Fifty years from now what will be the story of 2020?
COVID-19 and racism are not two stories - they're the same story.
If you asked the proverbial person on the street what the dominant story of 2020 is their answer would likely focus on the global pandemic or structural racism and state violence against Black and Brown communities.
While most mainstream news coverage has treated these narratives as separate stories the truth is that they are one and the same. The story of the COVID-19 pandemic, at least in the United States, is inextricably linked to and shaped by structural racism and ongoing, systemic, state-facilitated violence against Black and Brown communities.
The impact of structural racism and segregation on Black and Brown communities has been well documented. We know that Black and Brown communities experience lower life expectancy, more premature deaths, higher infant mortality rates, lower birth weights, and more chronic disease in NORMAL times.
And we know that these disparities have nothing to do with biological race because “race” is a social construct that has no biological basis. (To learn more about the social construction of race I recommend The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter and the podcast Speaking of Race)
So what we’re left with is the -ism of racism. While race may not be biologically real the practice of racialized structural and physical violence against those who have been labeled as “Black” or “Brown” is horrifyingly real and both creates and perpetuates the known disparities that impact Black and Brown communities.
One example of this is the now multi-century practice of government supported and financed housing segregation in the United States that is chronicled brilliantly by Richard Rothstein in his book The Color of Law. (If you haven’t read the book watch this 17 minute animated video that Rothstein helped develop to tell the story of the book). Rothstein’s book walks the reader through the clear narrative of how federal, state, and local governments have intentionally promoted, supported, designed, and financed the racialized segregation of our cities since the early 20th century. Everything from our highway networks to the invention of the suburbs to where public amenities and polluting factories are located to where people with darker shades of skin are able to live has been structured and designed over last last 100+ years at all levels of government. This is not a conspiracy because there was never an attempt to hide it. It was simply the normative practice of society. Now zoom out from this focus on housing and think about this same story across the social determinants of health, which include income and wealth, social status and discrimination, education and literacy, healthcare access, employment and working conditions, food access, transportation, public safety, social supports, childhood trauma, built physical environment, sexual and gender identities, disability status, and more.
So now you may be saying “Yes, but what does this have to do with the pandemic?”
What we know about impact of COVID-19 in the United States is that the virus has killed a disproportionate number of Black and Brown people because of structural racism. The CDC identifies factors that contribute to increased risk for Black and Brown communities and they may sound pretty familiar to the list of social determinants of health: discrimination, healthcare access and utilization, occupation, educational, income, and wealth gaps, and housing. The virus is disproportionately killing Black and Brown people not because they are Black and Brown but because we have spent hundreds of years designing our society in such a way that ensures Black and Brown folks are the most precarious and the most at risk, even in normal times. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated a pre-existing, multi-century crisis of intentionally designed and racialized suffering and death, the scope of which can hardly be grasped.
I am not a historian but I do have a B.A. in history (that and a quarter will get you a phone call in 1965) and I do pay attention to how historians are grappling with this moment in history. From my perspective I would argue that the dominant theme of 2020 fifty years from now (assuming human civilization exists in some form that employs historians) will be the United States’s wanton disregard for the racialized suffering and death created by his pandemic and how invisible that suffering and death has been for the whiter and wealthier and more powerful. This invisibility is a function of how segregated we are in terms of housing, education, workplace, and more. We live, work, and play in completely different worlds and this allows the whiter and wealthier and more powerful to easily ignore suffering and death in NORMAL times and continue in ignorance during a crisis.
I invite you to imagine what our societal and governmental response would be if COVID-19 was causing suffering and death at proportionate or higher rates in our whiter, wealthier, and more powerful suburban communities. It’s easy to imagine a World War II scale response that reoriented our entire economy and cultural norms in service of defeating the virus and stabilizing the economy. Instead the United States still has no national plan to fight rising infections, expand and improve testing, facilitate effective quarantine, or stabilize and support the people and communities most impacted.
And for every rare mainstream media piece that highlights the racialized disparities at the heart of this crisis there are a vast ocean of lovingly crafted paeans for young, white victims like Dr. Adeline Fagan. I hasten to add that the death of Dr. Fagan is a tragedy that should be mourned. But why do we know so much about her and so little about our seemingly countless Black and Brown siblings who have suffered and died?
In normal times our society is designed to heap invisible suffering and death on Black and Brown communities that can be easily ignored by those who are whiter, wealthier, and more powerful. In these extraordinary times the COVID-19 pandemic is causing additional suffering and death at a rate of a 9/11 (~3000 deaths) every three days that disproportionately impacts our Black and Brown communities.
There is only one story.