Opinion | Gretchen Whitmer: The Coronavirus Is a Civil Rights Battle, Too

For a moment, the death of George Floyd has eclipsed the nation’s battle with a lethal virus. But the stories are not at odds. Both reveal an infection we have yet to overcome.

Last Friday night would have been my daughter’s high school graduation ceremony. Because of orders I signed to protect Michiganders, my family and I were at home. No robes, no diplomas, no pomp and circumstance — like families across the country, just doing our best to make do and manage the disappointment.

I kept my phone close at hand. Protests were sparking across Michigan and the nation. Then a text brought news that I never expected: The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department in Washington had just filed a 17-page document asking the federal courts to strip me of my powers to protect the people of my state from Covid-19.

As cities boiled over with anger at racially targeted policing, the Justice Department argued that the true victims were carwashes and a jewelry store. Their closures were “arbitrary” and “oppressive.” About George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, the filing was silent.

Instead, after a string of federal failures — botched testing, buried safety guidelines, irresponsible recommendations and funding threats — the Trump administration was actively working to stop me from taking the actions my public health officials have told me are necessary to save lives.

The shameful irony does not escape me. It was the Civil Rights Division that prosecuted the murders of three civil rights workers during the Freedom Summer of 1964. The same office enforced the Voting Rights Act in the Jim Crow South to end the disenfranchisement of black citizens. And the same office held the Ferguson Police Department to account for fleecing and abusing its black residents.

Yet the Civil Rights Division was now trying to impede my efforts to fight a virus that has ripped through communities of color. You can see the legacy of racism in our mortality data. In Michigan, African-Americans have suffered 40 percent of all deaths from Covid-19 yet make up only about 14 percent of the population.

That’s why I pushed Michigan to become one the first states to report mortality by race and ethnicity. And it’s why I created the Michigan Coronavirus Task Force on Racial Disparities, which is working to remove barriers to care and mitigate the environmental and infrastructure factors that make the coronavirus so deadly in our black communities.

Fighting the coronavirus isn’t only a matter of public health. It is a matter of civil rights.

Even as the White House works to undermine my efforts, the courts have signaled that they will not support lawsuits meant to strip governors of their powers to fight the virus. And rightly so. In Michigan, for example, a judge has rebuffed the Republican-controlled legislature’s effort to argue that an emergency law that has been on the books since 1945 is unconstitutional.

On Friday night — just a few hours after the Justice Department filed its statement in federal court — the Supreme Court rejected a request from a California church to stop a rule limiting the number of parishioners who could attend services at one time. In a rare opinion joining with the court’s liberals, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that governors’ decisions about a lethal pandemic “should not be subject to second-guessing by an ‘unelected federal judiciary,’ which lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people.”

The chief justice’s opinion showed the Civil Rights Division’s filing for what it was: a brazen attempt to politicize a response to a global pandemic. Even in a case implicating the right to the free exercise of religion, protecting the public health comes first.

There’s nothing “arbitrary” about closing private businesses in response to the coronavirus. What is arbitrary, instead, is the federal government’s continued refusal to grapple with the problems that are so apparent to Americans. Carwashes are not the issue.

Whatever the Department of Justice may think, the story of Covid-19 is a story about the historical legacy of racism in our country. With enough time and money, I am optimistic we will develop a vaccine to inoculate us from one infection. But we must bring the equivalent commitment to the cause of healing the racial divide that continues to blight the United States.

Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, is the governor of Michigan.

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