The Coronavirus Pandemic has altered the ways we use shared space fundamentally. Policymakers across the nation have enabled police to deploy the power of the state to limit unnecessary and dense usage of public spaces and private gatherings. Such social distancing policies are critical in flattening the pandemic curve of an effective and efficient airborne virus and lessening the public health burden of an already-strained health care system. Yet, the stickiness of systemic racism persists. Racial inequities underpin the facesgoverning the matrices of the pandemic, policing, and protests.
The impact of COVID-19 on racially minoritized communities in the United States has forced us all to look square in the face of the systemic racism that is embedded in every fabric of our society. As the number of infected people continues to rise, the racial disparities are glaringly obvious. Black and Latinx communities have been hit considerably harder by this pandemic. Both racial/ethnic groups have seen rates of infection well above their percentage in the general population and African Americans have seen rates of death from COVID-19 as high as twice their percentage in the general population. These numbers bear witness to the high cost of racism in the United States.
In 2020, protests erupted around police brutality and other forms of institutional and systematic racism within the justice system. These same forms of structural racism exist in the medical and healthcare industries, and explain fundamentally, why we have large, ongoing, racial health disparities in all health outcomes including COVID-19 (Harris et al. 2006; House 2002; Matthew 2015; Washington 2006). COVID-19 is an acute (short-term), infectious illness that has become an epidemic in the United States. COVID-19 spreads through the air; therefore, it ought to affect people equally. Unfortunately, we are already seeing substantial racial inequality in COVID-19 infections. African Americans are experiencing three times the rate of COVID infection and nearly six times the death rate of White majority counties (Garg et al. 2020; Scott 2020; Webb et al. 2020; Yancy 2020).
In this essay, we examine Black–White racial health disparities and their social determinants. We argue that racism, whether called systematic, structural, or institutionalized (for the sake of this essay these terms are interchangeable), is the primary cause of both explicit and implicit race-based discrimination. Furthermore, we will present and refute biological, behavioral, and social class explanations for racial health disparities. Next, we use the institutionalized racism framework to examine COVID-19. We finish with a set of proposals designed to interrupt the association of racism with health outcomes.
There is a large body of research on racial disparities in chronic health conditions. Chronic conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes, and hypertension are life-long illnesses and syndromes managed through medical treatments. Today, they are the top causes of death (Rana et al. 2020). African Americans have more chronic conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and lung disease than Whites, increasing their risk of death from COVID-19 (Garg et al. 2020).
What causes African Americans to have more chronic conditions and be more likely to contract infectious diseases such as COVID-19? Dressler et al. (2005) find that most research looks to five types of explanations for racial health disparities, genetic, behavioral, socio-economic, structural-constructivist, and psychosocial stress. We can dismiss the genetic explanation because race is socially constructed as W. E. B. Dubois demonstrated back in 1906. He found that from 1725 to 1853, while Whites lived longer than Black folks, life expectancy improved similarly for both populations, and that differences in mortality rates among Black folks living in different cities were due to environmental differences. Therefore, genetic inferiority could not explain Black peoples life’ span (DuBois 2003).
The research is clear that

