Morry Gash/AP Photo
Ignoring a stay-at-home order and waiting to cast a ballot in Milwaukee, April 7, 2020
The COVID-19 virus was once called the “great equalizer” because of its potential to infect anyone and everyone at pandemic speed. But data on mortality rates tell a different story.
Instead of affecting everyone equally, the coronavirus is amplifying the racial disparities in health outcomes across the United States. The disparities result from the country’s own pre-existing condition: an environment where people’s living and working conditions are anything but equal when it comes to pollution levels and protection from harmful toxins.
These disparities are most visible in urban environments that have become pandemic hot spots. There, the coronavirus kills a higher percentage of minorities than it does of the cities’ overall populations.
In the nation’s pandemic epicenter, New York City, black and Latino people die at about twice the rate of the total population. In Chicago, the disparity is even more dramatic: Black people account for about 70 percent of coronavirus deaths but make up roughly 30 percent of the city’s population.
In early April, before Wisconsin went ahead with in-person voting, about 80 percent of Milwaukee’s coronavirus fatalities were black people, though the black share of the city’s population is just 25 percent. Since then, seven more coronavirus cases have been linked to voting on Election Day, but the full impact of virus spread is not yet known.
While these statistics shocked many, environmental-justice experts and advocates were not surprised.
“You can’t equalize from a gross place of inequality in a pandemic,” says Michael McAfee, president and CEO of PolicyLink, in an interview with the Prospect. “I think the story line that is being missed is that we are here by design, we are here by our arrogance, we are here by our lack of leadership, we are here because our institutions have stopped caring and knowing how to serve those most in need. Our disinvestment is coming back to haunt us, but it was hiding in plain sight already.”
About 70 percent of black people in the U.S. live in counties where pollution levels exceed federal standards.
Although there are regulations and limits on harmful toxins used in industries ranging from energy to farming, those rules are not always followed and the impacts disproportionately affect minorities. About 70 percent of black people in the U.S. live in counties where pollution levels exceed federal standards and thus violate federal law, according to the EPA.
Black and Hispanic people are also more likely to work essential jobs, meaning they are still going to work, risking coronavirus exposure with limited protections and protective gear. In many cities, minorities make up a major share of essential public-sector employees, operating and maintaining buses and subways, working in public hospitals and clinics.
The wide range of environmental factors at home and at work—as well as differences in access to regular health care—have long been determinants in people’s health. Before the coronavirus, it was known that black people are more likely to have asthma or develop cancer because of regular exposure to harmful toxins. Black children are also more likely to die from an asthma attack than their white peers. And black people are also more likely to have lung disease than white people, even though they are less likely to smoke cigarettes.
“I would say that the coronavirus found fertile ground in terms of the vulnerabilities in these kinds of health conditions,” says Jacqui Patterson, senior director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program. “When you have these pre-existing conditions where people are already more prone to die [beginning with] childhood because of their airways, and you add something that’s going to add a further stress to their airways like the COVID-19, it’s compounding the stressors that they’re caught in.”
When someone lives in an area with pollution, their lungs work harder, Patterson adds, so when a disease that attacks the respiratory system arrives, it compounds pre-existing negative health effects.
For its part, the current federal government has not prioritized environmental protection—let alone protections that consider race. Since taking power, the Trump administration has fought to roll back previous Clean Air Act standards and regulations in industry operations.
It’s not just the federal government that’s to blame. Local governments have also often failed to prioritize public health when considering pollution and industry. Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, a mostly Latino community, rests adjacent to energy industry plants. Despite the coronavirus pandemic, the city has allowed Hilco to implode an old coal plant, covering the area with smoke and dust. Little Village was already one of the most polluted places in Chicago.
Tyler Laiviere/Chicago Sun-Times via AP
A person with a bicycle walks though the dust cloud descending though Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, after the Crawford Generating Station smoke stack was imploded, April 11, 2020.
“These disparities in harm, environment, death have long existed in Chicago and I think the coronavirus is exposing once again those disparities,” says Antonio Lopez, senior adviser to the Freshwater Lab in Chicago. “But I think it’s also highlighting for us that the solutions we need to think about need to be different.” Lopez adds that these environmental-justice solutions will not require a “blanket approach,” but instead must be shaped around the different vulnerabilities of specific communities.
Among these vulnerabilities, race is an important factor. McAfee, along with the We Must Count Coalition and other advocates, is working to ensure racial data are collected during the pandemic. That can prove to be a tricky process. Many public authorities, “the very folks who wouldn’t want to provide data,” as McAfee terms them, “would be the very ones who would say, ‘we need data to make an informed decision,’ so it becomes a catch-22.”
But the data are essential, McAfee says. “You’re putting trillions of dollars into the economy and we want to be able to have accountability questions about who needed those dollars, where did they go.”
The first round of small-business loans and assistance in the CARES Act were shown not to have reached minority-owned businesses. McAfee says to avoid the mistakes of past crises when it comes to not just public health but economic recovery as well, data on the demographics most affected by the coronavirus need to be collected now.
For its part, however, the federal government has not collected data on race, ethnicity, and geography in its tally of the effects of the coronavirus. Nor have many hospitals or states since the start of the pandemic. In the absence of such data, mistaken impressions of which groups are most vulnerable may arise.
“When the media say it’s going to be mostly people over a certain age that will be at higher risk, that is not true, because in communities of color people at a lower age have chronic disease and live with significant air pollution,” says Peggy Shepard, of WE ACT for Environmental Justice in Harlem. “That means people in communities of color at a younger age will be at higher risk.”
While many are calling for a return to normal, these environmental-justice experts and advocates stress that “normal” will not improve the lives of the millions of people in the United States who were struggling before the coronavirus. They’re calling instead for change.
With the pandemic showing no signs of getting better and the economic impact appearing poised to become much worse, McAfee explains that a simple return to status quo will leave many people behind. “It was never good enough for 100 million folks living at 200 percent of poverty before COVID-19. If this is going to be, as experts say, worse than 2008, if unemployment is going to be higher than it was during the Great Depression, then it’s safe to assume that black and brown people are fucked,” he says.
“There’s no way you can miss it,” Patterson says. “Whether it’s Hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill disaster, all of these different disasters that have happened in the past, the pattern is unfailingly consistent. So in order for us to not reach this juncture again, we have to stop thinking in terms just of ‘how do we make things better for people who are poor, how do we make things better for people who are discriminated against based on race, how do we make things better for people living with this, that, and the other.’ We have to look back at the systemic inequalities and what is at their root.”
