Race and COVID-19

The Dangerous Link between Race and COVID-19

By Roger T Jones

Special to the Real Deal

Race plays no part in how the Covid-19 is spread.

Covid-19 is a vagabond virus looking indiscriminately for hosts. It is not a boutique infection that looks for a specific type of host. It does not calculate the  biology of a potential host before deciding to invade. It lands wherever it can survive. Covid-19 is from a larger family of viruses that cause disease all of the time. It is an infection that easily travels across racial and gender lines.

I say all of that because there are dangerous assumptions being spun about who gets the infection. Such is the slippery slope of racial biology. Although the belief that race is a classification tool in biology has been long sense debunked by mainstream natural and social scientists, the Alt-Right's “scientific wing” and — unwittingly, I hope — black identitarians have both appealed to the alleged racial nature of the infection. This cannot stand unchallenged.

Scientific racists are easy to dismiss since for them everything is in the genes. They claim that racial disparities are inborn, removed from external interventions like education, livable wages, or adequate healthcare. You can catch them most any night on Fox News sputtering nonsense.

Black identitarians inhabit the same coin with scientific racists, albeit on different sides. They believe, like scientific racists, that blacks have a different biology. They imagine that if blacks would just rediscover their lost African heritage, understand that they are syncretic Africans, all of their problems would simply vanish. Both postures rely heavily on specious logic that view race and genetic inheritance as exactly the same thing. This is how each side models Covid-19.

The Center for Disease Control, however, which has called for the collection of data and the tracking of racial disparities, says that blacks are particularly susceptible to Covid-19 infection because of certain social and economic conditions, specifically their impoverished living conditions, their work circumstances and underlying health conditions, and their lower access to healthcare. 

But a recent New England Journal of Medicine article underscores the need to contextualize disparities data about blacks and the disease with “adequate analysis” so as not to “perpetuate harmful myths and misunderstandings that actually undermine the goal of eliminating health inequalities.”

The more Covid-19 is viewed as a “black” disease, the more its victims will be stigmatized and the less likely a coherent long term national response will emerge.

The authors, Merlin Chowkwanyun and Adolph Reed, Jr. speak to the need to have a precise, data informed view of how “vulnerability is distributed in this pandemic.” They identify the dangers that attend the haphazard contextualization of data about blacks and Covid-19 and call on everyone to ground their thinking in four key areas and suggest data collection methodologies that preempts race as the principal explanation of the disease.

First of all, they warn against collecting data in a vacuum. Such explanations, they point out, can replicate racial biology by accepting the tenet that there are differences in black and white biology. This is a point not lost on Jonathan Marks, Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, when he observed: “One of the major scientific accomplishments of the 20th century was to distinguish the study of race from the study of human variation.”

        

Second, disparity figures historically have given rise to blaming the behavior of victims for their condition. This was apparent even in the early stages of Covid-19 when it was seen as a result of the Chinese penchant for eating bats and having live animal markets.

Third, normally supercharged language can often be camouflaged by use of a proxy. Here, the proxy for black Covid-19 sufferers has become a city ward — or a zip code. As Chowkwanyun and Reed point out, focusing the spotlight only on the people who generally inhabit those spaces reinforces stereotypes about “those people.” Descriptors like New Orleans Ninth Ward” or “Cleveland's East Side" are often used as synonyms for "poor black people. While zip codes and ward names don't tell the entire story of the people in an area, the linguistic sleight-of-hand  can further marginalize the people who inhabit that  area something in the way it implies something negative negative about “those people.”

Finally, Chowkwanyun and Reed warn how those three factors germinate a fourth challenge that may be equally dangerous. The researchers discuss how perception can become reality even when is false; how social problems become “racial” and give in to the “all-too-familiar mobilizations of racialized rhetoric.” That tendency has helped rationalize recent cuts in education, public housing and programs like the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). The more Covid-19 is viewed as a “black” disease, the more its victims will be stigmatized by it and the less likely a coherent national response will emerge in the long term.

Chowkwanyun and Reed end by calling for further research that collects social and economic data “alongside” racial data; takes into account “multiple axes of inequality,” and considers what public health researcher Arline Geronimus calls “weathering” or advanced aging, caused by a person's response to external stressors, which can lead to cardiovascular disease or diabetes — two conditions that elevate one's risk of death from Covid-19.

This line of research would almost certainly illuminate current Covid-19 data analysis and perhaps point to some long term public health policies.

Roger T. Jones is a Cleveland-based freelance writer.

# # ## # #