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'An unbelievable chain of oppression': America's history of racism was a preexisting condition for COVID-19

'An unbelievable chain of oppression': America's history of racism was a preexisting condition for COVID-19

'An unbelievable chain of oppression': America's history of racism was a preexisting condition for COVID-19
Oct 13, 2020 3 mins, 53 secs

As the country cries out for a vaccine and a return to normal, lost in the policy debates is the reality that COVID-19 kills far more people of color than white Americans.

A team of USA TODAY reporters explored how the policies of the past and present have made Black, Asian, Hispanic and Indigenous Americans prime targets for COVID-19.

When COVID-19 struck, more people of color were serving as essential workers directly in the path of the virus.

counties with the highest death rates from COVID-19, seven have populations where people of color make up the majority, according to data compiled by USA TODAY.

With nearly 1,000 people a day dying from the virus and scientists scrambling to grasp exactly how the virus spreads and kills, federal and state data has not provided enough demographic detail to show the full impact on communities of color.

Black people are more than twice as likely to die from the virus than white people, and Hispanics and Native Americans are 1.5 times more likely to die, according to The COVID Tracking Project. .

"You can't change the fact that America is so segregated and that people of color tend to live in communities where the environmental conditions are worse, and that can increase your risk of heart disease or lung disease and diabetes," said Richard Besser, former acting director of the CDC and president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation’s largest philanthropy dedicated solely to health care.

A team of USA TODAY reporters pored over lawsuits challenging housing and health care policies, analyzed demographic data for communities hit hardest by COVID-19 and studied documents that reveal how government and business leaders worked together to marginalize populations.

They interviewed the descendants of enslaved Americans who were denied homeownership in white neighborhoods and Indigenous Americans who had been funneled into reservations in exchange for federally funded health care that never came.

Now, Essex has the 12th-highest death rate from COVID-19 in the country, according to data compiled by USA TODAY, fueled in large part by the high numbers of Black Americans living in segregated, low-income neighborhoods. .

When the plants were constructed, white homeowners had the means to move away, in time leaving a mostly Black population to breathe toxic air and suffer from such high rates of cancer that the entire region was dubbed "Cancer Alley.".

John the Baptist Parish had the 27th highest death rate from COVID-19 in the nation, according to a USA TODAY analysis.

"People get sick, people die, you go bury them," Murphy said.

That helps explain why McKinley County has the nation's sixth-highest death rate from COVID-19, according to USA TODAY data, with more than 240 people dying in the isolated corner of the state. .

Anna Marie Rondon, executive director of the New Mexico Social Justice and Equity Institute in McKinley County (who is Diné, as the Navajo people call themselves), said the ravages of COVID-19 are not an isolated tragedy but the latest chapter in Indigenous people’s long history of abuse and neglect from the U.S.

In San Francisco, community activists are worried that the number of Asian Americans getting COVID-19 is being vastly underreported. 

Experts attribute that alarming disconnect to a number of factors, including the fear of losing a job after a positive test, language barriers, lack of health care, growing anti-Asian hate crimes, and what’s called the "model-minority myth" – an assumption that education and financial successes enjoyed by some Asian Americans applies to all 20-some Asian ethnicities

Judy Young, executive director of the Southeast Asian Development Center, a nonprofit that helps residents from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, said her community suffers from an average household income a quarter of the city’s average, low high school graduation rates and obstacles to health care

Add a COVID-19 testing regime tailored to those proficient in English and an often fatalistic attitude toward the pandemic in the community, and Young said the virus has been painful to the Asian American community

From the broken promises of reparations to the terrible treatment of immigrants, from redlining practices that excluded Black Americans from homeownership to the GI Bill money that went mostly to white service members returning from World War II, Wright says COVID-19 is once again revealing the precarious position people of color often find themselves in

Racist policies mean many Black, Latino, Asian and Indigenous Americans are poorer and sicker than white Americans

This six-part USA TODAY investigation shows how the policies of the past and present have made people of color prime targets for COVID-19

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