The Weather of Anti-Blackness: Is Health Equity Enough?

Abstract

Dryden (2023) highlights how the COVID-19 pandemic anchored on anti-Black racism within the Canadian healthcare system to cause disproportionate suffering and death among Black people. We extend this argument by situating both COVID-19 and healthcare within broader racialized landscapes- the weather of anti-Blackness in the US - and argue that from sports and education to healthcare, Black bodies are weathering precisely because of intentional interconnected systems of oppression grounded in white supremacy, racial capitalism and patriarchy. Because oppression does not exist in a vacuum, health equity and liberation require us to engender new lexicons that decisively expose racism to (1) evaluate data differently, relationally and more critically through different disciplinary lenses and (2) centre the liberation of those at the intersection of multiple systems of oppression, such as Black women; Black queer and transgender people; Black people with disabilities; and unhoused, unemployed, uninsured and incarcerated Black people.