'Using lockdown as an excuse to choke the human spirit'

News coverage of the virus pandemic in the West is entwined with the contemporary Western obsession about race. Here is an example of race-baiting in the New York Times. I quote from the footnote to an article in Unherd by Matthew Crawford who is described, which means he describes himself, as a philosopher and mechanic. The footnote is more interesting than the article.

"On 1 May, the New York Times featured a slide show at the top of its homepage with eight images of Covid. Of these, four showed persons of color in the developing world wearing masks, in scenes tinged with despair yet showing heroic mutual care. One more was of a lonely transit worker disinfecting the New York subway, acting in the public interest. The remaining three showed the following: 1. Mask-less white males in a gym in the backward state of Georgia, lifting weights — to maintain their toxic masculinity, presumably. 2. A telephoto-crowded beach in Orange County littered with careless, mask-less people frolicking in a sea of white privilege. 3. A sputtering redneck in Michigan, again maskless, confronting a line of masked police and no doubt spewing the ‘rona straight into their faces. However novel the novel Corona virus may be, the objective of the Nation’s Newspaper of Record appears to be to fold this emergency into the longstanding pseudo-emergency of race that has been their pole star since about 2014."