Under the guise of COVID, all of the formerly free and open to the public kids’ activities now require that you undergo a byzantine process of registration that includes uploading your driver’s license and another form of ID. You have to do this every single time you want to take your kid to an activity. Even when it’s a weekly art lesson, like the one we visit every Saturday. The apps you have to register with are buggy and require the patience of Sisyphus. And probably the knowledge of who Sisyphus is.
Obviously, only highly educated, extremely organized, quite leisurely and properly documented mothers can win the battle with the registration process that you have to undergo every week at very specific times for every activity. My calendar is littered with reminders that activity X can be registered for on Th-F while activity Y’s registration only works on Monday evenings.
Before COVID, you could just walk into these activities whenever the fancy struck you. Nobody ever asked for ID or any advance notice.
This week the app for the Saturday activity kept malfunctioning, and I had to struggle with it for three days to make it work. My kid loves the activity, so I tied myself into a pretzel to get her in.
The result? Black and Hispanic kids have disappeared from the events. The attendees are now about 60% Asian and 40% white. Working class families have disappeared, too. I now know everybody at every event because they are either professors or dentists / doctors. Just the kind of people who love bleating stupidly about racial justice and diversity. It’s such a convenient, sneaky, slick-bastard way of excluding the undesirables while pretending that it’s all about health.
COVID mitigation is a class war.
Clarissa's Blog 
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