CityLab Daily: How U.S. Medicine Can Fuel Racism in an Epidemic
Also today: Readers around the world map their life under lockdown, and how vending machines are feeding health care workers.
Blaming the victim: The racial breakdown of confirmed Covid-19 cases so far suggests that African Americans are being disproportionately affected by the pandemic. But instead of recognizing systematic racism that can make them more vulnerable, commentators and a Trump administration official have put the onus on black people themselves.
The rhetoric speaks to America’s long history of racism in medical treatment, with roots in a 19th-century Georgia mental institution whose chief superintendent blamed emancipation for an alleged rise of “insanity” among blacks. Freedom meant they no longer had access to the “hygienic effects” of slavery, Theophilus O. Powell argued at the time. Since he had no scientific answers for the outbreak of tuberculosis and pellagra in his asylum, Powell’s racist theory enabled him to blame the patients.