People of color won’t be required to wear masks in an Oregon county

(CNN) — People of color are exempt from an Oregon county’s mask mandate over concerns about racial profiling.

Lincoln County, Oregon, requires most residents to wear face coverings in public settings, indoors or outdoors. The overwhelmingly White county will not require non-White residents to wear them if they fear harassment, the county said this month.

It’s one of the first counties in the US to exempt people of color from wearing masks to prevent racial profiling.

Also exempt are people with disabilities or medical conditions whose breathing would be obstructed by a mask and children under 12, though children ages 2 through 12 are still encouraged to cover their faces.

Lincoln County, home to nearly 50,000 residents, is almost 90% White and less than 1% Black, census data shows. But it’s also home to the Siletz Reservation and a growing population of Latino residents.

The county’s directive diverges from Oregon Gov. Kate Brown’s mask guidance, which requires residents in seven counties to wear masks in indoor public spaces without exemptions for people of color.

When the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended in April that all Americans wear masks in public, many Black and Latino Americans didn’t feel comfortable following its advice. In their cases, wearing a mask could make others perceive them as criminal, activists and educators told CNN in April.

“This [wearing a mask] seems like a reasonable response unless you just sort of take American society out of it,” Trevor Logan, an economics professor at Ohio State University and a Black man, told CNN. “When you can’t do that, you’re basically telling people to look dangerous given racial stereotypes that are out there.”

It’s a “lose-lose” scenario, ReNika Moore of the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program told CNN in April, because either way, Black Americans feel endangered.

And they’ve beared the brunt of the coronavirus. Initial data shows that Black Americans are dying at disproportionately higher rates than other ethnicities. The American Public Media Research Lab estimated that Black Americans’ Covid-19 mortality rate is 2.3 times higher than the rate for White and Asian Americans.

The CDC’s advice came almost two months before protests erupted around the US after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were killed by police, though many demonstrators have worn masks while protesting.