Black people are being hit especially hard by the coronavirus. This has already prompted multiple commentators, and even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez herself, to deem this microscopic pathogen a racist and even demand reparations for slavery as part of the next coronavirus relief package.
But this isn’t about “systemic racism,” the bogeyman that social justice maniacs turn to when they don’t have any specific racist actions or decisions to point to.
It is true that a virus that hits especially hard in densely populated places and particularly slams heavily black cities such as New Orleans, Detroit, and New York is going to infect black people disproportionately. It’s also true that those who ride public transportation more frequently and who are more likely to work in jobs requiring human contact are going to be more likely to get it.
But the key difference with this virus has not necessarily been in who gets it but that black patients who do get it suffer a much higher rate of deaths and other complications. Some of that may be explained by the fact that those in more densely populated areas could be exposed to a higher load of the pathogen at the time of infection, leading to worse cases.
However, it’s also true that the virus is especially lethal when it infects people with serious underlying health problems that black people suffer from disproportionately. The CDC specifically mentions diabetes, heart conditions, and obesity as underlying factors that greatly increase the chances of death by coronavirus.
All three of those conditions were epidemics in the black community before any of this began. This what liberal CNN commentator Van Jones was talking about this week when he said that low-income black people in general are “barely healthy on a good day.” Black Americans are “50 percent more likely to be obese than white Americans and more than twice as likely to die from diabetes,” according to a 2017 white paper by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The group tied those figures directly to the consumption of sugary drinks and noted that “37 percent of African-American … high school students drank three or more sugar drinks a day compared with 20 percent of whites.”
“Do you got sugar, diabetes?” Jones said. “Do you got pressure, high blood pressure, hypertension? You could die in a week. … You’ve got to start screaming this to the black community.”
Jones also said that early on, black people had been quick to embrace misinformation that they were immune to the virus — that it only affected white people.
It’s too late this time around for the massive lifestyle changes that might eliminate risk factors sucy as obesity. But it’s also an opportunity to explore personal decisions that affect health rather than point to an easy explanation of institutional racism.
