Is Coronavirus Racist?

By Saudiel Benitez 

Race and Science 

Prior to the global pandemic, the US healthcare system already was failing millions of Americans by providing inadequate care. Covid-19 has only magnified the underlying issues of our healthcare system. There's different factors and influences on the healthcare system, but one that is not often looked at is the social aspect. In “Washington, D.C., Kansas, Wisconsin, Michigan and Missouri” the coronavirus “death rate is four to six times higher among Black people,” why is that? It has to do with scientific racism, something that has actually been around for centuries. Scientific racism is the incorrect use of science to justify assumptions of racial superiority and inferiority. But is Coronavirus racist, and can science even be racist? It has been used to justify the oppression or negligence of different racial groups. To understand this idea, we need to start at the beginning of American’s scientific racism. 

All Humans Are “Equal” 

Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, but that did not stop white supremacists from using whatever they could to uphold white supremacy. Scientific racism in America started out with scientists using phrenology to justify racist theories. Phrenology is a pseudoscience which looks at measurements of human skulls to determine mental, biological, and social capacities. “Scientists'' ended up with racist conclusions, because they were trying to answer their own preconceived notion of white superiority. These scientists sought to answer “Why white people were biologically superior” which skewed the framing of their data. These studies were used to justify policies, but most importantly at the time, uphold slavery and deny rights to African Americans. 

 This type of science falls under eugenics. The practice or belief that humanity as a whole can be improved “by selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits.” The US even founded the Eugenics Record Office in 1910 in which “field workers gathered data from individual persons on a variety of physical, mental, and moral or behavioral traits—all of which were believed to be biologically heritable.” These records were used in racist ways, but also ableist ways as well. 

Scientific Racism Today

Scientific racism has evolved to be more subtle. An example is textbooks as recent as 2017 explaining that Black people report a higher pain intensity or that Native Americans prefer their medications to be blessed by a shaman. The second resaon for this has to do with money, specifically, the history of non-white communtiies being subjected to generational oppression through redlining.

With the pandemic,some people have claimed that Black people are genetically inferior due to higher death rates. This kind of language is no different than the claims phrenologists or eugenicists made in earlier centuries. Like many other issues, racism has not gone away completely, just developed a new way to stay under your nose. The real reason for this is because “many people of color work in… nursing or home health care, grocery stores and mass transit, where they are more likely to come into close contact with people who are sick.” Not just that, but “to make matters worse, these jobs are often poorly paid, and a large proportion of such workers lack health or life insurance. 

The Cure 

There’s a lot of different ways to combat systemic racisms and inequalities in the healthcare system. Recently with the Bernie Sadner’s campaign, there has been a greater push for Medicare for All, a single payer healthcare system.  By abolishing private healthcare, it would prevent people from avoiding “going to the doctor when sick or injured in the past year due to cost.... Many Americans put off care rather than risk medical debt and even bankruptcy just to get the care they need.” This would not completely solve the problem of scientific racisms, but it would help level the playing field. Another way is to be able to help educate and change the culture around a lot of these negative stereotypes or bad faith arguments. When someone brings up that Black people or people of color are more likely to die from Coronavirus, explain to them why that is. Your advocacy against scientific racisms can help promote a more equal and understanding healthcare system.