By the end of July over 16,000 African Americans had died who would not have died if they had the
same death rate from Covid-19 as whites. It's just one example of getting a concrete sense
of the racial differences in health really mean the dramatic loss of life on a large scale.
We have known for more than 100 years that race matters for health thee are racial ethnic
differences at the beginning of life. Black babies are 2.4 times more likely to die before
their first birthday than white infants in the United States and that pattern of racial ethnic
differences exists across the life course. If you look at the best data that we have on Covid-19
deaths what we see is that African Americans have death rates that are at least twice that
of of those of whites. So it's a striking difference that exists although there's been
a lot of awareness among researchers that race matters for health. National public opinion data
tells us that most Americans have been unaware that racial ethnic differences even exist
They think that Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement and the 1960s policies solved the
problem and so that today racism no longer exists. Racism is a relic of the past and today everyone
has equal opportunity. In fact an interesting study published a couple years ago found that
the Americans who are most likely to overestimate the degree of equality are highly educated whites
who believe in a just world. So people are not motivated to solve a problem if they
don't even know the problem exists so the first challenge is we need to raise awareness levels.
In the United States and in other racialized countries we have large racial ethnic differences
in socio-economic status, income, education and wealth. Look at data for the United States
total household income in the year 2018. For every dollar of household income that white households
receive African American households receive 59 cents and as large as that racial gap in income is
it dramatically understates the racial ethnic differences in economic status. There's something
else that's important called wealth. Wealth is the economic reserves that households have
it's the savings, it's the home equity, it's the cash reserves that households have and the latest
Federal Reserve Board data tells us that for every dollar of wealth that white households have,
Black households have 10 pennies and Latino households have 12 pennies. And when you lack
wealth you can be one paycheck away from being homeless, you can be one paycheck away from
being able to feed your family. And so what we are seeing with these large racial ethnic differences
in wealth in the in this pandemic of Covid-19 is that although all Americans are in the same storm,
we are in the same pandemic, we are not in the same boats. And some boats, those boats that have
wealth, you are better able to to navigate the storm, you're better able to protect yourself
and take care of yourself in the storm than those very fragile boats households that have no wealth.
So if we think of Covid-19 and we think of
why is it well that Blacks and Latinos and other populations of color were at higher risk.
Research indicates that Blacks and Latinos were disproportionately among the essential
workers who kept the trains running and who who stocked the shelves in our grocery stores
and so that working from home was not an option for them. So it puts them on the front lines and
and made them at high risk. And then living in in more crowded communities where social distancing
was often not an option and then the the lower levels of access to medical care. Research
also documented that when you looked at where was testing available in a city for Covid-19 in those
poor disadvantaged communities there was less access to testing for Covid-19 as well. So being
able to identify the problem early on was also a challenge. So in multiple ways the conditions of
life, the neighborhood conditions, the housing conditions, the employment conditions are all
things that conspire together to put populations of color at higher risk of of the pandemic.
One of my areas of research is the impact of stress on health and what we find when
we do studies in the United States is that African Americans and Latinos have higher
levels of stress, of multiple types of stressful life experiences. So they have higher levels
of economic stress, that means more likely to lose their job, more likely to have difficulty making
their ends meet at the end of the month. They also have higher levels of psychosocial stress
like the death of a loved one, higher death rates means that you you have the disproportionate loss
of family members. And bereavement and death is a very stressful life experience. But they also have
higher levels of exposure to physical chemical stressors air pollution is an example of that.
On top of all of these stresses I've talked about there is an added burden that minorities also
carry and that is the stress of interpersonal racism. And what research documents is that
the stress of discrimination leads to a broad range of health problems.
Persons who report high levels of everyday discrimination are more likely to get diabetes
independent of other risk factors. They're more likely to develop high blood pressure,
they're more likely to become obese. So across a broad range of indicators of chronic disease
and poor health we find that stress in general and discrimination as well as one type of stress
leads to poorer health .What's the consequence of this? Well the Centers for Disease Control
tells us that African Americans get most chronic illnesses like high blood pressure, like diabetes,
like heart disease at younger ages than whites. Researchers who study this phenomenon
have developed terms like accelerated aging or premature aging or biological weathering
to capture the added burden of stress on the lives of African Americans and other populations
of color. And why does that matter profoundly with Covid-19? Well if you look at individuals who were
hospitalized for Covid-19 in the United States they have what we call some co-morbid condition,
they're more likely to be obese or have high blood pressure or have diabetes or have some
respiratory condition. So basically what I'm saying is the stressors of daily life over
decades of living in bad residential and working environments have been preparing individuals and
making populations of color more vulnerable to the impact of a condition like Covid-19
which has a disproportionate negative impact on people who have underlying health conditions.
The biggest challenge that we have is the fact that, to put it bluntly, we don't care enough
about the populations of color that are suffering this disproportionate burden and I go back to
the powerful words of W.E.B. Du Bois "The most difficult social problem in the matter
of Negro health is the peculiar attitude of the nation toward the well-being of the race.
There have been few other cases in the history of civilized peoples where human suffering has
been viewed with such peculiar indifference." What W.E.B. Du Bois called the peculiar indifference,
scholars today study and call it the empathy gap. Most adults feel greater empathy, feel
greater compassion for the suffering that occurs to someone of their own racial group than the
suffering that occurs to someone of a different racial group. How do we build the empathy? How
do we get the compassion? How can we generate that same kind of response to challenges that
are sitting on our doorstep that we can see the challenges and we can feel the pain of those who
are suffering and we will say this is unacceptable and we will tell our political leaders
we need to implement those strategies that have been shown to work and that will save our society
money so that we can allow every American child to have a chance at living the American dream.