COVID-19 Disparities: Racism & Social Inequity
Resources for Research, Practice, and Teaching
Resource List
November 2, 2020 | Historical Environmental Racism, Structural Inequalities, and Dik’os Ntsaaígíí-19 (COVID-19) on Navajo Nation | Nicholet A. Deschine Parkhurst, Kimberly R Huyser, & Aggie J. Yellow Horse | Journal of Indigenous Social Development
October 15, 2020 | Halting Workplace COVID-19 Transmission: An Urgent Proposal to Protect American Workers | David Michaels & Gregory R. Wagner | The Century Foundation
October 13, 2020 | Reimagining safety in a pandemic: the imperative to dismantle structural oppression in Canada | Nikisha Khare, Farah Shroff, Blessing Nkennor and Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay | CMAJ
September 30, 2020 | The covid-19 recession is the most unequal in modern U.S. history | Heather Long, Andrew Van Dam, Alyssa Fowers and Leslie Shapiro | The Washington Post
September 29, 2020 | Pandemic Highlights Deep-Rooted Problems in Indian Health Service | Mark Walker | New York Times
September 26, 2020 | Three-Part Spotlight Series: Is Death the Great Equalizer? | The Boston Globe
September 14, 2020 | For Prisoners in the West, the Virus and the Wildfires Are Colliding Threats | Tim Arango and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs | The New York Times
September 9, 2020 | Redlining and Neighborhood Health | National Community Reinvestment Coalition
September 8, 2020 | Covid-19 Death Rate among African Americans and Latinos Rising Sharply | Ed Pilkington | The Guardian
September 7, 2020 | Conditions of Immigration Detention Increase Risks for COVID-19 Disease Interactions | Bayla Ostrach, Kathleen Lynch, Ashley Houston, and Megan A. Carney | Medical Anthropology Quarterly
September 2, 2020 | Toward a Cure: Cities Declare Racism a Public Health Crisis | Tamara E. Holmes | COLORLINES
August 20, 2020 | ENOUGH: COVID-19, Structural Racism, Police Brutality, Plutocracy, Climate Change—and Time for Health Justice, Democratic Governance, and an Equitable, Sustainable Future | Nancy Krieger | AJPH
August 18, 2020 | Population Health in the Time of COVID-19: Confirmations and Revelations | Ana V. Diez Roux | The Milbank Quarterly
August 15, 2020 | To Talk About Racial Disparity and COVID-19, We Need to Talk About Class | Roberto R. Aspholm | Jacobin
August 11, 2020 | Racism’s Hidden Toll: In America, how long you live depends on the color of your skin | Gus Wezerek | The New York Times
August 5, 2020 | ‘Death by structural poverty’: US south struggles against Covid-19 | Oliver Laughland | The Guardian
August 4, 2020 | Systemic racism, chronic health inequities, and COVID-19: A syndemic in the making? | Clarence Gravlee | American Journal of Human Biology
August 1, 2020 | Death by Racism | Sharrelle Barber | The Lancet Infectious Diseases
August 1, 2020 | 12 People in a 3-Bedroom House, Then the Virus Entered the Equation Overcrowding, not density, has defined many coronavirus hot spots | Conor Dougherty | The New York Times
July 30, 2020 | The Coronavirus Has Intensified Systemic Economic Racism Against Black Americans | Steven Greenhouse | The New Yorker
July 30, 2020 | Native Americans Feel Devastated by the Virus Yet Overlooked in the Data | Kate Conger, Robert Gebeloff and Richard A. Oppel Jr. | The New York Times
July 29, 2020 | Structurally vulnerable neighbourhood environments and racial/ethnic COVID-19 inequities | Rachel L. Berkowitz, Xing Gao, Eli K. Michaels & Mahasin S. Mujahid | Cities & Health
July 29, 2020 | Hateful incidents against Americans of color surge amid pandemic | Kenya Evelyn | The Guardian
July 28, 2020 | Comparison of Weighted and Unweighted Population Data to Assess Inequities in Coronavirus Disease 2019 Deaths by Race/Ethnicity Reported by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention | Tori L. Cowger, Brigette A. Davis, Onisha S. Etkins, et al. | JAMA
July 21, 2020 | Tracing the Invisible Danger of Household Crowding | Laura Bliss & Lorena Rios | Bloomberg CityLab
July 14, 2020 | Socially Relevant Variables In US State COVID-19 Surveillance Reporting: A Report Card | Marion Boulicault, Ann Caroline Danielsen, Joseph Bruch, Amelia Tarrant, Alexander Borsa, and Sarah Richardson | Health Affairs Blog
July 13, 2020 | CDC Employees Call Out Agency's 'Toxic Culture Of Racial Aggressions' | Selenta Simmons-Duffin & Pien Huang | National Public Radio
July 11, 2020 | Covid-19 has revealed a pre-existing pandemic of poverty that benefits the rich | Philip Alston | The Guardian
July 9, 2020 | The Latino Community in the Time of Coronavirus: The Case for a Broad and Inclusive Government Response | Unidos US
July 8, 2020 | Study of 17 Million Identifies Crucial Risk Factors for Coronavirus Deaths | Katherine J. Wu | The New York Times
July 8, 2020 | OpenSAFELY: factors associated with COVID-19 death in 17 million patients | Elizabeth J. Williamson et al. | Nature
July 5, 2020 | The Fullest Look Yet at the Racial Inequity of Coronavirus | Richard A. Oppel Jr., Robert Gebeloff, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Will Wright and Mitch Smith | The New York Times
July 3, 2020 | 'Historic health screw-up': what you need to know about the Covid-19 crisis in California prisons | Abené Clayton | The Guardian
July 2, 2020 | On Racism: A New Standard For Publishing On Racial Health Inequities | Rhea W. Boyd, Edwin G. Lindo, Lachelle D. Weeks, and Monica R. McLemore | Health Affairs Blog
June 26, 2020 | COVID-19 And America’s Racial Violence Are Inextricable | Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Michael Bentz and Emily Vasquez | Health Affairs Blog
June 26, 2020 | Many Latinos Couldn’t Stay Home. Now Virus Cases Are Soaring in the Community. | Shawn Hubler, Thomas Fuller, Anjali Singhvi and Juliette Love | The New York Times
June 24, 2020 | The Coronavirus Crisis Inside Prisons Won’t Stay Behind Bars | New York Times
June 20, 2020 | Seizing the Moment: Policy Advocacy to End Mass Incarceration in the Time of COVID-19 | Meredith Minkler, Joseph Griffin, and Patricia Wakimoto | Health, Education & Behavior
June 19, 2020 | Imagining Rural Immunity | Thurka Sangaramoorthy and Adia Benton | Anthropology News
June 19, 2020 | Rising coronavirus cases among Latinos alarm public health experts | Laura Barrón-López | Politico
June 18, 2020 | The Nativist Fault Line and Precariousness of Race in the Time of Coronavirus (Asia and Asian America) | Jennifer Lee and Monica Yadav | ASA Footnotes
June 18, 2020 | Pervasive Ageism in the Response to the Pandemic | Toni Calasanti | ASA Footnotes
June 18, 2020 | Disability as an Axis of Inequality: A Pandemic Illustration | Laura Mauldin et al. | ASA Footnotes
June 16, 2020 | Race gaps in COVID-19 deaths are even bigger than they appear | Tiffany Ford, Sarah Reber, and Richard V. Reeves | Brookings
June 15, 2020 | Coronavirus Cases Rise Sharply in Prisons Even as They Plateau Nationwide | Timothy Williams, Libby Seline and Rebecca Griesbach | The New York Times
June 13, 2020 | The COVID-19 pandemic and health inequalities | Clare Bambra, Ryan Riordan, John Ford, & Fiona Matthews | Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health
June 13, 2020 | Assessing capacity to social distance and neighborhood-level health disparities during the COVID-19 pandemic | Daniel Carrion, Elena Colicino, Nicolo Foppa Pedretti, Johnathan Rush, Kodi B. Arfer, Nicholas DeFelice, and Allan C. Just | medRxiv
June 12, 2020 | Why Racism, Not Race, Is a Risk Factor for Dying of COVID-19 | Camara Phyllis Jones (Interview with Claudia Willis) | Scientific American
June 12, 2020 | Why Racism, Not Race, Is a Risk Factor for Dying of COVID-19 | Claudia Wallis, in conversation with Camara Phyllis Jones | Scientific American
June 12, 2020 | The unequal toll of COVID-19 mortality by age in the United States: Quantifying racial/ethnic disparities | Mary Baseet, Jarvis Chen, and Nancy Krieger | Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies Working Paper Series
June 12, 2020 | Covid-19 and police abuses have exposed an ugly truth about America: Racism kills | Robert Fullilove | The Guardian
June 11, 2020 | American Indian tribes thwarted in efforts to get coronavirus data | Darius Tahir and Adam Cancryn | Politico
June 10, 2020 | We’re Not All in This Together: On COVID-19, Intersectionality, and Structural Inequality | Lisa Bowleg | American Journal of Public Health
June 9, 2020 | 'Enormous disparities': coronavirus death rates expose Brazil's deep racial inequalities | Dom Phillips | The Guardian
June 7, 2020 | Racism, Not Genetics, Explains Why Black Americans Are Dying of COVID-19 | Clarence Gravlee | Scientific American
May 28, 2020 | Racism and the Political Economy of COVID-19: Will We Continue to Resurrect the Past? | Zinzi D. Bailey and J. Robin Moon | Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law
May 26, 2019 | Work-based Risks to Latino Workers and their Families From COVID-19 | Lisa A. Gennetian and Matthew S. Johnson | EcoFact
May 25, 2020 | It's Not Obesity. It's Slavery. | Sabrina Strings | The New York Times
May 20, 2020 | COVID-19 and Health Equity – A New Kind of “Herd Immunity” | David R. Williams and Lisa A. Cooper | JAMA
May 19, 2020 | How environmental racism is fuelling the coronavirus pandemic | Harriet A. Washington | Nature
May 7, 2020 | Coronavirus Killing Black Britons at Twice the Rate of Whites | Benjamin Mueller | The New York Times
May 6, 2020 | Racial Health Disparities and Covid-19 — Caution and Context | Merlin Chowkwanyun and Adolph L. Reed, Jr. | New England Journal of Medicine
May 5, 2020 | ‘We Are Not Essential. We Are Sacrificial.’ | Sujatha Gidla | The New York Times
May 5, 2020 | The Cost of Medical Marginalization: Undocumented Mothers and Health Access in the Time of COVID-19 | Elizabeth Farfán-Santos | Latino Rebels
May 4, 2020 | COVID-19 is a Perfect Storm of Hardship for US Immigrant Communities | Amanda M. Gutierrez, Jacob Hofstetter, and Mary Majumder | Bill of Health
April 29, 2020 | 'A Terrible Price': The Deadly Racial Disparities of Covid-19 in America | Linda Villarosa | The New York Times
April 26, 2020 | Racial Capitalism: A Fundamental Cause of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic Inequities in the United States | Whitney N. Laster Pirtle | Health Education & Behavior
April 16, 2020 | The Black Plague | Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor | The New Yorker
April 14, 2020 | Stop Blaming Black People for Dying of the Coronavirus | Ibram X. Kendi | The Atlantic
April 10, 2020 | A tale of two New Yorks: pandemic lays bare a city's shocking inequities | Ed Pilkington and Ankita Rao | The Guardian
April 6, 2020 | What the Racial Data Show | Ibram X. Kendi | The Atlantic
April 3, 2020 | Location Data Says It All: Staying at Home During Coronavirus Is a Luxury | Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Denise Lu and Gabriel J.X. Dance | The New York Times
April 2, 2020 | Confronting Disability Discrimination During the Pandemic | Katie Savin and Laura Guidry-Grimes | The Hastings Center Bioethics Forum
April 1, 2020 | Why Don't We Know Who the Coronavirus Victims Are? | Ibram X. Kendi | The Atlantic
April 1, 2020 | The Racial Time Bomb in the Covid-19 Crisis | Charles M. Blow | The New York Times
March 26, 2020 | Disasters and capitalism…and COVID-19 | Vincanne Adams | Somatosphere
March 23, 2020 | ‘I Will Not Apologize for My Needs’ Even in a crisis, doctors should not abandon the principle of nondiscrimination | Ari Ne'eman | The New York Times
March 23, 2020 | Spit On, Yelled At, Attacked: Chinese-Americans Fear for Their Safety | Sabrina Tavernise and Richard A. Oppel Jr. | The New York Times
March 16, 2020 | As Coronavirus Deepens Inequality, Inequality Worsens Its Spread | Max Fisher and Emma Bubola | The New York Times
March 15, 2020 | The Workers Who Face the Greatest Coronavirus Risk | Lazaro Gamio | The New York Times
March 9, 2020 | In Coronavirus Fight, China’s Vulnerable Fall Through the Cracks | Li Yuan | The New York Times
March 9, 2020 | The Poor and Marginalized Will Be the Hardest Hit by Coronavirus | Sandro Galea | Scientific American
February 28, 2020 | Web Roundup: What Can the Coronavirus Outbreak Tell Us About Capitalism, White Supremacy, and Climate Change? | Anika Jugovic-Spajic | Somatosphere
February 7, 2020 | "Wuhan coronavirus" and the racist art of naming a virus | Marie Myung-Ok Lee | Salon
February 4, 2020 | Race, epidemics, and the viral economy of health expertise | Adia Benton | The New Humanitarian
Selected Pre-COVID-19 Resources
2020 | Diagnosing bias in data-driven algorithms for healthcare | Jenna Wiens and W. Nicholson Price II | The Petrie-Flom Center for Health law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School
2016 | Is Racism a Public Health Issue? | Chandra L. Ford, Derek M. Griffith, Marino A. Bruce, and Keon L. Gilbert | Racism: Science & Tools for the Public Health Professional | APHA Press
2016 | Big Data Neglects Populations Most in Need of Medical and Public Health Research and Interventions | Sarah E. Malanga, Jonathan D. Loe, Christopher T. Robertson, and Kenneth S. Ramos | The Petrie-Flom Center for Health law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School
2013 | Body and Soul The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination | Alondra Nelson | University of Minnesota Press
2010 | “There Wasn't a Lot of Comforts in Those Days:” African Americans, Public Health, and the 1918 Influenza Epidemic | Vanessa Northington Gamble | Public Health Reports
2008 | Medical Apartheid The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present | Harriet A. Washington | Penguin Radom House
2002 | The Foreignness of Germs: The Persistent Association of Immigrants and Disease in American Society | Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern | The Milbank Quarterly
1992 | AIDS and Accusation Haiti and the Geography of Blame | Paul Farmer | The University of California Press