COVID-19 and Racial Justice in America

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the world to devastating effect, yielding profound societal disruption around the globe. However, its impact throughout the world has not been equal among nations. In the United States, the impact of COVID-19 is influenced and exacerbated by an embedded social issue: structural racism and its attendant systemic inequities. This paper first addresses how structural racism, broadly construed as the deeply rooted discriminatory policies and systems that produce the chronic systemic inequities faced by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) people in American society, have influenced, with notable detriment, COVID-19’s impact in the United States. This detrimental impact is most keenly demonstrated by the extreme disparate medical impact of COVID-19 itself, collectively in terms of the disease’s rate of infection, morbidity, and mortality on the BIPOC population versus that of the white population. As the United States crossed the threshold of 275,000 total deaths from COVID-19, it continued to see the significant inequities that were revealed in the early weeks of the pandemic. The latest data (as of November 2020) show that age-adjusted mortality rates for Indigenous people are 3.2 times higher than for white people; rates for Black and Latinx are 3.0 times higher than for whites. This translates into an unprecedented level of excess deaths across the country. If the COVID-19 mortality rate experienced in the white population applied universally to BIPOC communities, approximately 21,000 Black, 10,000 Latinx and 1,000 Indigenous people would still be alive today. The disparate impact is also evident regarding problems ancillary to the pandemic, such as the economic recession, which take a greater malignant toll on BIPOC communities, as well. Job and wage losses due to COVID-19 have hit marginalized and minoritized communities hardest; more than half of Hispanic (58 percent) and Black (53 percent) households in the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey reported a decline in employment income since mid-March. Black workers have experienced the highest rates of unemployment and the weakest recoveries since the March–April unemployment peak.