Race: Why such a huge disparity?
As the coronavirus sweeps the U.S., it’s “infecting and killing black Americans at an alarmingly high rate,” said Reis Thebault in The Washington Post. The numbers reveal a “stark racial disparity.” Counties where blacks are in the majority show triple the infection rate and nearly six times the death rate of counties where whites predominate. In Milwaukee County, Wis., blacks make up 26 percent of the population— and 70 percent of the dead. In New Orleans and Chicago, blacks also make up about 70 percent of the dead. To accurately assess what is happening in our communities of color, said Aletha Maybank in The New York Times, we “desperately” need more testing and reporting of data on the race, ethnicity, and gender of those victimized by this virus. We need to better understand the “structural inequities” that make people more vulnerable whenever there’s a threat to public health.
Let’s not “racialize the pandemic,” said Zaid Jilani in NationalReview.com. It’s hard to draw solid conclusions about the many factors that “explain who gets the virus and who succumbs from it,” but “the causal variable here is almost certainly not race.” Any imbalance is driven by factors such as poverty, disparities in medical care, and underlying health conditions including diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, which show up disproportionately in the black community but also afflict poor whites and Latinos. Instead of following “the progressives who are pushing racial narratives around the virus,” let’s focus on marshaling our resources “to ensure that nobody squeezes through the cracks.”
That argument misses the point, said Anthony Browne in the New York Daily News. The very factors putting blacks at risk result from “entrenched racial discrimination.” Redlining and housing segregation have forced blacks into crowded communities with limited access to healthy food and quality medical care. Limited prospects mean many blacks are stuck in service jobs that can’t be done remotely, forcing many to choose between “a paycheck and their health.” The pandemic “is exposing a deep-rooted system of the haves and have-nots,” said Fabiola Cineas in Vox.com. The horrific death tolls in black communities are the direct legacy of “hundreds of years of slavery, racism, and discrimination.” It’s not hard to picture a scenario where “white America recovers” as black communities are still being ravaged. “Will America still care?”