Getting vaccinated is an act of revolution for Black Americans | Opinion

Dr. Karen Kelly-Blake

There are more than 620,000 dead in the U.S due to COVID-19.More than 72% of adults ages 18 years and older have received at least one vaccine dose, but only 50% of the total population is fully vaccinated. The delta variant now accounts for an estimated 83% of cases in the U.S. SARS-CoV-2 continues to wreak havoc in Asia, Africa and Latin America with a global death toll of more than 4 million people.

In the U.S., the unvaccinated rate is especially troubling in the west and south. From the start, COVID-19 has decimated Black, Latino and Indigenous communities with high rates of severity of disease, hospitalization and death. The pandemic has not disappeared with the vaccines, but indisputably, the vaccines provide a way forward.

Vaccines offer an incredible opportunity to quell the assault. This commentary is not about vaccine hesitancy.

It is not about dispelling conspiracy theories, nor pleading for folks to “trust science.”

This commentary is instead a plea to Black people to live — so that justice can roll down. And the only incentive I offer here is that Black Lives Matter.

But do they? Black lives only matter if Black folks are alive. We live in a society that devalues Black life on every level: we are not human; we are inherently criminal super predators; we are hypersexualized and exotic; we are stupid; we are aggressive and loud; and, in short, we are unworthy to be taking up space on the planet. Unless of course, we stay in our place.

What is our place? Our place is right here right now. Living and breathing. If we want to change such white supremacist narratives and shatter those racist structures that perpetuate and sustain egregious harms, then we must be alive — alive to dismantle the systems that want us to die. We are U.S. history. We are the living monuments that illustrate this country’s lies.

I argue that not getting vaccinated is akin to saying, “I give up,” and thus, America with all its racial lies, hatred, inhumanity and immorality has won. We tell a nation with no moral authority that indeed it has achieved its goal — the continued eradication and erasure of Black lives. As we watched the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, hoping against hope that justice would be achieved, but with that inner voice telling us that it probably would not happen, we simultaneously were watching increasing case counts and hospitalizations. We see that again with the delta variant of COVID-19.

Getting the vaccine is about justice. We must live to fight for what is right, good, humane and moral. Succumbing to a disease that causes an agonizing death denies us the ability to engage and demand justice, redress and repair (dare I say reparation?). We save America every time — remember the 2020 election? We must love ourselves and make America what it needs to be for us to thrive and to prosper because in doing so we all will greatly benefit and reap the rewards. Getting the vaccine and not dying from COVID or its complications is revolutionary because we want to live. We want to be everything America says we are not and cannot be — but we are America.

What would happen if every Black person who can get vaccinated does so? Our living, our vital revolution, is anathema to the power structure. Our living is the bane of existence to those who would kneel on our necks and shoot us in the back while running in our neighborhoods. We must live to make America answer for its wrongs. We must live to ensure that our future generations will look back and see not only slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, state sanctioned police violence and white Christian domestic terrorism, but also the revolutionary act of living, resisting and protesting through a pandemic by getting a vaccine to ensure the uplift of all of us.

If now is indeed the time to engage in direct action, in protest, in resistance, in dismantling systems that ascribe Black people to inferior status, then vaccination is our work. How many times have we heard that we need to take small steps and that change gets done quietly and incrementally? This is not quiet work. Getting vaccinated during a pandemic is an act of resistance — it is revolutionary. It screams that we have been here, we are here, and we going to be here. Let us do this work and let justice roll down.


Dr. Karen Kelly-Blake is assistant director and associate professor in the Center for Bioethics and Social Justice and Department of Medicine at Michigan State University's College of Human Medicine. The opinions expressed in this commentary are the author’s own. Kelly-Blake notes that she and her husband are fully vaccinated, and that, unfortunately, and frustratingly only nine in their combined families have been vaccinated.