Democracy Dies in Darkness

The pathology of American racism is making the pathology of the coronavirus worse

Covid-19 is disproportionately killing black people because the whole system is worse for us.

Perspective by
Stacey Patton is the author of "Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America" and the forthcoming "Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children and Teenagers in America, 1880-1968."
April 11, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
A New York MTA worker wears personal protective equipment at the Grand Army Plaza subway station in Brooklyn. The coronavirus is disproportionately sickening and killing black Americans. (Frank Franklin II/AP)

Black America is ground zero for covid-19.

Alarming health department statistics from cities and counties in the Carolinas, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Wisconsin show that black people are getting sicker and dying at higher rates from the novel coronavirus than white people. Although the federal government hasn’t yet released data on the pandemic and race, the disparity looks likely to be a national trend, exacerbated by a combination of biased white doctors, black people’s well-documented distrust of the medical community and the failure to aggregate and properly report out data on the sick and dying.