California is reopening on June 15. We can't allow ourselves to go back to normal - San Francisco Chronicle

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On March 23 of last year, with COVID just beginning its deadly rampage across America and the stock market tanking, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick took to Fox News to issue a call for sacrifice:

The economy had to stay open at all costs. If older Americans caught COVID and died, so be it.

“As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?”

“If that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”

Fifteen months later, Patrick is still alive. Nearly 600,000 Americans are not.

He’s also still lieutenant governor of Texas. And while openly suggesting that wiping out the elderly to prop up the stock market struck many, myself included, as grounds for removal, if not public flogging, it’s now clear that millions across the country agreed with him — at least in spirit — and expressed that support in the form of mass revolts against social distancing, masking and business closures.

It’s easy to dismiss these attitudes as phenomena born of Trumpism, QAnon and anti-vax fervor. But clinging to the status quo — no matter how deadly, delusional or amoral — has long been part of our national character.

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In December 1942, America was fighting a world war on two fronts. And it was in crisis. The Japanese army had seized the primary American supply line for rubber and we were running out. U.S. military forces were in danger of exhausting the inventory they needed to continue their fight.

Lives were on the line. And the best and easiest way to preserve those lives was to get Americans out of their cars to keep them from burning rubber.

There was only one problem: We wouldn’t stop driving.

Voluntary driving restrictions didn’t work. Western states in particular recoiled at any mention of mandatory cutbacks. It took a year of politicking before FDR finally rammed through gas rationing rules.

Faced with a choice between convenience or death, even members of the Greatest Generation were perfectly happy to pick convenience.

Absurd as this recalcitrance was, it pales in comparison to the American unwillingness to break from its status quo on race. Even in the face of crisis.

In 1933, nine years before its rubber shortage, America faced unprecedented economic collapse from the Great Depression. New Deal plans were hatched to center a recovery around home ownership. If the federal government inserted itself into the mortgage business by providing cheap loans, it could expand the housing market, creating jobs and sustainable middle-class wealth in the process.

This was a radical break from established capitalist norms. But crisis dictated action.

There was, however, a hitch: Democrats in the South and other parts of the country preferred economic ruin to the idea of empowering non-white people with the opportunity to become their financial equals.

If Black people and other minority groups were given its benefits, the plan was doomed politically.

The result of this impasse was the Homeowners Loan Corp., a government lending institution that revolutionized home ownership in the United States, but also systematically racialized it.

The lending institution created lending maps that carved up American cities into graded racial territories. Exclusive white residential neighborhoods were given an A grade, and therefore the best loan terms. Black neighborhoods — as well as racially integrated areas — were painted red on the map, given a D grade and denied access to credit entirely.

This was the origin of the term redlining.

For decades, even after the Depression lifted, this system gave white buyers exclusive entree to cheap federal loans. This helped create an unprecedented expansion of home wealth for white America, and a powerful financial disincentive to integration.

America figured out a partial solution to an economic crisis, by expanding its racial one. The byproduct of that decision continued to be so ingrained in our status quo, most hardly knew it was there.

Until COVID.

Amid the sea of selfishness and incompetence that characterized much of the American response to COVID pandemic, the Bay Area was an island of ahistorical reason.

Eight decades after being part of the Western Bloc, which refused to voluntarily give up driving to stave off an invasion, Bay Area cities took early and decisive action to protect citizens from the spread of COVID. When residents were told to comply with strict lockdown and masking ordinances, we did. When vaccines became available, we took them.

These efforts saved lives. And yet they still weren’t enough.

COVID didn’t miss the Bay Area. Instead, its impacts were racialized.

Two months ago, The Chronicle published a map of how San Francisco neighborhoods were hit by COVID. Much of the city escaped relatively unscathed. But students of history will see patterns in the patches of COVID hot spots.

The virus’s trail is so firmly etched into the racial zones of the old Homeowners Loan Corp. maps, it’s as if the disease spread via government-sanctioned segregation in the 1930s. Which, in many ways, it did.

It would be hard to find a more blatant visual illustration that the past is prologue. That racism and death continue to live embedded in our status quo — even in the face of good intentions.

COVID was a test run. It showed us what our future holds without drastic action.

In the next few months, we’ll almost certainly smell the smoke-scented perfume of the coming climate emergency. As the years pass and that threat worsens, we’ll see history repeat itself. Those who can afford to will flee for safer, more comfortable environs. Or they’ll work from home while the “essential” risk their lives to fulfill the basic needs of their economic superiors. Who lives, who dies, who suffers will be guided at least in part by the racist policies of the past.

The Bay Area’s COVID response showed what a community united can accomplish. But it also revealed the limitations of good intentions absent systemic change.

On Tuesday, California will reopen. COVID restrictions will be lifted. A close approximation of our old lives will be available to us if we chose it.

It is our duty to resist. A return to the status quo is no different than Dan Patrick’s suggestion that Grandma die for the economy.

Matthew Fleischer is The San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial page editor. Email: matt.fleischer@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MatteFleischer

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