PSA:

As we’re starting to see news of staggering racial disparities in COVID-19 death rates, watch out for perspectives that place blame on individuals instead of systems.

THIS IS NOT ABOUT…

It’s not about Black people making poor individual choices re: diet, exercise, self-care.

It’s not about ostensibly neutral characterizations like “suffering higher rates of” heart disease, diabetes, asthma etc.

THIS IS ABOUT:

• Being systemically denied access to health care – there’s less care available in Black communities, which tend to be in the places where Black people were legally required to live just a generation or two ago; and racial bias in hiring puts limits on what jobs Black people are able to get, which leads to poverty and to lack of insurance – there are lots of stats about Black people with college degrees being less likely to get interviewed than White people with high school degree only, you can google it;
• Not being financially or logistically able to work from home or shelter in place – only 1 in 5ish Black people have jobs they can do from home, see previous bullet for why;
• Receiving worse quality of care – there are lots of stats available about Black people’s pain being discounted by doctors, google it; and the care available is often culturally competent or actively offensive; and there’s also a well-justified distrust of the medical field among many Black people for good historical reason, e.g. the Tuskegee experiments;
• Having less access to healthy food and exercise – again due to geography and to poverty resulting from the job issue above and historical racism preventing their families from building wealth; and
• Being forced to live in high-pollution areas – let’s not forget our country’s habit of situating highways and industries that pour out air pollution next to Black communities, which contributes to asthma, which turns out to make COVID-19 worse.

When we look for solutions, let’s make sure we’re really seeing the problems clearly in the first place: this is about the systems in which individuals live, not the choices individuals make within the systems. When you go to a movie theater, you can choose which movie you see – but you can only choose from among the movies that theater is showing. You can’t choose “Get Out” if the theater is only showing “Gone With The Wind.”