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Abstract
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This is a year of reckonings. Chief among them: communities have been forced to face the injustices laid bare by the yawning racial and ethnic disparities in illness and death caused by COVID-19 the world over.
Predictably, even the data that shine some light on these inequalities remain wanting. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention withheld national-level data about the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 on Black, Latinx and other people until threatened with a lawsuit. In the United Kingdom, a government agency removed nearly 70 pages of community-based research from a report that pointed to structural causes of unequal disease toll on Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups.
Still, there is much we do know. The extra burden borne by under-resourced and marginalized communities globally is plain. In the United States, for example, Black residents in the state of Maine reportedly comprise nearly 21% of those infected with COVID-19, despite being just 1.4% of the population. People of Pacific Islander descent, including Native Hawaiians, in Los Angeles County, California, have an infection rate six times that of their white neighbours. Black, Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities in the United Kingdom experience rates of infection with the new coronavirus up to twice those of white communities, and are more likely to become severely ill with the disease.
These data show trends in societally constructed categories; they do not explain how the trends arise. How, then, can we account for tragic losses in groups as distinct as Roma communities in Greece, Indigenous Yanomami in Brazil, and Somali immigrants in Norway? The common inheritance of these diverse populations is the lived experience of discrimination, racism and inequality. Yet, even now, some people prefer to suggest that these health disparities are driven by genetics. It is a wearily, tragically familiar line of reasoning...
Language: en |