The death of George Floyd, who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, was yet another reminder that black people are at greater risk of deadly encounters with police. Watching a man die in such a manner can be traumatic for anybody, but the video of Floyd’s death is especially difficult for black families.
“You know that could’ve been your brother, or your son, or your husband,” Robynn Cox, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Southern California, told me. “I understand in this country that our color is almost like a weapon. So, as a black person, I have to be careful of that.”
In the wake of Floyd’s death — as well as those of Breonna Taylor, Manuel Ellis, and Ahmaud Arbery — people are taking to the streets at a time when the intersecting dangers people of color face are clear. The demonstrations have focused on police brutality, but the very act of gathering poses the risk of catching COVID-19, which, like police violence, has disproportionately harmed communities of color. All this is especially poignant in Los Angeles, where the assault of Rodney King in 1991 yielded the first video of blatant police aggression, and where coronavirus transmission — and its economic impact — is only getting worse.
Black people in L.A. — and other people of color around the West — find themselves dealing with conjoined crises of public health, public safety, and economic security. And to permanently fix any of them, experts like Cox say, we must fix them all.
In early March, Dr. Bita Amani, an associate professor of urban public health at Charles R. Drew University, was in Cuba to study that country’s widely hailed public health system. She lacked internet access for much of the trip, and was relatively unaware the virus was beginning to roil the U.S.
Days before her trip was scheduled to end, the university called Amani and her students back to Los Angeles. They returned to a country entering lockdown, and from her perch in L.A. — a diverse city segregated along lines of race and income — she would witness a case study of the disproportionate impacts of the pandemic.
Early on, the virus was billed as an equalizer, a threat to rich and poor, white and brown, men and women alike. But the disease’s transmission through the United States has taken a familiar meander through disadvantaged populations. Nationwide, people of color are getting sick and dying at rates exceeding their share of the overall population. According to the latest Los Angeles County health data, COVID-19 has killed black people at a rate of 33 deaths per 100,000 residents — nearly double that of white folks.
Racial hierarchies — of housing, health care, income, you name it — “shapes your access to all the things that are good for you … and the distribution of your exposure to the harms and hazards,” Amani told me. “Race is literally the determining factor for that uneven distribution.”
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Similar trends have emerged in Denver, Seattle, and other cities in the West. At various points during the outbreak, the Navajo Nation and Yakima County, Washington — which has a large Latinx and Native American population — have had the West’s highest infection rates.
A growing chorus of public health experts say the severity of COVID-19 outbreaks in communities of color is inextricably linked to disparities that broadly affect the health of racial groups.
“The very real impact of the injustices plays out every day … and amplifies why racism is a public health issue,” Dr. Barbara Ferrer, Los Angeles County’s public health director, told the Los Angeles Times. “And the disproportionately higher number of deaths from COVID-19 among black and brown people is an indication of the impact of racism and discrimination on health and well-being.”
Compared with white folks, people of color in the U.S. suffer from higher rates of nearly every chronic disease — a testament, in part, to increased stress and exposure to pollution. Half of Americans who lack health insurance are people of color. In Los Angeles County, black and Hispanic residents have lower incomes, higher rates of poverty, and more precarious housing situations, all of which play into health outcomes.
Amani, co-chair of a coronavirus task force at the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice and Health, said addressing these factors is more important than vanquishing the virus itself. COVID-19, then, is not a standalone threat, but an agent triggering systemic issues that predispose folks to illness.
“Diseases play out in a social, political, and racial context,” she told me. “This has never been about just the coronavirus — it’s about the society in which coronavirus also lives.”
Amani saw that dynamic at play in Cuba. Though its per-capita health spending is dwarfed by that of the United States, Cuba has largely kept the outbreak under control, thanks in no small part to a community-oriented system that prioritizes access to preventive health care. Do that, Amani mused, and we’d be better off during the next pandemic — especially in disadvantaged neighborhoods like South L.A. Simply waiting for a vaccine and then returning to business as usual, Amani said, means we’ll go through the same process when we face another disaster.
“Without addressing those issues, what are we doing?” she said. “Focusing only on the virus doesn’t prepare us for the next set of problems.”
In 2017, University of California Los Angeles researchers painted a bleak picture of the job market for black workers in L.A. For decades, industries that supplied thousands of well-paid union jobs, especially in the manufacturing sector, left the city’s black neighborhoods. In turn, about 100,000 black people left Los Angeles between 1980 and 2015, and those who remained competed for jobs unlikely to offer benefits such as health care, or wages that could support homeownership.
“The convergence of the Black jobs crisis, spiraling housing costs, state violence and mass incarceration has resulted in a perfect storm of discontent in the Black community,” the authors wrote. “The response has been an unprecedented display of Black working-class activism and mobilization in Los Angeles County.”
Fast-forward three years, and the coronavirus is intensifying the ramifications of this unequal economy. The California Policy Lab estimates a quarter of black people in the state have filed unemployment claims since the pandemic began.
It’s an issue across the nation, and not just for black folks. A greater share of Hispanic women — 21 percent — have lost their jobs during the pandemic than any other demographic.
Even those who stay on payrolls aren’t safe. Consider the situation in Yakima County, Washington state’s agriculture hub. Deemed essential, many workers had to report to fields, orchards, and processing facilities. As a result, Yakima’s case count has yet to plateau. “We’re a little bit of a model of what it looks like when you have a lot of the population going off to the workplace,” Dr. Teresa Everson, health officer of the Yakima Health District, told The Seattle Times. “We never got to low mobility.” That’s left workers — most of them Latinx — lobbying for greater protection from COVID-19 at the job site.
The coronavirus has exacerbated a precarious economic situation for low-income people of color. Those who are deemed essential workers face a higher risk of infection, but many work low-wage jobs that often lack health insurance coverage. Others have lost their jobs, with no guarantee they’ll be returning to work before the federal unemployment assistance dries up in August.
It’s easy to unspool the consequences of this economic instability for people of color. No job would mean, likely, no health insurance. Already cash-strapped families who don’t own their homes are teetering on homelessness. Like COVID, a run-in with law enforcement could have a similarly destabilizing — or deadly — effect.
“I bring it back to economic justice,” Cox, who studies the economic and social fallout of criminal justice, said. “We have an enormous racial wealth gap in this country, which has partially been propped up by policies enacted by governments. … What you are seeing here is the compounding effects of racial injustice over hundreds of years.”
The impact of police brutality is palpable in Los Angeles. According to reporting from the Los Angeles Times, L.A. police have killed 886 people since 2000. About a quarter of them were black, even though African Americans make up just 8 percent of the city’s population. And the nation’s unfortunate history of capturing police brutality against black people on video began here — the 1991 video of Rodney King being beaten following a traffic stop galvanized the country, and riots broke out after the officers were acquitted the following year.
Demonstrations this time around have been far more peaceful, but those making their voices heard are nonetheless subjecting themselves to risk by gathering amid the pandemic, and amid police. Social distancing is difficult with hundreds of people near you in the street, and police hostility amplifies the danger. Measures such as mass arrests and deploying tear gas put folks at greater risk of contracting COVID-19, Amani said. But she, like many other public health experts, supports the demonstrators. “They’re demanding the very things we need to address COVID,” she said. “I cannot untangle the pandemic from the policing situation.” (Again, there are parallels in Indian Country: Law enforcement have killed Native Americans at a higher rate than any race or ethnicity since 1999.)
Cox has found in her own research that incarceration can foment food insecurity and hinder job prospects. So even when a black person survives an altercation with law enforcement, their economic prospects are hindered — which, in turn, puts them at greater risk during a public-health emergency. And so the cycle goes.
Demonstrators are calling for structural reform of policing. Mayors across the country, including Los Angeles’ Eric Garcetti, are heeding calls to restructure police departments. Democratic Representative Karen Bass, who represents Los Angeles and chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, and Senator Kamala Harris have sponsored measures that would ban chokeholds like the one used to kill Floyd and make it easier to sue or prosecute police officers for misconduct.
To Cox, such measures would be a starting point for a longer journey. “Look, there needs to be police reform, but we need to figure out why it took the death of George Floyd, in such a horrific way, to get to this point,” she said. “And I think that brings us back to race and our history of racism in this society.”
Cox has written that sustainable change in criminal justice can only take place with a broad re-education campaign, so Americans — especially those who are white — clearly understand how racism shapes our politics, economy, and culture. In addition, she wrote, the federal government should audit the entire criminal justice system — from police to prosecutors to prison — to evaluate how a person’s race can dictate outcomes. Federal funding to states should be tied to the eradication of disenfranchisement laws, and reparations must be considered to address the yawning wealth gap.
Those suggestions would likely take years to implement. But it’s possible the messages from demonstrators and activists are the first step of Cox’s re-education campaign. The evidence is obvious, and it’s piling up: Unemployment figures, tear gas, and the deaths — both by COVID-19 and police.
“The injustice is so apparent at this moment,” Amani said. “For those who have been questioning it — can you not see it now?”
