Racism is Our Most Chronic Health Condition
On Monday, Chicago’s Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced an astonishing new statistic in our city’s pitched battle against COVID-19. Data shows that about 70 percent of coronavirus deaths have been Black people, in a city where Black people make up only 30 percent of the population.
There are two tragedies found in that horrifying statistic, if we are willing to face them.
The first tragedy is that despite decades of progress since the civil rights movement, 56 years after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and the protests that eradicated Jim Crow laws and segregated water fountains, we are really no closer to racial justice.
COVID-19 has laid bare the yawning chasm of our inequities: Black Americans are far less likely than White people to have the privilege of working from home, or to have the steady income to keep them stably housed. Black Americans are more likely to have the chronic health conditions that make COVID-19 deadly, in part because they are most likely to live in segregated and disinvested communities near toxic air pollution that cause these conditions. They have more limited access to tests and doctors than White Americans, who are almost twice as likely to have health insurance. Throughout our medical system, Black Americans receive worse treatment than White Americans. And Black Americans are over-policed and over-incarcerated in places like Cook County Jail and Stateville Correctional Center, which have become two of the nation’s highest clusters of COVID-19 cases. Layered together, these systemic factors are shielding White neighborhoods from the high fatality rate that is devastating Black communities.
As Nikole Hannah-Jones says, “Being black in America, a country built and maintained on a system of racial caste, kills.”
The second tragedy is that nobody is surprised. In crisis after crisis, from Hurricane Katrina to Hurricane Maria and beyond, we’ve come to expect that people of color suffer most, as if our racial differences were the natural cause of our disparate outcomes. We obscure the truth, which is that these inequities are entirely artificial. They only continue because we allow them to.
Both Mayor Lightfoot and Governor J.B. Pritzker have shown true leadership in this moment by naming the racist structures and systems that create and perpetuate our inequities. We commend Mayor Lightfoot for sounding a “public health red alarm” on the devastating toll of COVID-19 on Black Chicagoans, and for creating a Racial Equity Rapid Response Team led by our former colleague Candace Moore. Both the City and the State deserve applause for diligently collecting the data required to identify and address these racial disparities. We hope that this data will also give us a clearer picture of the infection rate among Latino communities, which face many of the same systemic injustices and have likely been undercounted. The mayor’s executive order giving immigrant and refugee communities equal access to the City’s COVID-19 benefits should be a model for others.
But our response in this moment requires a larger lens. These inequities existed even before the pandemic, including a 9-year life expectancy gap between Black and White Chicagoans. If we do not address our underlying inequities, we’ll simply set the stage for the next crisis to take its disproportionate share of Black and Brown victims.
Audre Lorde wrote that “the master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house.” As our organization has worked over the past 50 years with communities of color and low-income neighborhoods to overcome structural disparities, we have come to understand that an equitable outcome can only be reached through an equitable process.
Mayor Lightfoot is right that the full force of the city government must be used to address Chicago’s unacceptable disparities. But equity must be baked into each stage of our recovery planning – at the beginning, middle and end. To that end, we urge the City and State to:
Adopt a process that will set racial equity as an affirmative goal in all recovery programs and assess the impact of recovery efforts and relief funds on racial equity.
Track data on how relief funds are spent to ensure transparency and accountability.
Use relief efforts and policies to support recovery for those most harshly impacted and to specifically target efforts to correct the systems that led to such stark racial disparity.
Ensure that the most impacted communities have a meaningful seat at the table, informing our understanding of the crisis, shaping our interventions, and building our evaluations.
A just recovery does not mean getting us back to the status quo. A just recovery means working to dismantle the longstanding racial gaps in healthcare, economic investment, school funding, and other spheres that got us here in the first place. As we have done for 50 years, our organization stands ready to work towards that vision together with community organizations, impacted individuals, and policymakers.