North America
Photo: Essential workers and advocates rallied in Queens last week asking the city. Edwin Martínez/Courtesy El Diario, 2020.
The US CARES Act and Latinx Workers Racial Capitalism at Work written by Grace Hunley
T
he economic slump resulting from the coronavirus pandemic has hit minority groups particularly hard in the United States, especially those of the Latinx community. According to the Pew Research Center, unemployment rates in the United States in June 2020 were the highest for people identifying as Latinx at 14.5%, with US-born Latinx people and Latinx women having higher rates of unemployment than foreign-born Latinx people and Latinx men respectively. Similarly, 59% of Latinx people in the US claim that they have experienced unemployment or pay cuts due to the pandemic, compared to 49% of the total population of the US. While one reason for the inequities presented in these statistics is the high number of Latinx workers in service-sector jobs that were shut down during the pandemic, policy issues are contributing to and exacerbating the economic hardships of Latinx people during the pandemic.
Racial capitalism is a major cause of the longstanding racial and socioeconomic disparities that have become exceedingly evident during the pandemic. ‘Racial capitalism’, a term coined by Cedric Robinson in his book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, emerged from the world histories of slavery, violence, imperialism and genocide as a capitalist system that is heavily influenced by racism and nationalism. Throughout the course of capitalism, racialisation has allowed governments and corporations to profit off of black and brown peoples by commodifying them. The most striking example of this has been the enslavement of native and African peoples, starting during the colonisation of the Americas. Racial capitalism persists in current US policies. As an example, many Latinx children are being separated from their families and detained in private detention centres around the US-Mexico border. This policy has resulted in hefty profits for the prisons as NBC News reports that it costs around $775 per night to keep each child. The recent CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act) carries two policies that also exemplify this, if less conspicuously: denying stimulus aid to workers paying taxes with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) and denying stimulus aid to mixed-status families – those families that include
Autumn 2020 • Dialogue 91
