Second-Class Postals

Clearly our current spirit of neopatriotism cannot vanquish the old bogyman of racism in America. In fact, it seems that the swelling nationalism is shaping up to be a kind of mask for what many of us know is still a deep-rooted problem in America--the marginalization of poor people and people of color. In the months since the September 11 attacks, for the most part Americans have supported the government's military efforts to hunt down and eradicate those believed to be responsible. But following the recent deaths of two black postal workers who apparently inhaled anthrax while working in mail centers in the Washington, DC, area, it's hard to ignore the possibility that it didn't occur to some government officials that these workers' lives were worth protecting. Tom Ridge, Secretary of Homeland Security, and Tommy Thompson, Secretary of Health and Human Services, obviously didn't sit around and hatch a scheme to put postal workers in danger. Yet the way the October anthrax scare played out--or rather the government's response to it--makes it clear that high-level officials failed to protect the well-being of thousands of government workers, who are mostly black. This failure sprang, in all likelihood, from a cultural-awareness shortcoming closely tied to the new face of racism in America--what I call the "can't we all just get along and live in a colorblind society" brand of early-twenty-first-century racial denial.

For once, this shortcoming did not go completely unnoticed. But the media's performance has been bittersweet. On one hand, the press was quick to cover the immense contradictions in the government's response to anthrax outbreaks--i.e., the fact that workers on Capitol Hill were immediately evacuated, tested for anthrax and given weekslong supplies of Cipro, while postal workers weren't told of the high level of risk they operated under, weren't tested once the anthrax was found in their midst and were given only short-term doses of the drug. But most stories stopped short of pinpointing the full implications of this official oversight and failed to interview local activists or politicians who might have called it for what it was. But the earliest stories did let the postal workers' anger speak for itself.

One of the more telling quotes in this regard came in an October 25 New York Times story: "So far I don't see any baseball caps for postal workers like everyone's wearing for the firemen and police lost in New York," said Patricia Johnson, a veteran mail carrier and union president for workers in the facility where the two dead workers are believed to have contracted pulmonary anthrax. "No one's starting a fund for the families of the two postal workers," Johnson noted.

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