The Resilience of Humanity
Nine months into the COVID-19 quarantine. Time may have been lost but hope is not. With all the buzz surrounding the COVID-19 vaccine, perpetual historical narratives seem to hit home. Sources have shown that particularly individuals from the African American community have been negatively impacted by the COVID-19 coronavirus. Mark Zarefsky, writer for the American Medical Association, argues in his 2020 article, “Why African American communities are being hit hard by COVID-19”, that “the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shared a report in April that found 33% of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 were Black, although they made up just 18% of the community being evaluated.” He went on to name three primary reasons for this: preexisting conditions, essential jobs not in the health profession, and implicit bias and racial health disparities.
Recent other reports have revealed that Black communities have become reticent about news of the vaccine. Black communities and health disparities have been historically intertwined for quite some time. Remember the Tuskegee Experiment of the 1930’s. Angela Jennings writes in her 2020 Los Angeles Times article, “ ‘We want to study you.’ For Black Angelinos, coronavirus triggers fear of Another Tuskegee”, that “seeds of mistrust were sowed almost a century ago in a rural corner of Alabama, where, for four decades, medical researchers used hundreds of black men as guinea pigs in a government study known as the Tuskegee experiment.” In 1932, several Black men underwent a round of treatments for syphilis. The experiment had not only an adverse effect but a near-fatal one as well. Anyone familiar with the story behind the Tuskegee experiment can sympathize with the Black community’s hesitancy towards the cure for the COVID-19 corona virus. Especially when Black America has been going through a racial pandemic for the past four centuries, reaching a fever pitch in the #BlackLivesMatter movement with the recent protests surrounding the murders of innocent Black lives such as Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and more.
Politics and healthcare seem to be as opposite as oil and water but in reality, they are more Interconnected that one may think. It should come as no surprise that the Black community’s access to resources such as affordable housing, child care, clean food and water, and health care, has been long withstanding symptom of the racial pandemic Black America has gone through. Politicians and thought- leaders have exclusive access to some of the most brilliant scientific minds in the world and will strategically gerrymander access to these health disparities to further deconstruct and destroy the Black body.
