Black Americans are dying disproportionately from COVID-19 and there is a reason for it.
History has shown us that the consequences of contagion are not equally felt by all communities. Almost 100 years ago, a 1926 syphilis survey conducted in the US state of Alabama showed that 36 percent of the people in Macon County had syphilis. Only 60 years after the legal abolition of slavery, Black Americans made up the majority of that county, barely keeping a living through sharecropping.
In 1932, the county was chosen to become a living laboratory in which for the next few decades, Black men would be tested and examined to track the development of syphilis. The study was led by what was then known as the Tuskegee Institute, which recruited hundreds of residents, misleading them that they were receiving treatment.
In the late 1940s, effective treatments became available for the disease, but the unwilling participants in the study were not given access to it. They did not become aware that they were being lied to until local media uncovered the truth in 1972.
This story was not an isolated accident but was rather part of the systematic disregard for African American lives by public and private institutions during the Jim Crow era. At that time, medical professionals openly espoused anti-Black racist beliefs and were convinced treatment for some diseases, like syphilis, was not possible among Black communities. . . .
Fast forward to 2020, when the United States is battling a pandemic of the COVID-19 virus, and a similar racialised pattern of contagion and treatment has come to the fore. In early April, the online media outlet ProPublica reported that African Americans are getting infected by the novel coronavirus at a faster pace than white communities.
Edna Bonhomme – Aljazeera – April 16, 2020.
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