Health is inextricably associated with socioeconomic status, yet studies show racism plays a key role in health disparities. How and why? Racial bias in employment, housing, education, criminal justice and health care all intersect in a “perfect storm” of disadvantage for communities of color. The impact on Black health is striking, never more so than now during the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, at the time he was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, George Floyd had been exposed to coronavirus.
Commentary
From Policing to Pandemic: America’s Lethal Racism
Between police brutality and the coronavirus, Black Americans are increasingly finding it hard to breathe.
For decades they have been victimized by police across the country. They have been shot, suffocated, hunted down and/or assaulted while jogging, shopping, eating, driving, playing and even sleeping.
According to Mapping Police Violence, eleven hundred persons were killed by police in 2019. Black people were 24% of the victims, despite being only 13% of the population. In 2015 police killed unarmed black people at 5 times the rate of unarmed Whites.
And in less than 1% of cases were officers even charged with a crime, much less convicted.
In fact, we often only find out about police killings by accident — because they happened to be recorded. And the recordings almost always reveal facts in direct contradiction of the police version of events.
Many see police brutality itself as a public health issue
Osagie K. Obasogie, professor of bioethics at UC Berkeley, in his article Police killing black people is a pandemic, too, urges policy makers, political and community leaders to determine “how a network of government-sponsored brutality across 18,000 local, state, county and federal law enforcement agencies can, in lockstep, without any central organization, create persistent terror in black communities.”
Police violence is a leading cause of death among Black men, yet such killings are only the most dramatic reflection of a system that commits violence against African Americans every day. According to the NAACP Criminal Justice Fact Sheet, over a million African Americans are incarcerated in the US, at nearly six times the incarceration rate of white Americans. And so nearly one third of African American men will be imprisoned during their lifetimes.
If that isn’t enough, COVID-19 is spreading rapidly and disproportionately through communities of color, highlighting dramatic inequities in access to health care and testing. Mortality rates are highest by far among Black Americans.
But according to Dean E. Robinson, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, “The pronounced differences in COVID-19 mortality are not driven by a lack of health care per se but a reflection of how the virus compounds health problems created by inequality.”
For example, according to Brian Resnick in Vox:
Many racial and ethnic minorities, … have been classified as “essential workers,” and are unable to work from home, leave their job, or access paid sick leave. They live in denser housing and more often polluted communities than whites — a result of years of racist housing policy that puts them at greater risk during a pandemic.
Pervasive Racism: A Daily Reality
Between the George Floyd murder-by-cop and the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans have been forced to confront the pervasive racism that is not only our national heritage, but our daily reality.
We must all act together to work for the changes that are long overdue and take action to fulfill the promise of our democracy. It has fallen to us to address the vast disparities that have so cruelly impacted communities of color for decades, including in health care.
–Mark Wrede
Mark Wrede is a freelance content researcher and writer living in Los Angeles, California. markwrede@ca.rr.com
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