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This forum was organized by the Taiwan Instiute for Sustainable Energy (TAISE) in the context of the United Nations Global Treaty on Plastics.

According to this article by Nicole Westmen (2020), police violence has been tied to the development of numerous underlying conditions that increase the risk of complications from COVID-19. Furthermore, experiences of police brutality have been shown to foment distrust with other institutions, including medical institutions. As a result, contact tracers are experiencing resistance to divulging such important information as whether or not COVID-19 patients attended a protest and who they might have encountered there, for fear of retaliation.

In New Orleans, African American communities were not only hit hard by Katrina's floods, but also by violent policing during the catastrophe and a disaster "recovery" effort that was fundamentally Anti-Black (closing of publich housing and the privatization of schools and health care). Recovery efforts were not organized along ideals of racial justice that would have addressed gaps in educational and health care resources. Instead, they were imagined along neoliberal principles that systematically excluded the city's Black population. I am interested in looking into how the Anti-Blackness of Katrina "recovery" set the stage for the virulent way COVID 19 is affecting New Orleans' African American communities.

In the US Virgin Islands, Hurricanes Maria and Irma decimated what were already decrepit public school and public health systems. Public schools and hospitals had not been property repaired and remained under-supported as of early March 2020. In places like the Island of St. Croix, residents reported the hospital having only one physicial on staff, and indicated fear of misdiagnosis and prolonged waiting times kept them from seeking health care there. The clientelle of the public health system is predominantly Afro and Hispanic Caribbean. Meanwhile, US "mainlanders" (who are predominantly white) are reported to seek their healthcare off island, something only those with ample financial resources can do. Infection rates and fatality rates for the USVI seem rather low from official reports, but it is important to find out if this is because testing itself is not readily avialable in the territory.

Media coverage from hard-hit cities suggests there is a disproportionate number of arrests and citations related to enforcement of social distancing among racial minorities.

Also, police response seems to have followed very different patterns in the case of "re-open" protests and anti-police brutality protests.

I'm currently learning more about Wikipedia for another course project, mostly focused on how I could use it to teach undergraduates. I've used Wikipedia countless times but never looked further into how the contribution process actually works, nor did I ever contribute anything. Below are a few brief observations about BLM on Wikipedia: 

Every article has a "talk" page where users discuss changes. As events are unfolding, there are various discussions about the Black Lives Matter entry. For example: should there be separate entries for BLM as an organization and social movement (like Black Panther Party and Black Power Movement). Currently, COVID-19 is only mentioned once, in a sub-section on protest in New Zealand.

In addition to the talk page, there is an entire WikiProject, a sort of overview site to cover activity about BLM. Throughout June 2020, they are hosting an edit-a-thon to improve articles related to BLM, racism, racial justice, and policing. 

Sidenote: there is also an entry for #AllLivesMatter – which according to the talk page was split off sometime in 2016. The "criticism" section opens with a reference to David Theo Goldberg (in our department here at UC Irvine).

As you can tell from my notes, I'm still very new (and slightly overwhelmed) by the different layers of participation. Since I will keep learning more, we could think about whether and if our own transnational project could contribute to discussions (see the WikiProject site for COVID-19). 

While it is certain that black communities in the US are being disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, the extent to which this is the case is still unknown. In Texas, there is only an 18% gap in the demographic data on the races of positive COVID-19 cases, which is much smaller than the 65% gap nation-wide. Still, this gap means the true prevalence of COVID-19 among black communities could range from being roughly equal to their population share to nearly three times worse (Martinez and Keller 2020). Furthermore, while Texas testing sites are recording the race/ethnicity of people who test positive for COVID-19, these articles in the Austin Statesmen and Austin's local NPR attest to the need to record similar data for rates of hospitalizations and death. Austin-Travis County does not record this data, which is why the City is unable to report any race-related differences in the distribution of COVID-19 fatalities (Platoff 2020). Across the state of Texas, only 1/3 of confirmed COVID-19 fatalities have data of the race or ethnicity of the deceased.

In this article, it is comparing how polluted Newark is compared to the country mentioning facts such as Newark residents face the nation's second greatest risk due to diesel emissions, the city being the nation's largest trash incinerator in the Northeast, and 25% of the school children in Newark face asthma which is double compared to the nation's average rate.