We know that COVID-19 is killing African Americans at greater rates than any other group. You can see this most clearly in the American South.
In Louisiana, blacks account for 70% of the deaths but 33% of the population. In Alabama, they account for 44% of the deaths and 26% of the population.
South Carolina and Georgia have yet to release information on death disparities, but in both states blacks are more likely to be infected than whites.
That African Americans are overrepresented in service-sector jobs reflects a history of racially segmented labor markets that kept them at the bottom of the economic ladder; that they are less likely to own their own homes reflects a history of stark housing discrimination, state-sanctioned and state-sponsored.
The pattern exists in the North as well, where African American populations in cities like Chicago and Milwaukee have high infection and death rates.
Federal officials have tied these disparities to individual behavior - the U.S. surgeon general, Jerome Adams, who is African American, urged blacks and other communities of color to “avoid alcohol, tobacco and drugs” as if this was a particular problem for those groups.
Black susceptibility
In truth, black susceptibility to infection and death in the coronavirus pandemic has everything to do with the racial character of inequality in the United States.
To use just a few, relevant examples, black Americans are more likely to work in service sector jobs, least likely to own a car and least likely to own their homes.
They are therefore more likely to be in close contact with other people, from the ways they travel to the kinds of work they do to the conditions in which they live.
Today’s disparities of health flow directly from yesterday’s disparities of wealth and opportunity.
That African Americans are overrepresented in service-sector jobs reflects a history of racially segmented labor markets that kept them at the bottom of the economic ladder; that they are less likely to own their own homes reflects a history of stark housing discrimination, state-sanctioned and state-sponsored.
And if black Americans are more likely to suffer the comorbidities that make COVID-19 more deadly, it’s because those ailments are tied to the segregation and concentrated poverty that still mark their communities.
Racialised inequality
What’s important to understand is that this racialised inequality isn’t a mistake - it isn’t a flaw in the system. It reflects something in the character of American capitalism itself, a deep logic that produces the same outcomes, again and again.
American capitalism did not emerge into the world. It grew out of existing social, political and economic arrangements, toppling some and incorporating others as it took shape in the second half of the 19th century.
White supremacy was one of those arrangements.
The Civil War may have destroyed slave society, but the central relationship of that society - race - survived the carnage and disruption of the conflict to shape the aftermath, especially in the absence of a sustained program to radically restructure the social and economic life of the South.
For the most part, before the war, blackness marked one as a slave. Afterward, it marked one as the lowest of laborers, relegated to sharecropping and domestic work, excluded from the mounting ranks of industrial labor.
“With the coming of industry and the factory system, the social code which made manual labor a degrading factor was no longer of binding force,” historian Charles H. Wesley wrote in his 1927 book “Negro Labor in the United States, 1850-1925.” “Work in the factories was honorable and it was to be considered the particular task of white workers.”
Which is to say that, as it developed in the United States, industrial capitalism retained a caste system that marked whites as the dominant social group. This wasn’t just a matter of prejudice.
As it did under slavery, race under industrial capitalism structured one’s relationship to both production and personhood.
Whiteness, philosopher Charles W. Mills notes, underwrote “the division of labor and the allocation of resources, with correspondingly enhanced socioeconomic life chances for one’s white self and one’s white children.”
It’s not that life was particularly good for white workers but that blacks faced additional challenges, from the denial of formal political rights to social exclusion and widespread, state-sanctioned violence.
If they lived in cities, blacks were relegated to the least sanitary neighborhoods with the most substandard housing; if they had a skill or knew a craft, they were excluded from the guilds and unions that would have given them a path to employment; if they possessed a formal education, they were barred from most middle-class professions.
If you look at the full picture of American society, it is clear that the structural position of black Americans isn’t so different than it was at the advent of the industrial age.
Race shapes personhood
Race still shapes personhood; it still marks the boundaries of who belongs and who doesn’t; of which groups face the brunt of capitalist inequality (in all its forms) and which get some respite. Race, in other words, still answers the question of “who.”
Who will live in crowded, segregated neighborhoods?
Who will be exposed to lead-poisoned pipes and toxic waste? Who will live with polluted air and suffer disproportionately from maladies like asthma and heart disease? And when disease comes, who will be the first to succumb in large numbers?
If there was anything you could predict about this pandemic - anything you could be certain about once it reached America’s shores - it was that some communities would weather the storm while others would sink under the waves and that the distribution of this suffering would have everything to do with patterns inscribed by the past.
As long as those patterns remain, there is no path to a better society.
We have to break them, before they break us.
Jamelle Bouie is an American journalist and columnist
(NYT)
