Should the COVID-19 impact on Blacks be viewed primarily in terms of race or class?

by Lacino Hamilton

Stark statistics have come to light showing that Black Americans are disproportionately contracting and dying from COVID-19. However, the focus on why this is may be less racial than it is economic? Furthermore, when Whites and Blacks are convinced that their basic health and economic interests are the same they may find common cause for the advancement of those interests.

There are caricatured narratives, racist stereotypes, and ancedotes aplenty peddled by some politicians and media narrowly describing why COVID-19 has disproportionately affected Blacks. Everything from having weak immune systems to being stupid and refusing to social distance. Of course many of us know the painful truth. To the extent that racial statistics are even valid, they simply give the statistical shape of a demograghic reality, a surface phenomenon.

Housing, education, employment, health insurance, you name it, America’s racial divide is systematized and perpetuates an unequal distribution of privileges, resources and power between Whites and Blacks. It is historic, normalized, and deeply embedded in the fabric of U.S. society. But just looking at COVID-19 impact on Blacks through a racial lens fails to be critical, and prevents finding ways to redistribute resources more equitably.

Just seeing the dispropoftionate impact of COVID-19 through a racial lens unburdens people of any responsibility to challenge-let alone change–the fundamental precepts of a society torn asunder by one percent of the nation owning two thirds of the wealth, and the rest of the wealth distributed in a way as to turn those in the 99 percent into potential candidates for the worst possible human consequences. The evils of racism, economic exploitation, and getting sick and dying more of the virus are all tied together. And this madness must cease.

Way before the nightmare we had thought might one day arrive actually did in the form of a global pandemic, the average American adult had less than $400 in savings. Household incomes were stagnating for a large share of the population, job opportunities deteriorating, prospects for upward mobility waning, and economic gains increasingly accruing to those already wealthy. The top 5 percent of the population receive about two-thirds of all personal income while about 40 million live in poverty, 18.5 million in extreme poverty, and 5.3 million live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty.

Talking about racism has virtually no effect on the source of why Blacks are at greater risk of contracting and dying from COVID-19. It actually conceals the failure of the American system. That is, the virus combines with a system which is chaotic in nature, where the owners of capital make social policies in their own interests. Preventing tens of millions of white and Black Americans from being safe and secure. There is actually 8 million more poor Whites than there are poor Blacks in this country. Though Black poverty, percentage wise, out rank that of Whites.

What is clear in this moment of crisis is the American economic system is fundamentally unjust allowing cities to fester, forcing rural people to face debt, offering no life building work for the young, creating a marginal population of idle and desperate people, many of whom happen to be Black. What America needs is radical economic transformation, such as a reduction of the military budget and a truly progressive income tax.

With those changes alone there would be more than enough funds available to pay for a universal health-care system funded by the government as Medicare is administered. The public appeal for such transformation is based on a simple but powerful argument: people over profits. A culture where people are no longer taught to strive for success as a mask for greed. Economic arrangements that distribute the national wealth humanely.

Racism is still deeply embedded in American society. The evidence is continued police terrorism against people of color, the highest rates of infant mortality, having to work two and three jobs–as much as 80 hours a week–to pay for rent and food, and a corresponding growth of imprisonment. But in the richest country where no one should be living hungry, homeless, or under the stress of health care being a privilege, where liveable wages, food, housing, health care, and education should be a right to all people, business interests is king.

Pre-COVID-19 when Trump would declare that the economy was the best it had ever been, he neglected to acknowledge that while it may have been moderately sound for many in the middle class, extremely sound for the richest 1 percent, it was not at all sound for about 100 million people who are struggling to survive. This does not give us absolute truth about who is at the greatest risk of catching and dying from the virus, but it should cause us to look deeper than the glib racial statements made by political leaders and “experts” quoted in the media.

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