In the past few days, liberal Democrats Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, academics Ibram X. Kendi and Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor, and New York Times columnist Charles Blow separately have issued calls for special focus on black Americans’ particular vulnerability to Covid-19, apparently based on a generic presumption that blacks are likely to have it (whatever it is) worse.
Meanwhile, the non-profit news outlet ProPublica published a report seeking to ratify the claim of special black suffering even in the absence of solid evidence. Yet why do they presume that? And what do they and others, especially those who don’t intend to argue that blacks or other nonwhites are inferior, mean when they refer to “race” as a factor contributing to vulnerability to Covid-19, or to anything else for that matter? Sometimes it’s just an empty piety, as in the presidential debate-stage pledges made by Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Tom Steyer to fight “systemic racism,” without any of them ever once suggesting what that notion might mean concretely. Sometimes the reference is a condensation of clichés that evoke a history of racial injustice, or a condensation of shibboleths like “when America has a cold, black people have the flu” and canary-in-the-coalmine analogies. Sometimes, often I suspect, speculation or assertion that race is a causal factor in producing some, usually undesirable, outcome is a proxy for reference to a variety of material conditions, like poverty, economic inequality, and stressors related to them that can undermine health—such as overcrowding, inadequate shelter, malnutrition, unemployment, to name only a few—that have, or seem to have, disproportionate impact on blacks or other racially defined populations. Even the possibility that living in a race-conscious
— source commondreams.org | Adolph Reed Jr. | Apr 04, 2020