government to bail us out, or take advantage of the opportunity we have them be as safe as possible and still, you know, make as much money as we can and play it safe?" 

If the academics and politicians are worried about the well-being of blacks in America, they'll do them a greater service by enabling them to earn a living than by demanding that America's economy collapse.