Since early April, the CDC has recommended that everyone wear a mask or some kind of face-covering in public to help slow the spread of coronavirus. While this makes sense without context, this recommendation raised concerns for many people of color who are worried about being racially profiled as criminals for wearing a homemade mask or bandana. Aaron Thomas said on twitter, “I don’t feel safe wearing a handkerchief or something else that isn’t CLEARLY a protective mask covering my face to the store because I am a Black man living in this world. I want to stay alive but I also want to stay alive.” This was retweeted more than 17000 times and encompasses a widespread sentiment.
People of color, and men in particular, are stereotyped constantly as criminals by the media, and they are seriously mistreated by our criminal justice system. Racial bias in the criminal justice system has a long history: one law passed in Pennsylvania in 1700 stated that if a black man attempted to rape a white woman, he could be castrated or punished to death, which was not the case for white men.
Despite the progress made in the area of civil rights, some racist laws persist. During the war on drugs in the 70s, crack cocaine, a drug that is functionally the same as powder cocaine, was falsely portrayed by the media as more addictive and more dangerous. The minimum sentence for possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine was 5 years in prison, while to get the same sentence for possessing powder cocaine one needed to have 500 grams (over a pound), 100 times more than if they had been carrying crack. Crack is cheaper than cocaine, and it is usually sold in small quantities to individuals, making it much more prevalent in poor and minority communities, demonstrating the blatant targeting of these laws.
The Stanford Open Policing Project that looked at data from traffic stops from 2011 to 2017 found that blacks were stopped at a higher rate than whites. There are many recent examples of police brutality and shootings of people of color, particularly men. This unfair treatment by the criminal justice system has created fear among people of color of being profiled, unfairly arrested and subject to violence at the hands of police or mistreatment by other members of the general public.
People of color may be wary of any action or appearance that might increase their already elevated risk of mistreatment, and the thought of wearing a homemade mask or bandana (an example of a clothing item associated with gangs or criminals) can be particularly scary for black men, as the consequences for being perceived as a criminal can be fatal. In this video, a police follows two black men through a Walmart and asks them to leave, wrongly telling them that wearing masks is against a city ordinance. Another video shows a cop arresting a doctor wearing a mask outside his own home. this is a lose-lose situation; the choice between dying of coronavirus and being shot seems like a bad one.
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