COVID-19 AND THE COLOR LINE

AS THE COVID-19 CRISIS unfolds, its toll on African Americans is coming into sharper focus. In almost every setting, African Americans are contracting the virus-and dying from it-at startlingly disproportionate rates. In Alabama, African Americans account for 27 percent of the population, 44 percent of COVID-19 cases, and 45 percent of COVID-19 deaths. In Illinois, African Americans account for 14 percent of the population, 22 percent of COVID-19 cases, and 28 percent of COVID-19 deaths. In Wisconsin, African Americans account for just 6 percent of the population but nearly a quarter of COVID-19 deaths. Starkest of all, in the city of St. Louis, African Americans account for 47 percent of the population, almost 60 percent of COVID-19 cases, and over two thirds of those who have died.

How do we account for this damage, for what New York Times columnist Charles Blow aptly dubbed the racial time bomb at the heart of the COVID-19 crisis? The answer to that question has deep and tangled historical roots. It is a story not just of discrimination, but of systematic exploitation, exclusion, subordination, and predation. The ability to live a long and healthy life is predicated on access to a range of social and economic resources systematically denied African American families and communities. In St. Louis, as elsewhere, African American workers are overrepresented among frontline service workers, among whom low wages are the rule and the luxury of social distancing is not. In order to get to work, or even to shop at a grocery store, many must spend hours on public transportation. Because health care in our society is generally allocated according to employment, it is least accessible to those who need it the most. In St. Louis, African Americans are more than twice as likely as whites to be uninsured. Without economic security or options, and without adequate protection on the job, these workers and their communities have been delivered to disease by their history-by U.S. history.

The slow violence that we see unfolding in St. Louis has been structured into the fabric of the city, built brick-by-brick by those who have sought profit in segregation and comfort in social distance. Its racialized patterns of disadvantage are the result of decades of conscious choices by actors at every level of government, aided and abetted by private industries such as banking, insurance, and real estate, to name but a few. St. Louis’s history of imposed Black deprivation is both unique to it and reflective of the broader patterns that have made COVID-19 a charnel house for Black Americans nationwide. WHITE ST. louis has been in a sort of self-imposed social distancing for most of the century. In 1916 it passed a racial zoning law by popular referendum. After the Supreme Court struck down racial zoning on equal protection grounds the next year (in Buchanan v. Warley), St. Louis realtors, developers, and homeowners turned to the use of racial restrictions written into property deeds-“covenants” that bound neighborhoods and new subdivisions to whiteness. The “uniform restriction agreement” in wide use in St. Louis by the early 1930s sought to “preserve the character of said neighborhood as a desirable place of residence for persons of the Caucasian Race,” holding that homeowners could not “erect, maintain, operate, or permit to be erected, maintained or operated any slaughterhouse, junk shop or rag-picking establishment” or “sell, convey, lease, or rent to a negro or negroes.” These restrictions, written into the deed as a condition of sale, still turn up in property transactions all over the city today.