The pandemic, the protests, and why racism endures as a public health crisis
By: Ylonda Gault
My daddy used to say: When America gets the sniffles, Black people catch pneumonia. My dad didn’t invent the saying but he used it to explain everything from the war on drugs to the 1990s national recession. Even as a child I knew what he meant. In other words, the country’s history of institutional racism and unjust policies make every part of Black life — including economic growth, fair housing, health care access and more — exponentially harder than it is for others. Today, as worldwide protests against police brutality continue and COVID-19 ravages the Black community, we see clearly that old sayings are so often repeated because they bear truth.
The pandemic, a danger for all, is lethal for Black people, who’ve died at a rate of 61.6 per 100,000 people, compared with 26.2 for whites. Yet, this peril is not new. We’ve been brutalized for generations. The murders of Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and George Floyd, to name but a few, are only an extension of plantation overseer violence and Klan lynchings that have been hallmarks of our 400-year existence in America. In recent weeks, the streets have erupted because structural racism is — and has long been —the public health crisis that no masks, sanitizer, or social distancing can remedy.
With widespread mandated sheltering and business shutdowns, the serious and potentially deadly infection — caused by a virus for which there is no known cure, vaccine or treatment — has meant lost income or job loss for some and, for others, a huge inconvenience. But research shows that Black people are much more likely not only to get infected with COVID-19 — but to die from the disease because racism undergirds our health care systems, workplace policies, and the environment. — Indigenous and Latino communities are also more vulnerable.
That’s not because we are, as a race, doing something to cause infection. We’re not to blame. Nor is it because we’re unhealthy as a group, or because of something in our biology.
Why are Black communities hit hardest?
Institutional racism is the pre-existing condition that has left Black communities far more vulnerable to COVID-19 than others. While many think the racist barriers to Black people’s rights and freedom came to a close with the end to enslavement, they have not only persisted — but grown more entrenched. From Jim Crow segregation, voting and housing discrimination, to heavy-handed policing, generation after generation of targeted bigotry has led to a lack of equity in health care, housing, education, and opportunity. For example, for Black people who work in the service sector; their jobs put them at greater risk of getting COVID-19 — as does the environment. These circumstances are not the result of bad luck or poor choices; they’re created by a long legacy of racist policies that have put Black people in harm’s way and made our communities more at risk from the virus that causes COVID-19 than white people
Of course, chief among the risk factors is the barrier to health care access. Black people who work in low-wage jobs usually lack insurance, leading to delayed or bypassed essential health care services — because of the cost. We’re also more likely to live farther away from medical care and face language barriers. And Black people and other folks of color are distrustful of health care professionals because of historical mistreatment. The U.S medical establishment has a history of exploiting Black folks, Latinos, and Indigenous people by performing medical experiments on them without consent, and even stealing their dead bodies from the grave for research and profit.
Barriers to preventive health care — again, a primary outcome of structural racism in the U.S. — mean Black and Latinx communities also have higher rates of health issues like diabetes, heart disease, and lung disease. People with chronic health conditions such as heart disease and diabeteswere hospitalized six times more often than otherwise healthy individuals infected with the coronavirus during the first four months of the pandemic, and they died 12 times more often, according to a new report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The public health disaster facing Black communities is the result of hundreds of years of U.S. policies that bolster white supremacy and marginalize Black people. But the pandemic is just a single symptom of the nation’s public health disaster. What is being played out over the past few weeks, as people take to the streets to protest a national pattern of violent over-policing, is another.
Why protest during a pandemic?
Just as structural racism created fertile ground for COVID-19 to take root in the Black community, it has also helped plant the groundswell of pro-Black organizing across the country in the wake of George Floyd’s murder May 25. Black people, for whom racial profiling and stop-and-frisk policies are a way of life, don’t need a viral video to prove their realities; police have killed roughly 1,000 people a year since 2015, according to The Washington Post’s real time police shooting data base. While many outside the Black community see the recent spate of killings at the hands of police as random and unrelated — “a few bad apples,” so to speak — the pandemic and police brutality are two crises inextricably linked. Both are killing us. And both seem to be unrelenting.
It’s Shakespearean that as he lay dying — a white police officer nonchalantly kneeling on his throat, Floyd can be heard in a plaintive whisper: “I can’t breathe.”
Black America has long been suffocated by racist and dehumanizing policies. Certainly protests have erupted in the past, in response to the brutal murders of Black people by the police — notably, the 2014 murders of Eric Garner in New York City and Michael Brown in St. Louis. But none have gripped the national and global attention of what is happening now. The volume and breadth of outrage is magnified — at least, in part — because the added dimension of COVID-19 deaths has created a perfect storm.
Unlike Ferguson demonstrations, for example, when protesters of late carry placards that read “Stop Killing Us,” the statement has implications far broader than police violence. And the simple phrase, Black Lives Matter, hits different now, too. There will always be detractors and deniers who reflexively counter that “all lives matter.” But there’s a new resonance to the BLM phrase, and wider acceptance among white Americans of what it means to “matter” — and with it, a deeper awareness of the unjust conditions that disproportionately keep the rest of the world from understanding all the ways that Black lives matter.
On this day, 2 July 1951, transgender revolutionary icon Sylvia Rivera of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan descent was born in the Bronx, New York. Rejected by her family due to her “effeminate” behaviour Rivera ran away from home aged 11 and engaged in survival sex work in the Times Square area.
In the 1960s, Rivera became involved in movements against the Vietnam war and for Black liberation, then with the Stonewall rebellion threw herself into the burgeoning gay liberation movement, taking part in activities with the Gay Liberation Front, and later the Gay Activists Alliance.
With her friend Marsha P Johnson and others, she co-founded Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries, a radical group which raised money to rent an apartment to house and support homeless gay and trans young people. And she was a critic of the more middle-class, cis gendered (i.e. not transgender) leadership of much of the gay rights movement, especially when a Gay Rights Bill which was eventually passed in 1986 omitted trans people: “They have a little backroom deal without inviting Miss Sylvia and some of the other trans activists to this backroom deal with these politicians. The deal was, ‘You take them out, we’ll pass the bill’”.
After the suspected murder of Johnson in 1992, her life went “off the rails”, according to her friend, historian Eric Marcus, and she ended up homeless again living on an abandoned pier in Manhattan and drinking heavily. She did get involved in movement again, and in 2001 relaunched STAR, renamed Street Transgender Action Revolutionaries, but she died the following year of liver cancer.
She is today remembered as one of the key activists who “who made sure there was a ’T’ with the ‘LGB…’”.
Learn more about the gay liberation movement in the 60s and 70s in our podcast: https://workingclasshistory.com/2019/05/13/e21-22-the-stonewall-riots-and-pride-at-50/https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1465608393624306/?type=3
“If our generation happens to be too weak to establish Socialism over the earth, we will hand the spotless banner down to our children. The struggle which is in the offing transcends by far the importance of individuals, factions and parties. It is the struggle for the future of all mankind. It will be severe, it will be lengthy. Whoever seeks physical comfort and spiritual calm let him step aside. In time of reaction it is more convenient to lean on the bureaucracy than on the truth. But all those for whom the word ‘Socialism’ is not a hollow sound but the content of their moral life – forward! Neither threats nor persecutions nor violations can stop us! Be it even over our bleaching bones the truth will triumph! We will blaze the trail for it. It will conquer!”
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