Many had anticipated that Trump’s recklessness while the coronavirus infected thousands on the US soil will have wider implications. Americans have been cooped up in their homes. The opinion in the NYT has identified this phenomenon with ‘ghettoisation’.
Ghetto is associated with conferring inferior status to a particular community and limiting their opportunities. In the author’s sense, Ghetto is described as an impact of “Trump’s tendency to demonize his perceived enemies and then cast them into a permanent irrelevance that justified his ignoring of their concerns, to put them over there”.
The term was used to denote “black people who’ve lived in segregations everywhere in country.” Now people of every color are anxious as they lose their jobs to the stagnation brought by coronavirus.
“The president has said the enemy is the virus, but that’s too abstract for him; the real enemy is anyone who acknowledges the seriousness of the coronavirus crisis, which continues to upstage and overshadow him”, points the opinion piece.
Trump has made anyone who demands tests and obeys lockdown as insignificant. While, the anti-lockdown protesters are termed as “good people” by the president. Nonetheless, it is cogent to note that how the most-resource rich country in the world “could not find the wherewithal to warn its people about what was coming”.
Some say it is the centralisation of power that has left Americans in a deplorable position. Not to mention that the group suffering the highest fatality rate from the virus are the black population.
Original Link for deep read: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/opinion/coronavirus-trump-race.html