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The year of COVID: The vulnerability of being Black or brown | Opinion
Updated Mar 10, 2021;
Posted Mar 10, 2021
Elise Boddie, director of Rutgers University’s Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, says Black and brown lives have long been precarious. COVID-19 just laid bare what America must have known but would not see. Illustration by Andrea Levy | Advance Local.
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NOTE: On the one-year anniversary of COVID-19 in New Jersey, we will publish several opinion pieces about our experiences over the past year. Today, a professor writes about how the pandemic affected Black and brown communities. Thursday, a teacher writes about how she endured a year of teaching at home.
Hank Aaron and the Hill
Elise C. Boddie
Rutgers-Newark director, Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice and Professor of Law
When Hank Aaron died two weeks ago, the tributes poured in. Mostly, they were about his breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record. But they also told of his life under the virulent strains of racism – the threats against him and his family, the police escorts, the way he used to leave through the back of the ballparks, rather than from the front. For all the glory, in those early days Aaron lived in the shadows of violence. “They carved a piece of my heart away,” he told the New York Times in 1994.