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.

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NAACP Misses a Moment, but Hope Lies Ahead

Yesterday’s NAACP election was a potential watershed moment in Cleveland political history. It was an opportunity to move beyond the representational politics that have come to dominate much black political activity, especially in communities still operating on old ethnic group patronage models of allocating political and economic resources. This obviously includes places like Cuyahoga County, where black political activity in the post-civil rights era often amounts to a kind of race relations management in which the have-nots fight in the trenches while the higher ups are busy allocating the spoils.







It helps us to understand events when we are able to see them in the larger contexts of structure and process. The political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. has written compellingly about black politics in the post-segregation era. He talks about the nonparticipatory politics enacted by the mainstream black politicians where the undifferentiated masses, the underclass, do not speak. The spokesman is identifiable, but his constituency can be defined only by inference.







The Plain Dealer account of yesterday’s NAACP election said that George Forbes won an easy victory over his opponent and quoted him and member Jocelyn Travis as attributing the victory to Forbes’ being essential to protecting the black community’s economic interests.  The story was incomplete as to facts, one-sided as to sourcing, disingenuous in its analysis, and devoid of context that would suggest why the election had any significance.







Forbes was indeed re-elected yesterday for a tenth term as president of the Cleveland Branch NAACP. To say, however, that he “easily defeated opponent Lawrence Floyd” or that his candidacy was “in response to a mandate” as the page 1 teaser put it, is to advance dubious propositions.







Forbes received 65 votes to 53 for Floyd. Nine contested ballots went unopened because they would not have affected the twelve-vote margin. When you consider that there were 18 unopposed candidates on the Forbes slate running either for officer positions or for executive committee seats, the race was more like 19 people against one. The size of the vote and the relative slimness of the margin against a solitary opponent, who was not a household name, actually attest to a tenuous victory and a rising chorus for change.







Forbes’ team includes several officers — Bishop F. E. Perry, attorney James L. Hardiman, Dr. Eugene Jordan, and Amos Mahsua, CPA — who average about 30+ years on the board. Unverified numbers provided to The Real Deal indicate that local branch membership has dwindled to less than 1500, including many churches, social organizations, businesses and others who hold Life Memberships that were fully paid decades ago. Attendance at this year’s Freedom Fund Dinner, the branch’s major fundraiser, was only about half of what it was back when Forbes was first elected president, notwithstanding the growth claims he made in a letter sent to the membership just last week.







The fall off in support for the NAACP is not just local. The national office is challenged regularly to defend its relevance in a post-segregated world. This is not a post-racial America even though we are a generation beyond the basic legal racial restrictions in voting rights, public accommodations, and the like. However, in critical areas — criminal justice, public education, voter disqualification, housing, police misconduct — there are persuasive arguments that far more sophisticated tools of discrimination and exclusion have been developed.







The need for a strong and vital civil rights organization will doubtless be coterminous with the history of the country. If you doubt it, ask pretty much any immigrant of color without a Ph.D. Neither wealth, power, status is any guarantee against arbitrary discrimination.







The Cleveland NAACP has become a model of exclusion where alternative voices are discouraged, debate is stifled in the false idol of racial unanimity, and power is concentrated in whimsical and tyrannical hands. The idea that only one octogerarian man can assure equitable treatment for 400,000 black people — is of course, ludicrous. The re-elected president has now attributed this irrational view to both the casino moguls and to the local NAACP lay leadership.







The same values of transparency, collaboration, accountability, dialogue and inclusion that motivated the best efforts of county reforms must become core within the NAACP. This is the surest if not the only way in which the Cleveland NAACP can once again become a trusted community partner.







The next branch election is two years away. Join the NAACP now, get involved and make a difference. That is the hope that lies ahead.