The current crisis with the coronavirus pandemic producing disproportionately high black death tolls is just highlighting black life in America. “When white America sneezes black America gets the flu,” is an old but meaningful saying in Black America.
Race determines how well and how long you live in this country. Race is a matter of life and death. Consequently, I have pushed for a little less attention to symbolic racism (where we have a lot of focus) and more attention to systemic racism, which often results in illness and death, which we see manifested in these racial disparities with the coronavirus disease.
Race (and racism) are fundamental causes of disparities in disease and illness, and death. African Americans die at a higher rate than whites, over 80,000 each year. In other words, over 80,000 blacks die each year who would not have died had blacks died at the same rates as whites.
Blacks die from major diseases more often than whites:
• Infant Mortality Rate: Black babies are 2.3 times more likely to die in infancy than whites.
• Cancer: Black women are slightly less likely to have breast cancer, but they are 40% more likely than whites to die from it. Black men are 40% more likely to die of prostate cancer than white men.
• Diabetes: Blacks are 60% more likely to have diabetes, but even more likely to die from it (2.1 times whites).
• High Blood Pressure: Blacks are 40% more likely to have high blood pressure.
• Heart Disease: Blacks are slightly less likely to have heart disease but 20% more likely to die from it.
Blacks do not have a proclivity to die more often. They die more readily because of how society treats them. Two of the top three causes of excess mortality are low socioeconomic status and inner-city dwelling, two situations occupied disproportionately by blacks.
Also, African Americans are quite often the front-line service workers: janitors, messengers, food service employees, and bus drivers, thus continually in possible paths of this virus.
COVID-19 is infecting and killing black people in the United States at disproportionately high rates, according to data released by several states and big cities. The following is from the last week or so:
• Louisiana: 70 percent of the people who have died are black, though only a third of that state’s population is black
• Michigan: Population is 14% black; however, African Americans made up 35% of cases and 40% of deaths as of April 3.
• Illinois: African Americans are14.6 percent of the state population, but 28 percent of confirmed cases of the coronavirus.
• Chicago: Blacks are 23% of the population of the Cook County, but they account for 58% of the COVID-19 deaths.
• Milwaukee: African Americans made up almost half of Milwaukee County’s first 1,461 cases and 71% of its first 59 deaths in a county whose population is 26% black
These data do not tell the whole story, but they suggest a predictable pattern.
And then there is the problem of medical care, even when one has health insurance. In 2003, the Institute of Medicine published a report requested by Congress that demonstrated conclusively that regardless of insurance status, physicians give blacks more inferior treatments than they gave whites. They reviewed hundreds of studies that examined actual patient records and concluded that, on average, physicians treated blacks worse than whites for the same presenting symptoms. Further, physicians prescribe less pain medication for blacks than whites with the same level of pain.
We see the racial disparities in medical care popping up again in this coronavirus crisis. The New York Times reports that initial indications suggest that doctors are less likely to refer African-Americans for testing when they visit a clinic with symptoms of COVID-19. This may have contributed to the dangerous myth that blacks are immune to the virus.
Further, young people—white as well as black—have been assuming that they are immune to COVID-19; however, the data say otherwise. A recent CDC report shows that about 40 percent of all persons hospitalized with coronavirus are between 20 and 54 years of age.
We must work against these types of myths, because some are harmful, even deadly.
