Bridy Rock
Stories (1/0)
RACISM COVID-19
In the US, UK and elsewhere, COVID-19 is hitting Black and other ethnic minority groups hardest creating a renewed focus on racism in healthcare. The Covid-19 crisis has highlighted this longstanding anti-African racism. With all the damage this pandemic has done to the economy and people’s livelihoods, scapegoating and hostility towards an imagined outside threat clearly helps to divert domestic frustration away from the ruling elite a trend we are all seeing worldwide. Travel bans missed the mark. Travelers from Europe not Asia brought the first cases of COVID-19 to at least 93 countries across five continents. Voyages from Italy were responsible for bringing COVID-19 to 46 nations, while travel from China is responsible for just 27 index cases. Yet, while the United States issued a travel ban on China at the end of January, it took another month and a half to limit European travel. During that time, an estimated two million people flew from Europe to the land of the free. The irrational racist surveillance that leads to the brutalization of Black Americans in their neighborhoods is spilling into public health and medical care. The coronavirus crisis has exposed China's long history of racism, It started with the local government in Guangzhou implementing surveillance, conducting compulsory testing and enforcing a 14 day quarantine for all African nationals even if they had earlier been tested negative and hadn’t recently travelled outside China. In Yuexiu district, the largest African migrant community in China, many Africans were evicted by landlords despite having paid their rents and left to sleep rough on the streets. In a department store, an African woman was stopped at the entrance while her white friend was allowed in. In a McDonald’s restaurant, a notice was put up saying “black people cannot come in”. In an echo of apartheid South Africa or segregation-era United States, a colour bar was imposed across the city: Africans were refused entry by hospitals, hotels, supermarkets, shops and food outlets. At one hospital, even a pregnant woman was denied access. The widespread racism has caused a huge public outcry across Africa, shared on social media. A key term used interchangeably for both ethnic group and nationality, refers to a group of common descent, with a distinct culture and territory. Community’s in Europe and the United States become victims of racism during this pandemic, Africans in China are crying out, “We are not the virus!” To resist racism, we need to see it for what it is, wherever it occurs. We rely on readers’ generosity to power our work and protect our independence. Every contribution, however big or small, makes a difference for our future. Ethnic minority workers are also more likely to have zero-hours contracts or work for agencies , meaning they are under pressure to keep working despite the danger posed by the virus. Poverty has also hit some communities harder as businesses closed in the pandemic, Bangladeshi men are four times more likely to be in these industries than white men. In the 19th century, Black people were seen as ‘racially different’, which was used to justify discrimination. In the 20th century, medical racism became more ‘systemic’, for example with Black people not informed of the true nature of some experiments. Today, medical algorithms are accused of racism and systemic housing inequalities continue to create bad health outcomes. If you’re Black or Latino in the US, you’re almost twice as likely to die from COVID-19, That’s according to The New York Times’ analysis of data from America’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The numbers also reveal that Native Americans are more likely to be hospitalized with the condition than other ethnic groups. In the UK, it’s a similar story. Official figures show that Black people are 1.9 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than white people. In France, infection rate data is not collected by ethnicity but the trends are believed by some medical experts to be similar. These patterns are drawing attention to long-standing health inequalities faced by ethnic minority groups. And in some cases, these inequalities stem from structural or overt racism that goes back decades, or centuries. Throughout history, medical racism has often been based on the myth that Black people have different and inferior bodies. Researchers say that history shows this practice could represent an implicit bias, discrimination, and racism, and masks economic and environmental factors. Black people were used unwittingly in early 20th-century medical experiments. One of the worst examples is the Tuskegee study.
By Bridy Rock3 years ago in The Swamp