Disproportionate Deaths

I became upset listening to a Republican lawmaker, who is also a physician from Louisiana, explain why over 70% of the deaths from COVID-19 in his state were African American. As expected, he sited the higher prevalence of pre-existing conditions such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and asthma among the African American community. But when the interviewer tried to delve into the underlying reasons behind these pervasive conditions, the Republican refused to go there. He refused to acknowledge the role of governmental policies around health, urban pollution, education, wealth accumulation, criminal justice and discrimination that have hampered and continue to impede the progress of African Americans since slavery. Even when reminded of his role in Congress beyond medicine, he chose to ignore the root causes for the pre-existing health conditions that have made African Americans so vulnerable.

The continued legacy of the mindset behind slavery and Jim Crow is discrimination against African Americans in nearly every system in the country. Our inability to accumulate wealth is the result of longstanding and ongoing educational disparities, job discrimination, healthcare treatment disparities, housing discrimination, banking discrimination, environmental injustice, and criminal justice disparities. The most recent statistics show that in 2018 about 21% of African Americans lived below the poverty line compared to less than 12% of the general population. Poverty is stressful, destroys relationships, reduces access to life-sustaining needs like healthier foods, better education, basic preventative healthcare, adequate legal defense, clean air and water. It’s like the toxic circumstances African Americans are born into is a burden carried throughout life. For example, I’ve had asthma since I was 2 years old as a product of my early environment. I have high blood pressure like most African Americans in my family. These conditions coupled with being over 60 make me especially vulnerable to COVID-19 mortality.

But I’m not poor. I’m educated and have a job that has me working from home. I continue to get a paycheck. I can and am limiting my exposure. I consider myself lucky. But too many African Americans are not lucky. Many African Americans have either lost their jobs or have jobs working in places where they risk daily exposure to the virus. Without the proper protection, they are having to choose between a paycheck and their health. Too many are locked away in prison or jail and are being exposed against their will. Some, like that Republican doctor would be apt to blame African Americans for their poverty and risk factors.

To people like that Republican doctor, I would say that for African Americans to achieve stability in this country takes more determination, greater intelligence, higher levels of energy, and greater resilience and emotional intelligence than the average American. Most people are average in intelligence, stamina, and determination. To require a group of people to be superhuman to overcome the added roadblocks and obstacles placed in their way every day so that they can achieve what others achieve by just being average is unreasonable. Most of us are not exceptional. But that is what America expects today of every African American. And if we are not, then we are to blame for our blight.

Ours is a country that discriminates both institutionally and individually against African Americans. I know this first hand because I have experienced it all first hand. Everything from teachers who have to be forced to provide rigorous learning opportunities, to banks who require additional layers of scrutiny for loans, to employers who attempt to limit hiring, promotion, and pay, to nurses who under-estimate the pain of black women in labor. I’ve fought through all of these discriminatory practices multiple times. I know this is the reality of most of my African American friends and family.

So, this virus is coming for the vulnerable. The sad thing is that African Americans have been made vulnerable by our society. When people blame the victim like this Republican congressman did, I don’t see this current reality as any different from when the government sanctioned the distribution of blankets with Smallpox among Native American populations. The result is the same, the eradication of an undervalued minority group.