By Demetrius Dillard
The global supply chain is critically important in everyone’s day-to-day lives, and can be loosely defined as a worldwide network or system that enables businesses and consumers to receive products and goods in a timely fashion.
The recent spike in gas prices, food costs and various other day-to-day expenses can be directly attributed to the latest global supply chain issues.
Problems significantly affecting supply chains are linked to the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, which over the past year and a half has largely impacted both supply and demand for big manufacturers – many of which aren’t operating at the levels they reached before the onset of the pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic has also impacted logistics-focused companies that particularly specialize in warehousing and transportation. Those two industries help store products that come from overseas and help deliver them throughout the country when they arrive here.
On Oct. 13, President Joe Biden revealed plans to help fix “bottlenecks” within the nation’s supply chain, including striking a deal with the Port of Los Angeles – the largest port in the U.S – to turn ports into 24/7 operations.
Lumber is becoming hard to find, products for small businesses to stock their shelves are hard to find and most notably, holiday gifts and items will be hard to find due to this crisis.
A severe labor shortage has also contributed to the crisis and may prolong the recovery process, though there may still be a high volume of goods being shipped to U.S. shores.
“We have increased the number of goods coming here to the U.S., but we do not have more truck drivers, we do not have more warehouse space,” Johns Hopkins professor Tinglong Dai told USA Today. “So then that’s where those cargo ships are stuck.”
According to the Business Insider, the key American ports face a near-record backlog of cargo ships, and things are expected to get worse as the holiday season approaches. Southern California’s ports had 63 of its 90 container ships waiting off the shore a few weeks back.
As of Oct. 5, the Port of Los Angeles had almost half a million 20-foot shipping containers, the equivalent of about 12 million metric tons of goods, waiting in drift areas for spots to open up along the port to dock and unload, according to data the Business Insider collected from the Marine Exchange of Southern California’s master queuing list.
Apparently, the U.S. isn’t the only country struggling to manage a backlog of cargo ships. On Oct. 3, Bloomberg reported that pandemic shutdowns created a “ripple effect, pushing the prices of goods across the globe to increase,” the Business Insider reported, adding that “executives have warned the shipping crisis will continue into 2023.”
Now, on to the matter at hand: What does all of this mean for Black America?
History has shown that Black people suffer at least twice as bad as their other counterparts (White, Hispanic, Asian, etc.) in times of national or global crisis – the most recent example being COVID-19.
Other examples can date back from the Great Depression of the 1930s to the Great Recession of the 2000s. Regardless of the era, regardless of the situation — the vast majority of Black Americans are at the bottom of the 10 to 1 racial wealth gap that persists in America.
A relatively large number of Black people live at or below the poverty line and clearly don’t have equal access to goods and resources, and that’s the bottom line as it relates to the worsening global supply chain issues.
“The global capitalist supply chain is controlled by white hegemonic masculinity.[1] Affluent, corporate-elite, straight white men are structurally positioned as the managers and overseers of a vast global logistics labor force comprised primarily of working-class men of color,” wrote Jake Alimahomed-Wilson, Professor of Sociology at California State University-Long Beach in his scholarly piece “Racialized Masculinities and Global Logistics Labor.”
Black leaders, educators and persons of influence (primarily Black billionaires and multi-millionaires) must realize these inequities and act accordingly by taking the necessary measures to garner resources and goods while alarming, and if need be, financially supporting their marginalized Black brothers and sisters who will be affected worst by this crisis.
Demetrius Dillard is a freelance writer based in Baltimore, Md.
