The chief economist for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Vance Ginn, is getting lambasted for his recent racist tweet that he has since taken down.  As you can read in the title to this piece, he said that said schools should open—after all, Hispanics and the elderly are the ones dying from COVID. 

Despite his weak proverbial republican excuse that his words in his Tweet were taken out of context, this is not defensible. Not only is there no nuance in what he said, but if he did want to be nuanced, a single Tweet is obviously not the medium for this. 

No, he's ok with Hispanics and the elderly dying at a greater rate from COVID than non-Hispanics. As far as I'm concerned, his devil-may-care attitude about opening schools disqualifies him from any credible or authoritative viewpoint on whether or not schools should re-open.

Has he not heard that the virus actually doesn't care about your race, class, gender, or age? Has he not yet grasped a key lesson that COVID is teaching us that everybody's health matters regardless of race, class, gender, or age?

But there's an even deeper point...

I also want to remind him and readers to this blog that "Hispanic" is a word that came into existence in the 1980s. It masquerades the fact that we Hispanics, Mexicans, Tejanas, Tejanos, Mexican Americans are native to this continent. We are the descendants of the original peoples to this continent. Somos Americanos Nativos, Native Americans, Indigenous. That we don't emphasize this more has either to do with our own internalized racism that largely comes from schooling and/or we've been severed from those connections due to forced assimilation in both the U.S. and Mexico. Assimilation and disparaging native peoples is a Latin America problem, too, as it was also colonized by Europeans. Award-winning film, Roma, about which I blogged previously is exactly about this problematic.

 To say this, is not to equate our experience with that of Native Americans—federally designated or not who are experiencing unconscionably high COVID rates—but rather to acknowledge a shared history of genocide, violence, and colonization, including the perpetual drumbeat of what I call in my own work, "subtractive cultural assimilation" (Valenzuela, 1999), to which both so-called “Hispanics” and Native Americans—especially the darker ones—alike are perpetually subjected.

I say all of this as background to the comment that I now want to make. In my circles, friends and colleagues—especially those on the front lines of this battle—share with me that they often think about the current COVID moment that we're in as yet again, a genocidal campaign to which our communities are getting subjected. N.B. I encourage you to read Dr. Greg Pulte's recent piece titled, "COVID19 is our Small-Pox Infected Blanket, as well as Dr. Juan Andrade's cogent analysis titled, "Trump's "Passive Eugenics" and Crimes Against Humanity."

So when a Vance Ginn makes comments like these, for many of us, it confirms what we already think and know. Consider that a state so contemptuous against Mexico and Mexican Americans, generally, that officials have already "attempted to deny birth certificates to the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants" (Garcia, 2019). 

It confirms the violent, dismissive, and genocidal impulse against us as native peoples. We as Mexicans, Mexican Americans, or "Hispanic" people are not at all "wearing out [our] welcome" as one unfriendly commentator posted to my blog last January.  We have nowhere to go back to if our ancestors have always been on this continent—thousands of years before there was anything called "Texas," "the United States," or "Mexico." And we're still here. We're not going anywhere. 

And I wish you could really know and internalize that because what we as Mexicans, Mexicanas, Chicanas, Latinx young people, families, communities, and nations have to offer is hopeful, brimming with potential. To draw on Professor emeritus University of California San Diego anthropologist, Dr. Olga Vasquez came up with an apt metaphor for who we as Indigenous people are, "We're like the beautiful sahuaro cactus that blooms in the desert. Despite the hardship, we always bloom and are a refuge for other desert creatures." 

In contrast, European-origin "white" people are exactly that—from Europe who were colonial settlers in their new land that they invaded and pillaged—and that finds expression today in the continued exploitation of native peoples, women, African Americans, and people of color, generally.  To position oneself as white and aboriginal to this continent is ignorant, arrogant, and a reflection of not only one's miseducation, but also of a willful, self-serving desire to perpetuate a highly unequal status quo that disproportionately benefits white people—and as a consequence, feeds the false narrative of white supremacy.

It's amazing to think that 528 years after Christopher Columbus set sail, many of us as Indigenous peoples still know our history. We teach it to our young, too. Perhaps it's not so hard to forget when people like Vance Ginn open up a wound of memory that builds on others. to keep such notions as genocide and colonialism fresh and alive, however painful or distressing.

-Angela Valenzuela

#BrownContinent

References

García, M. (2019, September 7). In Texas, a call to action against white supremacy, CNN Opinion.

Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling: U.S.-Mexican youth and the politics of caring. NY: State University of New York Press.

Conservative think tank leader says schools should reopen since most Texans dying from COVID-19 are elderly or Hispanic

In an interview, Vance Ginn said the intention of his Twitter thread was to outline the more thorough data provided by the state. He also said his tweet with a GIF was “woefully taken out of context out of bad faith.”

BY ALEX SAMUELS JULY 28, 2020UPDATED: JULY 30, 2020

Vance Ginn is chief economist at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Texas Public Policy Foundation

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Vance Ginn, the chief economist for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, is facing fierce backlash for a recent racist tweet that said schools should open since most of the people dying from the coronavirus in Texas are elderly or Hispanic.

Before Monday, the state’s racial and ethnic breakdown of deaths had large gaps, with up to 18% of deaths last month recorded as “unknown.” A revised count of the data released Monday by the Department of State Health Services, however, shows that Hispanic Texans are overrepresented in the state’s updated fatality count.

Citing the revised data, Ginn tweeted that the people most likely to perish from the deadly virus are people older than 50 and Hispanics, whose death rate increased from 24.8% on May 27 to 48% on July 27. Hispanics make up about 40% of the state’s population.

Meanwhile, about 180 deaths, or 3% of the total, occurred among Texans younger than 40. About 2,000 people who died were 80 or older, making up the largest age bracket of COVID-19 deaths.

“Why not #openschools, end universal mandates, target vulnerable & check those from #Mexico?” Ginn wrote in a since-deleted tweet. He juxtaposed his tweet with a GIF of Prince Harry of Wales miming a mic drop.

He later apologized for tweeting the GIF. “It’s been brought to my attention that the gif may have been perceived as insensitive. I apologize as that was not my intention,” he tweeted.

In an interview with The Texas Tribune, Ginn said the intention of his Twitter thread was to outline the more thorough data provided by the state. He also said his tweet with the GIF was “woefully taken out of context out of bad faith.”

“What we’re really focused in on is, ‘How can we best make sure that Texans are taken care of during this time?’” he said. Given the revised data that shows demographic breakdowns, he questioned whether state and local officials should take a more “targeted approach” to combatting the virus, rather than passing blanket policies.

Ginn later removed the tweet and apologized. “I believe strongly based on my deep faith that every life is precious,” he wrote. “My intent was to highlight the positive development of more data available to make better policy decisions and help the vulnerable.”

Almost 53% of public school students were Hispanic in 2018-19 and more than 60% are economically disadvantaged, according to Texas Education Agency data. Public health experts have said schools that reopen in areas with high and fast-rising rates of community spread are likely to exacerbate the effects of the virus. That means staff and students could bring the virus home to their families.

“This is my grandfather Albert. He was an Hispanic citizen of the U.S. & passed from #Covid,” tweeted former state Rep. Jason Villalba, R-Dallas. “His grandchildren (born in Dallas) lived with him and also got #Covid. They survived. W/ great respect, the death of elderly Hispanics does not necessarily make the schools safe to open.”

Ginn, who previously served in the White House under President Donald Trump's administration as associate director for economic policy at the Office of Management and Budget, also served as senior economist for the think tank.

While children may not be the most vulnerable to contracting the virus, fear of community spread has prompted some large school districts to delay the start of the fall semester for in-person instruction.

In mid-July, Texas education officials said school districts could delay on-campus instructions for at least four weeks and ask for waivers to continue remote instruction for up to four additional weeks in areas hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic. During that time, districts must educate at least a small percentage of students in person and give the state information on what public health conditions would allow them to bring more kids into classrooms.

In recent months, the Republican Party has faced criticisms for appearing to prioritize the economy over public health, while research shows that COVID-19 disproportionally affects Black and Hispanic people.

Gov. Greg Abbott, too, has faced pushback from Democrats on his coronavirus response efforts. Although he implemented a statewide mask mandate earlier this summer, he’s been chided for a speedy phased reopening of the economy to which public health experts attribute a record number of coronavirus deaths in the state.

Aliyya Swaby contributed to this report.

Correction: An earlier version of the headline on this story referred to the Texas Public Policy Foundation as a GOP think tank. The conservative foundation is nonpartisan. On July 30, the state said an “automation error” caused approximately 225 deaths to be incorrectly added to the overall death count; a subsequent quality check by Department of State Health Services epidemiologists revealed COVID-19 was not the direct cause of death in these cases. We updated the cumulative numbers for July 27-29 to account for this error.

Disclosure: Texas Public Policy Foundation has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.