While the Left was decrying “systemic racism” in the summer of 2020, it was imposing it on children across the country. Two years later, the most Democratic city in the country is still imposing the systemic racism of COVID restrictions on children.
Washington, D.C., has a vaccine mandate in place for children 12 and older to attend school. Children who have not received the COVID vaccine will not be allowed to attend school in the coming 2022-23 school year. Children are not at serious risk from COVID, even if they are unvaccinated, but city officials want to prevent them from going to school anyway.
Among students between 12 and 15, 85% are vaccinated. For black children, that number drops to 60%, meaning that 40% of black students aged 12 to 15 will be barred from attending school because they didn’t get a vaccine that they do not need. Those children, who already suffered through two years of remote “learning” and other unnecessary restrictions, will suffer yet another year of learning loss so vaccinated adults obsessed with safetyism can feel better about themselves.
As was entirely predictable, school closures during the pandemic harmed minority students the most. The learning gaps between white students and black and Hispanic students widened in states that forced schools to go remote, while states that allowed students to attend class did not see that gap widen.
Most students do not need to be vaccinated to be protected from COVID. Those students certainly don’t need city bureaucrats telling them that banning them from school is for their own health. And we are well past the point that any adult living in fear of COVID should be demanding sacrifices from others given that they could simply get the vaccine themselves. Yet here we are, as Washington intends to punish thousands of students in a futile effort to reach zero COVID.
That would be bad enough, but it comes after more than two years of liberal wailing about systemic racism. While many on the Left cited myths peddled by the Black Lives Matter movement as proof that the country is undeniably racist, liberal politicians and bureaucrats imposed COVID measures that harmed black children the most. Washington is now planning on keeping those measures in place for a third school year.
Washington was happy to paint “Black Lives Matter” on its streets to show how much it cared about racism, but COVID panic now comes first. While the city’s politicians pretend they care about fighting racism, they will be directly responsible for widening the learning gap between black students and their white counterparts.
