CLOCKING COVID: Being Black and Bearing the Brunt
- Aug 6, 2020
- 6 min read
We’re getting crushed by COVID. Don’t think so? Well, just clock these numbers:
We’re 12.4% of the population but 23.3% of all COVID related deaths.
We’re 2.3 times more likely than Whites to die from COVID.
We’re more likely to personally know someone whose life has been snatched by COVID.
Outrageous, right? Well, if disproportionality and elevated mortality rates don’t engender a sense of indignation, then perhaps a recent study by a group of researchers at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health might just cause a case of rising rage. The underlying idea of the Harvard study is straightforward: Premature death is a form of robbery. When we die prematurely we’re robbed—jacked—of a host of opportunities. We’re prematurely and permanently denied the possibilities of play, work, and love. We’re denied—prematurely and permanently—the chance to contribute to our communities, pursue our dreams, and to fight for justice. Our lives span across space and time, and when it’s ripped away it painfully reverberates through the communities within which we claim membership and the relationships within we are embedded. Deaths rarely occur within a vacuum and premature deaths are particularly painful. Ask a parent who prematurely loses a child or a child who prematurely loses a parent. Ask someone who prematurely loses a partner. Just ask.
The Harvard researchers calculate years of life lost (YLL) to convey and capture the forgone opportunities borne by folks who prematurely died from COVID. They begin by inspecting death certificates to identify those whose cause of death is listed as COVID. Using a cutoff age of 65, they sum up the number of years each individual had left before hitting the cutoff. So, say your partner contracts COVID and dies when she’s 55. Well, her YLL is 10; she’s been “shorted” ten years of opportunities to do all sorts of stuff. According to these researchers, COVID has robbed Americans of grand total of 138,000 years of life loss.
Hey, I’m not claiming the Harvard report is without problems. I, for one, think their cutoff is too low. There’s plenty of folks in their 70s and beyond who have plenty to contribute to the enrich their lives and of the lives of others. But going for a cutoff age greater than 65 would only highlight, not diminish, their primary finding; their report would still have a kick to it.
And here’s the kicker: The YLL for Blacks and Whites are estimated at 45,777 and 33,444, respectively. In other words, we—Black folk—account for more than 33% of the overall YLL, compared to about 24% of Whites. Premature COVID related deaths are disproportionately snuffing out opportunities for Black folk. A lot of folk, including Whites, are taking a lick from COVID and losing YLL’S but Black folk out here getting slammed by the shutting down of life opportunities associated with these premature deaths.
BLACKS BEHAVING BADLY?
So, to be Black is to disproportionately bear the burden of COVID. Buy why? Why are we much more likely to contract and die from COVID? What’s causing us to check out from COVID? Well, one of the more popular, although questionable, explanations is that we are somehow responsible for racial disparities in social, economic, and health outcomes. We’re constantly lectured to about how we’re supposedly our worst enemy. Our dysfunctional behavior is the reason why we’re so much more likely to catch a case of COVID and end up in a coffin. Play with fire and get smoked! We bear the brunt, so the story goes, because we behave badly.
By the way, there’s two versions of such racial disparities: “Hard” and “Soft.” The “hard” versions cast black folks—especially poor black folk—as imprisoned within the confines of a jacked up culture. It’s a culture that is present-oriented and that eschews any notion of delayed gratification. You know, “ we want our stuff and want it now” kind of thing. In this play, Black folk are hell-bent in turning up. Even if means taking unreasonable risks. We drink from wells that hold values that are different and in tension with those held by most other folk. We’re the aliens in the midst and a threat to ourselves and others. COVID is not going to dictate what we do, how it we do it, and where we do it. That’s the “ hard” version.
But it’s the “soft” version that seems to be dominating discourse. In this version, Black folk aren’t aliens adhering to weird values that make them prone to making risky moves. Nope, in the “soft” version we make risky moves because we lack information about the real dangers of the disease and, as result, put ourselves in harm’s way. If we’re given the info, says this version, we’ll be much more likely to follow the guidelines and, presumably, we’ll stop being disproportionately clocked by COVID. If we can get the info to those disproportionately impacted by COVID, they’ll act less like dunces and more like savants. The problem is not that we’re aliens but that we’re ignoramuses.
But are we? Are we behaving badly because we’re ignorant of the dangers of COVID? Is there any evidence that, on average, Blacks are less aware of this disease—and what it can do—than Whites? This is the central claim of the proponents of the “soft” version and, yet, they never offer a scintilla of evidence that supports the hook they hang their hats on. What they do offer—and it’s all they offer—is anecdotes. See some Black folks hooping and bodying up on each other? Walking around umasked? Packing the clubs? Well, all of a sudden that becomes prima facie evidence that, collectively, Blacks are unaware of the dangers of COVID and putting themselves at risk. Individuals become representative of an entire group. What we do as individuals is “read” as telling a story about the collective. Especially the dumb, dangerous, and deadly stuff. Sure, some individuals may very well behave as knuckleheads. But when it comes to us, folks—including some of us—make the gargantuan and illogical leap from seeing individual knuckleheads as signifying a race of knaves.
Besides, what evidence that’s available suggest that Black folk are more, not less, aware of the threat that COVID represents to their health. A Pew study, for instance, finds that 46% of Black people view COVID as a major threat to their personal health. The comparable figure for Whites is 21%. Did you catch that? Black people are more than twice as likely as Whites to view COVID as a major health threat. If anything, it appears as if Whites, not Blacks, are the ones desperately in need of data drops. This info suggest that, in fact, it could very well be Whites who need to “step up and follow the guidelines.” Kendi captures what’s at stake here when he writes that “Too many Americans are infected with the belief that a cause of the higher black infection or death rates is that Black people are not taking the viral threat seriously, and that white people have lower rates because they are talking COVID-19 seriously.” He also cites evidence that Black folk are more likely than Whites “to be buying nonperishable items, hand sanitizer, cleaning products, toilet paper, and bottled water.” And he ends it with this gut punch: “Ironically, the very people calling black people ignorant are ignorant about black people.” These “soft” behavioral explanations are insulting and their advocates specialize in the infantilization of Black folk.
WE GOT TO DO BETTER
We’ve got to do better. We’ve got to jettison explanations that infantilize Black folk and casts us as behaving badly because we’re suffering from a dearth of data. We’ve got to cease singling us out as being especially in need of info on the dangers of COVID. We’ve got to recognize that, despite the dominant narrative, we actually get it. We’ve got to be daring enough to envision something that this nation rarely does: We’re not broken, damaged, or in need of repair.
What we need, instead, is a full-throated response to this pandemic that centers the dignity of Black lives and that embeds any info within a broader response that promotes the protection of that dignity. What we need is a response that incorporates the myriad of ways of which racism and capitalism interacts to color code the occupational structure in such a way that it increases our exposure to the virus. What we need is a response is sufficiently attentive to the fact that many of us are not simply essential workers but, rather workers who are essentially expendable. What we need is to stop fixing people, especially Black people, and to start fixing policies.
In subsequent posts I’ll share what I think that looks like.
Catch you on the rebound,
Doc Greene
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