By Alana Lentin
As coronavirus continues to rampage across the globe, it has become apparent that, while biologically the virus may not discriminate, it is having a much worse effect on people from ethnic minorities. As the researcher Omar Khan has noted, BAME Covid-19 deaths “track existing social determinants of health” such as overcrowding in homes, insecure work and lack of access to green spaces. In other words, the virus is hitting people harder not because it can see their race but because “racialised” people – those who are categorised by societies as, say, black or brown – are more vulnerable.
And this is not the only way that race is playing a role in the crisis. All around the world, minority communities are disproportionately targeted by ramped-up policing that has accompanied the enforcement of lockdown measures. Data from New South Wales in Australia reveals that, although the richer, whiter Sydney beach suburbs have the majority of Covid-19 infections, it is in the neighbourhoods with larger numbers of people of migrant origin and indigenous Australians that people have received the most fines for breaching social distancing directives. The US has seen a business-as-usual approach to police brutality targeting black people while, at the same time, groups of overwhelmingly white people in New York’s West Village freely breached social distancing.
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Some voices are uninterested in this connection between race and the virus or treat it with derision. “Campaigners are twisting BAME Covid data to further their ‘victimhood’ agenda,” reads a commentator in the Daily Telegraph. An article in Quillette – the online magazine of the so-called “intellectual dark web” – asks the question “Do Covid-19 racial disparities matter?” before concluding: “The fact is our culture is obsessed with race.” These responses are the product of a discourse in the west that for decades has claimed that “making it about race” unnecessarily sensationalises an issue. But as BAME people die and suffer disproportionately from a virus, it is clear that “race” is about power – which is very much contrary to the way that it is usually discussed.
Source: Coronavirus is the ultimate demonstration of the real-world impact of racism | Alana Lentin
