Twin crises spur calls to treat racism as public health crisis
Change is in the air as Black Lives Matter demonstrations spread from Montreal to Madrid
Pandemic, police violence take heavy toll on Black communities
For some, the protests erupting in reaction to the deaths of George Floyd and Regis Korchinski-Paquet have been a distraction from the COVID -19 pandemic. But Black health leaders say these two crises are connected by the same deep-rooted ill: anti-Black racism.
Researchers, advocates and racialized communities have long recognized racism as being harmful to human health. But there are now calls from multiple groups to declare anti-Black racism a public health crisis — an effort they say has taken on fresh urgency in the face of the coronavirus and police violence, both of which disproportionately impact Black communities.
“Systemic anti-Black racism is a public health crisis in Canada,” said Dr. Onye Nnorom, a public health specialist with the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and president of the Black Physicians’ Association of Ontario.
“We are at that point. We are dying and no one is paying attention, whether it’s due to police violence or health-care neglect.”
“We are beyond saying that ‘we understand and we are on your side,’ ” said Safia Ahmed, executive director of the Rexdale Community Health Centre.
“I think our communities are really asking for action.”
Ahmed was a signatory on a statement last week from a coalition of Black health leaders that named anti-Black racism as a public health crisis and called on others to do the same. It was one of several such calls in Canada and the U.S. following the deaths of Floyd, a Minnesota man who died after a police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, and Korchinski-Paquet, a Toronto woman who fell from her balcony during an encounter with police.
The group cited a 2018 Ontario Human Rights Commission study, which found that between 2013 and 2017, a Black person was nearly 20 times more likely than a white person to be fatally shot by police in Toronto. Black people are also vastly overrepresented in cases in which police used force against civilians.
In an interview, Ahmed pointed to recently released Toronto Public Health data showing that the COVID-19 pandemic is disproportionately affecting racialized neighbourhoods in this city — though the province has yet to begin collecting race-based and socioeconomic data that could reveal the depths of these health inequities, a month after saying it would.
“Start collecting this data, so we know exactly who is most impacted and we can better direct resources to help and support these communities,” Ahmed said.
She called the collection of race-based data “low-hanging fruit” in the push to tackle systemic health inequities, and noted that other jurisdictions who do collect this data have found disturbing disparities. In the U.S., the COVID-19 death rate for Black Americans is 2.4 times as high as for white Americans, according to a recent report.
Both police violence and the pandemic “have disproportionate impacts on Black communities because we have systematically under-resourced Black communities so that they can live healthy lives with adequate education, employment, housing, health care and fair, just and transparent policing,” said Anthony Morgan, manager of the city of Toronto’s Confronting Anti-Black Racism unit.
The letter signed by Ahmed and a coalition of Black community health leaders — the Black Health Committee of the Alliance for Healthier Communities, the Black Health Alliance, and the Network for Advancement of Black Communities — urged concrete actions, including the declaration of anti-Black racism as a public health crisis, more accountability measures for addressing police violence, a strengthened anti-racism directorate, and provincial funding to support the health and well-being of Black communities.
In response to the Star’s questions about whether Toronto Public Health would declare anti-Black racism a public health crisis, medical officer of health Dr. Eileen de Villa said in a statement that “the evidence is clear: anti-Black racism is a critical public health issue that impacts the physical and mental health of people of African descent.
“From education to employment, housing to health care, there is no aspect of life that anti-Black racism leaves untouched. I acknowledge the profound anger, sadness, fear and exhaustion that many of our residents are experiencing on top of the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic,” de Villa said, describing anti-Black racism as everyone’s problem. “The responsibility is on nonBlack people to be allies in creating a city where Black lives truly matter.”
On Thursday, the Ford government announced a new advisory council for supporting youth from marginalized communities, as well as $1.5 million to address the “disproportionate impacts of COVID-19” on Black youth and families.
Earlier in the week, after stating Ontario didn’t have the same “systemic, deep roots” of racism as in the United States, Premier Doug Ford course-corrected and acknowledged systemic racism in the province and in Canada but stopped short of declaring anti-Black racism a crisis. The opposition NDP has urged the Ford government to declare it one. When asked whether the province planned on doing so, a spokesperson for the health ministry did not answer the question but noted public health units are collecting racebased data on a voluntary basis, and said the province is “actively looking at making it mandatory” province-wide.
“This is an important first step to understand the unique impacts race and income may have on public health outcomes,” spokesperson Hayley Chazan said in an email.
For Camille Orridge, a longtime advocate for health equity and demographic data collection, that “first step” of collecting race data to better understand health outcomes is long overdue — and something she has been working towards for15 years.
She said the provincial Health Ministry has been stubbornly resistant to collecting racebased data, fighting “tooth and nail” against doing so under the previous Liberal government. And now that the province is creating a new data platform — an effort led by former federal health minister Dr. Jane Philpott — Black health leaders who have been working on equity-related data were neither consulted nor given a seat at the table, she said.
COVID is showing that the province’s continued failure to collect race-based data “is not benign,” she said.
“I think COVID is culling society,” said Orridge, former CEO of the Toronto Central LHIN who is now a senior fellow at the Wellesley Institute.
“And the people who are being culled — and I use that word deliberately — are the elderly, those who require communal living, those with mental health issues, kids with disabilities, and Black and Indigenous populations. And this culling has occurred from years of indecision that has set up the climate for this to happen.”
In the early days of Ontario’s epidemic, Black health leaders
— including those now calling for a public health crisis declaration — warned their communities would be harder hit by COVID because of existing inequities.
“Ontario is home to the largest proportion of Black people in Canada. Here too, as in the rest of Canada, race is a determinant of health,” they wrote in an April 2 statement.
“COVID-19 does not flatten these disparities; it amplifies them.”
For the province to now successfully defeat COVID-19, it must also address the antiBlack racism that created the social, economic and health conditions that place Black communities at higher risk of contracting — and dying from — this virus, said the Dalla Lana school’s Nnorom.
And when people take to the streets to protest police violence and other racial injustices, this fight should be seen as intimately connected to the struggle to overcome a deadly pandemic that is also disproportionately hurting and killing Black people, advocates say.
“I would encourage folks to hear the declaration ‘Black Lives Matter’ as a declaration of anti-Black racism being a public health crisis,” Morgan said.