Tag Archives: COVID-19

Opinion | My Mother’s Death Will Have Everything and Nothing to Do With Covid-19 – The New York Times

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My Mother Is Busy Getting Ready to Die

No insurance. 64 years old. Alone, along with all the other black people at the bottom of the pandemic.

By LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant

Dr. Manigault-Bryant is an associate professor of Africana studies at Williams College.

My mother is dying a painful death, and it has everything and nothing to do with Covid-19.

In a piece for The Atlantic detailing the ways in which the coronavirus seems to be hitting black people the hardest, Ibram X. Kendi wrote: “Sometimes racial data tell us something we don’t know. Other times we need racial data to confirm something we already seem to know.” My mother is a living example of what we already know about race, class and suffering.

She is not in an elder-care facility, nor a hospital. She has not been, and most likely will not be, tested for the virus or receive a diagnosis of having it.

Still, hers is the body of all the black people at the bottom of the pandemic. No insurance, though not for lack of trying. Medicaid applications denied for reasons we don’t understand. Inconsistent care at a local public clinic meant hard-to-come-by appointments and checkups only at moments deemed most critical. It wasn’t enough.

Now, she’s dying from end-stage liver disease and kidney failure, diagnosed too late to save her. This has nothing to do with Covid-19.

She is not even that old (64, and thus Medicare ineligible), but FaceTime tells no lies, and she is wasting away before us. What’s worse, even as I’m exactly four hours and three minutes away — geographically closer than I’ve been in over a decade — I can’t be near her, touch her, cook for her, kiss her or tell her all of the things that I don’t yet know I need to say. This has everything to do with Covid-19.
On the occasion she’s strong enough to answer the phone, holding the phone for FaceTime proves too much. Calls come too late, even as time is too short. The grandchildren who live close by cannot get close to her — the idea of transmitting anything to her, as she’s so obviously immune-compromised, is terrifying. The underlying conditions would amplify an already-certain death. This has everything to do with Covid-19.

My brother, who lives exactly six minutes and 24 seconds away from Mommy, risks seeing her because someone needs to make sure she’s still breathing. That check-in is thus essential. He scrubs himself clean after work with all manner of chemicals — he’s a waste management truck driver, an essential employee. This is an effort to protect her. He’s close to her. This is an effort to protect us. This has everything to do with Covid-19.

He tries to get her to eat something other than her single meal of applesauce and Vienna sausages. This has nothing to do with Covid-19.

It’s officially power-of-attorney and health-proxy time. Getting my mother to the lawyer — a four-minute drive — is a thing. My brother and I spend hours strategizing transportation. The errand feels like it takes an eternity. This has everything to do with Covid-19.

Like so many, countless others, my family and I are going to be left with the unsettling weight of her death. My mother is going to die soon, and it will most likely be alone. I am afraid. I am one of many grieving, forever-changed faces. No repast. No low-country songs sung graveside. No sending up our timber for her. We cannot grieve properly. Lots of regret. This has everything to do with Covid-19.

When the pandemic is over, we still won’t know how to deal with this. We’re not ready for this kind of grief. Death is so utter, so absolute, yet so much right now is uncertain. My mother is dying a painful death, and it has everything and nothing to do with Covid-19.

LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant (@DoctorRMB) is associate professor of Africana studies at Williams College and the author of “Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory Among Gullah/Geechee Women.”

 

Confinement and Disease from Slavery to the COVID-19 Pandemic – AAIHS

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Confinement and Disease from Slavery to the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Gabriella Onikoro-Arkell   0

Apartment building in Chicago, 1941, (Russell Lee: Library of Congress)

As many college students as well as others have moved back home during the current pandemic people’s houses are feeling more cramped than ever. The conditions of small living spaces feel even more confining as communities are tasked with staying inside as much as possible with orders to shelter in place still intact in some locations. These conditions have left many feeling restless, bored, agitated and sad as they try to carve out private space and a sense of normalcy in such an uncertain time. The feelings of confinement ordinary people are facing contrasts starkly with the views of celebrity housing available through live streams, photos, and videos on social media. Gal Gadot and several other celebrities, for example, released a video of them singing John Lennon’s “Imagine.” The video was posted to Gadot’s Instagram with the caption “We are in this together, we will get through it together. Let’s imagine together. Sing with us. All love to you, from me and my dear friends.” Immediately, people on Instagram and Twitter noted the emptiness of these gestures coming from wealthy celebrities without the addition of material action.

The pandemic has drawn to a head the inequalities in housing and wealth defining the contemporary US. The nation’s majority have been left scrambling to make rent for their tiny apartments while watching the wealthy squirrel away in large open concept mansions with lush lawns and huge pools.

For Black communities, these contradictions are nothing new, as forced immobility and confinement have defined their historical and contemporary experiences with regard to the matters of space. As West Africans were rendered slaves, one of their primary spatial experiences was confinement, first in slave castles like El Mina in modern Ghana and then aboard the thousands of slave ships that traversed the Atlantic across five centuries. Africans crossed the ocean packed in and chained together with little room to move.

The carceral space aboard the slave ship  put captives in a position of increased vulnerability to diseases and illness. Despite slave trader’s efforts to bring only “healthy” Africans across the sea many ships suffered numerous casualties due to yellow fever, smallpox, scurvy, malaria, flux, and several other diseases. Sowande’ Mustakeem has noted that the isolation caused by the sea voyage along with the cramped and unsanitary conditions captives were held in created unique and devastating encounters with disease. The spread of disease was further aggravated by the violent treatment of captives aboard these ships as well as poor nutrition. As people’s bodies attempted to heal from physical and psychological injuries as well as illness, they faced an environment that only further deteriorated their capacities to fight infection.

In the North American context, despite variation in housing circumstances across different regions and time, the enslaved were forced to live in confining spaces. Whether awaiting sale in a dingy and overcrowded slave pen in Richmond, living in overcrowded gender-segregated barracks in Charleston, or making lives in a drafty and inadequately sized cabin on a rural sugar plantation in New Orleans’ hinterland, slaves experienced the quotidian violence of tight living irrespective of other differences in their social conditions and labor. This contrasts sharply with white slave owners who demonstrated their power with sprawling homes on sprawling estates. Consider for example, Thomas Jefferson’s Albemarle County, Virginia mansion, Monticello in contrast to the small and poorly insulated log cabin structures in which the people he enslaved lived. The contrasts between Black and white space also had another dimension related to mobility. Especially in the wake of the Jacksonian era, white people moved freely, while enslaved people’s movements were legally regulated and violently circumscribed. Even free Black people, especially after Nat Turner’s bloody 1831 rebellion, were strictly delimited in their abilities to move freely. Confinement and immobility were twinned conditions for slaves. As Katherine McKittrick analyzes, Harriet Ann Jacobs, spent seven years in her grandmother’s garret or attic space, unable to fully stand upright in nine-foot-long, seven-foot-wide, three-foot-tall space. She hid in this space, carving it as a “loophole of retreat” in order to evade the violence of her master and eventually to escape. For Jacobs freedom required a subtle reworking of the confinement enforced on Black life and Black geographies.

This lack of mobility and confinement continued after slavery as part of its afterlives along with the related condition of predisposition to contagious disease and premature death. In Chicago between the World Wars, Black migrant communities were forced into the West and Southside by legally sanctioned segregation, policing, and vigilante violence. Black families rented small apartments called kitchenettes at exorbitant rates, and as St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton characterized  in their influential study, lived in cramped poorly heated and congested conditions. As Rashad Shabazz argues, in the spaces of kitchenettes, Black Chicagoans experienced an expression of carceral power in their ordinary lives, manifest in the arrangement of their housing. He writes “by creating close associations between people the kitchenette made privacy of any kind impossible, shaming its residents by putting all actions under the forced gaze of others in the room.”1 This kind of housing arrangement is psychologically wearing, as Richard Wright’s Native Son disturbingly and dramatically fictionalizes. Many Black Chicagoans, across generations, experienced life-long emotional states like the frustration, restlessness, and captivity some people stuck in their homes due to the pandemic currently are experiencing for the first time.

This confining geography extending out from kitchenette also had deadly effects. In 1918 and 1919 the Spanish Flu pandemic caused mass death and tremendous social upheaval that anticipated and rehearsed what Black communities are currently experiencing with COVID-19. Prisoners today are among the most vulnerable to COVID-19—the highest number of cases tied to a location is a prison in Ohio where 80% of the prisoners have tested positive. This resonates with the history of the Spanish Flu in Chicago. As one Chicago Defender writer noted, “Chicago police stations are doing more to breed disease than any other agency supposed to be working for the good of Chicago.”2 The journalist went on to note the way Chicago jails “huddle prisoners together” without medical examinations and how this led to the spread of the deadly flu.3 The carcerality of the kitchenette also made its residents vulnerable. Shabazz notes that Black Chicagoans had higher rates of mental illness, disease, and death all of which were influenced by their crowded and run-down living conditions. These kinds of vulnerabilities tied to spatial confinement are ongoing in Chicago where 50% of the deaths from COVID are Black, and where segregation and carcerality continue to define the landscape.”4

Blackness’s tie to tight spatial control and confinement,extending between living spaces and formal carceral institutions, and from slavery to the present, puts Black people at greater risk for disease and infection exacerbated by the mental health effects of confinement. This greater vulnerability tied to spatial confinement, overcrowding, and other effects of our nation’s anti-Black geography buttresses the spatial advantages white communities enjoyed historically and which they continue to enjoy. White slave owners profited from the confinement and forced vulnerability of their slaves. White landowners in Chicago profited from overcharging their Black tenants for poor quality housing. The risk of death, disease, and mental illbeing that Black people live with exists to produce white safety and comfort, guaranteed in exclusive geographies away from lead paint, rusty water, over-policing, and gratuitous violence. In order to mitigate the unequal deadly effects of COVID-19  and to prevent the future of devastating conditions disproportionately affecting Black people, we must reimagine the American landscape outside this history defined by the twinned and reinforcing structures of Black immobility and confinement.

  1. Rashad Shabaz, Spacializing Blacknes: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 50. ↩
  2. “Spanish Plague Raging in Chicago: All Places of Public Assemblage Ordered Closed by Health Officials,” Chicago Defender (Chicago, IL), Oct. 19, 1918. ↩
  3. Ibid. ↩
  4. “The Color of Caronavirus: COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the US.” APM Research LAB, May 5th, 2020. https://www.apmresearchlab.org/covid/deaths-by-race. ↩

Source: Confinement and Disease from Slavery to the COVID-19 Pandemic – AAIHS

‘The Father of Environmental Justice’ Isn’t Surprised by COVID-19 Health Disparities – Texas Monthly

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As the coronavirus keeps large swaths of Texas shut down, from the economy to the education system and social life, it has become common to note that the disease “doesn’t discriminate.” But Robert Bullard, a professor and former dean at Texas Southern University’s Barbara Jordan–Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs, has spent the past four decades researching the opposite: how natural disasters and crises wreak havoc on society unequally. Low-income communities of color often have far fewer resources to address disaster and, as a result, face far greater risks than whiter, wealthier neighborhoods in times of crisis.

Indeed, across the nation, evidence suggests that people of color are dying at higher rates from COVID-19 than are white people. Though Texas’s Department of State Health Services has so far reported incomplete racial data, some counties are following the national trend. In Harris County, for example, 40 percent of those who died from COVID-19 were black, though black people account for only 20 percent of the county’s population.

A number of factors could be responsible for the disparity. In Texas, black and Latino communities have higher rates of preexisting conditions that make the coronavirus deadly, like asthma and high blood pressure. When it comes to health care, black, Hispanic, and Native Americans in the state are more likely to be uninsured than white residents, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Testing for COVID-19 is also far from equally accessible: in the city of Dallas, testing is concentrated in high-income areas. And people of color might also be more likely to be employed in sectors that preclude social distancing: black and Latino workers are the least likely to report being able to work from home, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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While COVID-19 is a new phenomenon, racial disparities in health outcomes are not. In the seventies, Bullard’s research in Houston demonstrated that toxin-releasing facilities like waste and sewage plants were disproportionately placed in the city’s black neighborhoods, leading to a higher concentration of health problems. To this day, the pattern holds true.

Bullard’s work catalyzed the American environmental justice movement, which argues that environmental problems disproportionately affect communities of color and the poor, and that race and class should be accounted for in their potential solutions. Texas Monthly spoke with Bullard about how the pandemic intersects with environmental issues and why people of color are more vulnerable to the disease.

[This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.]

Texas Monthly: In your book The Wrong Complexion for Protection you write, “When societal resources are distributed unequally by class and race, it should be no surprise that population health is distributed along those lines as well.” Were you at all surprised by the racial disparities many counties are reporting with COVID-19?

Robert Bullard: No. When it comes to who gets in line first, and who has priority [for resources like health care], a lot of that is predetermined by the power structures, politically and economic. Oftentimes privilege aligns with race, with white people getting the first and the best protection. And so it’s not surprising when you look at how structural and institutional racism has given privileges for some and disadvantaged others. And when you have poverty, lack of access to health care, [high rates of] uninsured, many who have no private automobiles and are dependent on the buses and public transportation, and neighborhoods in pollution sacrifice zones—and then you pile on top of that the stress of racism—you’re going to get people who are vulnerable. It’s not rocket science. These social determinants of health have been known for many years.

And so the coronavirus is basically taking advantage of those vulnerabilities, and you’re seeing it play out in the deaths. And that’s more than sad. It’s unacceptable.

TM: The coronavirus seems to be a public health disaster that’s layering on top of existing disparities in environmental and social determinants of health. How do you see these things as interconnected, and how are environmental vulnerabilities making the coronavirus worse in certain communities?

RB: We know that if communities are saturated with all kinds of polluting facilities—landfills, incinerators, petrochemical plants and refineries, and coal power plants—and the air quality is bad, you’ll find high rates of ill health: asthma, respiratory illnesses, and other kinds of diseases that are elevated among people of color and poor people, like diabetes and hypertension.

We’re not even dealing with the coronavirus yet: we’re talking about studies that have shown that areas that have high concentration of polluting facilities also have high concentration of health disparities.

So when you apply that to this virus that appears to be attacking the respiratory system … and the cardiovascular system, it’s already hard to breathe in some of these neighborhoods. The coronavirus will make it even harder. It will kill you.

The idea is that if a community is located physically on the wrong side of the levee, the wrong side of the river, on the wrong side of the tracks, it receives less protection than those who are on the right side. Communities of color are disproportionately more vulnerable.

You tell me your zip code, and I can tell you how healthy you are. And so when you talk about trying to map out those social, economic, and racial vulnerabilities, and then overlay health, you can see that there’s a big disparity. You can go from one census tract or one zip code to another, and life expectancy changes by more than fifteen or twenty years by just crossing that line.

TM: Has Texas’s response failed to acknowledge preexisting health disparities?

RB: Texas has the second lowest percentage of testing but that doesn’t surprise me. What surprises me is that it doesn’t have the worst.

This virus does not does not look at your race, or your color. It looks at vulnerability. You can try and look at geographic areas the virus is hitting and not look at race. But then if you put race back in, you will see that there is a discernible pattern. Oftentimes, lax enforcement of environmental law means that communities on the frontline suffer. And that goes hand in hand with lax civil rights enforcement. Texas has the highest rates of uninsurance in the nation, and it has resisted expanding Medicaid, for example. So these policies have created vulnerabilities and it disadvantages communities.

If you talk to people in those neighborhoods on the streets, they can tell you without mapping that they’re most likely to get flooded. Most likely to get polluted. Most likely to suffer from extended unemployment. Or they don’t have the benefit of working from home or a safety net for sick days and paid leave. The medical folks call it comorbidity. Folks on the frontline have always known that’s how things are connected. It’s the cumulative impact of all these things coming at you at one time.

TM: What sort of public policies do you think that Texas, or the United States more generally, should implement to close these racial disparities?

RB: There are some obvious things that need to happen like strengthening people’s access to health care and health insurance. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen attempts to weaken both access to health care and environmental standards with federal rollbacks of specific provisions of the Clean Air Act and tailpipe pollution, and even today with mercury emissions.

So for many of us who have been advocates of environmental justice and health equity, that’s the wrong direction. Other states have taken the high road, and expanded Medicare and access to health insurance. And we should also acknowledge that climate change will make it even more difficult in the future for Texans with hotter days and more bad air-quality days. There will be more outbreaks [because of climate change], as health professionals and scientists have said. We can’t wait to address these issues. We need a real emergency plan for disasters, especially as our population is growing in Texas, to make our cities and rural areas more resilient.

TM: Low income communities are also more likely to live in environmentally vulnerable areas, particularly those at risk of flooding. Do you have concerns about hurricane season coming up and how that might put a double strain on some communities?

RB: The communities that are hit hardest and take the longest to recover, those are the same communities that I’m worried about. On June 1, if we have an active hurricane season in communities that are already suffering from COVID-19, how can you shelter in place when you have to evacuate? Where do people go? If you go to a shelter, it’s going to be hard to social distance. So you’re talking about disasters compounding. That should be worrisome for FEMA and the state government. I’m hoping there is planning for that, so that we don’t get caught flat-footed. I would hope that the smartest people in government are working on the areas that have historically had these severe weather events.

People are stressed about the virus, and people who live on the Gulf Coast, April and May is when they start getting stressed about hurricane season. How are we going to respond to another Harvey or Imelda? In many cases, community groups are the first line of defense. People aren’t going to wait on the government for [immediate aid], because if we do, it will be too late. It’s important to lift up organizations and institutions that have built up that trust in communities. We have to make sure that these organizations are funded and positioned in a way that can address what’s happening.

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