Nothing will be the same after the coronavirus pandemic
It’s everyone’s job to make sure of that.
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What was immediately revealed in the early days of the quarantine—now some five weeks old in the U.S., give or take—is that many of the things we believed were impossible were not. They were choices.
Until the coronavirus pandemic, most courts sided with employers, finding that “teleworking from home” was not a reasonable accommodation for professionals with disabilities. If you’re currently suffering from “resting Zoom face” from the crush of video meetings you’ve been having, you now know that was not true. Jails and prisons are filled with people who were deemed too dangerous to be released—the elderly and frail, the non-violent, low-level offenders, the innocent too poor to afford bail to be proven innocent. That also turned out not to be true, even if limited release programs are turning out to be too little, too late.
What has also been revealed, and predictably so, amounts to a collective lesson on systemic inequality. Lesson number one: The human cost of inequality is also a choice.
The people who are dying from COVID-19 are largely Black and Hispanic, the very people who were unable to work from home as they continued to provide “essential” services in retail, health care, social service, farm work, mail delivery, transit, and sanitation work—the frontline workers who are making it possible for the rest of us to stay home and meet quarterly goals in our leisure wear.
“Grocery workers are risking their safety, often for poverty-level wages, so the rest of us can shelter in place,” John Logan, director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University tells the Washington Post. Over 40 people have died, and more are testing positive. But grocery frontliners are a proxy for a whole lot of workers who are treated by society as if they’re disposable, not indispensable.
It’s time to question every assumption we have about how the world works, and the ecosystem of inequity that has kept our suddenly essential workers trapped where they’ve always been—needed but never seen, vital but never cherished.
Let’s start by getting the data we need.
Dr. Aletha Maybank is the first-ever chief health equity officer at the American Medical Association. Before the pandemic hit, she had been ramping up to shine a light on how and why unequal health outcomes happen in the U.S. Now, she is urgently calling on all laboratories, health institutions, and state, local, and federal health agencies to standardize, collect, and publish race and ethnicity data that relates to the coronavirus epidemic, from testing to morbidity.
She is also on a mission to stop any chatter that some people are more vulnerable to COVID-19 disease because of pre-existing conditions. Racism is the pre-existing condition. From a recent opinion piece in the New York Times:
“Our call for the reporting of racial and ethnic data is not based on a poisonous argument that some races are more susceptible to the coronavirus. Our call, instead, is based on widely known history that American health institutions were designed to discriminate against blacks, whether poor or not. My own organization, for example, made it harder for Blacks to obtain a medical degree and practice medicine, with negative repercussions still evident to this day.”
Into this unforgiveable breach comes a new project from The Atlantic, in partnership with the Antiracist Research and Policy Center.
The COVID Racial Data Tracking Project has cobbled together imperfect data from 29 states to begin confirming the extent of the racial disparities. Their ongoing analysis paints a grim picture: In New York City, Latinx account for 34% of known coronavirus deaths, which is higher than their 29.1% share of the city’s population. Available data finds that some 42% of that nation’s deaths by April 8 were Black.
It’s going to get worse. So, it’s time to choose.
“Today, the racial disparities are undeniable. But Americans don’t know for sure that there is racism behind those racial disparities,” says ARPC director and Atlantic contributing writer Ibram X. Kendi, who co-leads the COVID Tracking Project with staff writer Alexis Madrigal. “So yet again, our voices are crying out in the wilderness for a miracle to save America from its original sin—the sin Americans can’t ever seem to confess.”
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com