Featuring John Kim, Executive Director, Advancement Project California: What’s America’s deadliest underlying condition? How have decades of unbridled gentrification, racial and economic segregation and discrimination intersected to keep communities of color in the eye of the pandemic in Los Angeles? John Kim and Code WACK! host Brenda Gazzar examine the systemic injustices exacerbated by COVID-19. Plus, why building trust is essential to any solution.
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COVID’s Deadly Trio: Gentrification, Racial Segregation & Distrust
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Welcome to Code WACK!, your podcast on America’s broken healthcare system and how Medicare for All could help. I’m your host Brenda Gazzar. Today, we’ll examine the link between the spread of coronavirus, race and racism.
The shocking images of George Floyd’s death in the custody of a white Minneapolis officer who knelt on his neck for eight minutes despite the black man’s urgent pleas, has sparked massive protests across the country. It’s happening amid the pandemic that has forced much of the country to shelter in place.
Los Angeles County’s public health director, Dr. Barbara Ferrer, said there’s a connection between the brutal killing of Floyd and the current coronavirus crisis. Black Americans fare worse than other groups on virtually every measure of health status, she said. Science is also clear that the root cause of health inequities is racism and discrimination.
Shortly before Floyd’s death, I interviewed John Kim, who’s the Executive Director of Advancement Project California, a multi-racial, multi-generational racial justice organization with expertise in research, advocacy, and policy. His comments are as relevant as ever in light of the recent events.
Welcome to Code WACK!, John.
Amid the coronavirus crisis, the Advancement Project California recently released an interactive policy brief: How Race, Class and Place Fuel a Pandemic. Tell me what that means and what you found.
Kim: Unfortunately, the report found something that had worried us and confirmed something that had worried us from the opening days of this crisis. And in those first days, we assumed that this would be one more example on top of generations of examples of how in America the deadliest underlying condition is still systemic racism. And even in a place like Los Angeles with our national image as a lefty Progressive inclusive place, that when you get rid of the artifice and the nice flowy, flowery language we like to use sometimes here, that you actually look at the economic and political structures at work, when you look at the way that this region is formed by neighborhood and by race that in the end, that anything that is a burden, anything bad or hard will all flow in one direction and that’s generally right to the doorstep of low-income black, Latinx and indigenous families.
Wow. Can you speak to what that looks like on the ground?
Kim: In those early reports, we saw mortality disparities of 2 – 2.5x between black and Latinx and white populations or cases but we knew that if we looked a little bit ahead of the actual point of death and mortality, if we looked at confirmed cases, a lot of the race data wasn’t filled out, for that … and so as opposed to waiting for that we decided to really create a different kind of analysis that looked at the contours of confirmed cases by geography and by neighborhood and then analyzing that against the poverty and racial demographics of those neighborhoods. And it again sort of confirmed what we assumed at the beginning, which was that the cases started in wealthier, whiter communities, particularly as they were being tracked early in March or middle of March, and then as the shelter-in-place order started to take hold, we saw that this virus in the confirmed cases started to shift directionality into much more poor and much more POC or People of Color communities in L.A.
It not only shifted directionality but because of the way gentrification and racial segregation has worked in L.A., because of the way that housing density has played through in LA, it shifted velocity as well.
Got it. When you talk about racism fueling the disparities, you mentioned things like segregation and housing. Can you talk about some examples in L.A. where that’s been really evident?
Kim: Actually it’s our freeways that’s actually the most diverse part of LA County. It is not our neighborhoods and unfortunately not our schools….and so that is certainly one factor, but in these conditions around COVID-19, it’s also about the way our economy works.
It’s put many more black, Latinx, Pacific Islander and indigenous families in what are now celebrated as essential jobs but it kept them in harm’s way while wealthier and whiter residents were able to kind of shelter in place, lock the door and get out of the way of this virus and so the economic realities of who has what kinds of jobs exactly formulated who could be safe and not safe in those opening days of this crisis.
The last thing that I would note… is that this has everything to do with how much trust exists in communities and how much trust was built between government in those communities over the last several generations. If you have a history of police violence on black bodies, it only makes sense that you are going to have a larger trust gap between the black community and government institutions, even though it might now be public health officials who are the heroes of this moment and that are trying to save all of us but they are held back because of injustices from government to these communities for generations.
Within the Latinx community, you have to talk about the ICE raids, you have to talk about the rhetoric from the administration, you have to talk about public charge to understand that there is a huge gap between Latinx communities and public institutions and so between the economy, between housing and gentrification and racial segregation and a lack of trust that was sort of foisted upon these communities, we have a much larger gap to to fill. We have many more issues to deal with than just the public health crisis in front of us.
Thank you so much, John. In our next pod, we’ll talk about whether Medicare for All could help address some of these inequities.
Find more Code WACK! episodes on ProgressiveVoices.com and on the PV app. You can also listen at HEAL dash C-A dot org. This podcast is powered by HEAL California, which uplifts the voices of those fighting for healthcare reform around the country. I’m Brenda Gazzar.
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