Gender, Race, and Class in Today’s America

Covid 19 and the Present

On NPR today I heard a story about the special efforts from local businesses on up to the federal government to vaccinate Black Americans, one of the most reluctant sectors of our population to get the Covid 19 vaccination.  In the story a Black-owned barbershop in Chicago had been converted by its owner into a vaccination center, with live music and catered food, in efforts to lure in the hesitant neighbors. This reluctance is at least partly the result of centuries of racially misguided medical treatment of African Americans, from slavery to the recent past. We see this in The Immortal Life… when Bobette relayed the rumor that, “John Hopkins was known for experimentin on black folks.  They’d snatch em off the street…” (Skloot 165).¹⁹ This is an echo of passed-down stories about night doctors, possibly slave owners who controlled slaves with superstition and fear or body snatchers who took bodies for medical research; no one fought the loss of black corpses. Bobette is alluding to these stories at the beginning of the 21^st century, illustrating their staying power.

Regardless of how these fears and stories have been passed on over time, the reality now is that we are struggling through a pandemic that has hurt people of color at disproportionate levels to white ones. “Black and Latino patients are two to three times a likely as white patients to be diagnosed with COVID-19, and more than four times as likely to be hospitalized for it. Black patients are more than twice as likely to die from the virus. They also die from it at younger ages” (Ezekiel).²⁰ Now put those numbers in this context: “The healthcare system, by one estimate, is responsible for only about 10-15 of preventable mortality in the United States” (Ezekiel).²¹  Class and race affect other factors:  inadequacies for people of color in housing, education, and food access account for the other 85-90 percent.  These numbers tell us that we may not have made that much progress in medical equity since Henrietta’s death, nor in other lifestyle measurements that affect health.

Covid vaccines are one arena where we see race disparities, both in access and reluctance. Reasons black Americans are not vaccinated by far than white Americans are complex, though, and my students will look into this. In her New York Times editorial, Dr. Boyd reports that only 5.7 percent of black Americans had had one dose.  She points out, though, that pointing the blame at “vaccine hesitancy” puts the blame solely on these Americans, when in fact, there are contributing factors such as access problems and less dependable quantity and quality of information. She names some of the same culprits that we see in other articles: lack of insurance and lack of medical providers. Boyd also points out solutions, in this case at the grassroots level: “In Philadelphia, Black health workers are running walk up vaccine clinics that don’t require appointments made online or over the phone. Health workers in Oakland have built a testing site that doesn’t require any personal documentation to receive a test,” and they are going go social media (Boyd).²² And there is the story at the beginning of this section about the Chicago barber shop.  

Mississippi has become a model state in access for its black citizens.  While the state’s black population 38%, the percent of vaccinated Mississippians is 34%. The government reached out to individual communities and empowered them. Another editorial we will read describes how black health workers, faith leaders and community leaders, where there is greater level of trust, have had success. They created vaccine clinics in non-white communities and rural areas, taking the vaccines to the people, sometimes in parks and workplaces.  They are knocking doors to educated and answer questions (Avila).²³

Isabel Wilkerson in her book Caste explains another measurement of our health inequities by race and class and by extension, probably gender. In chapter 24, she explains how racism affects our physiology.  We are not predisposed by our color or historical geography to have higher rates of disease in general. Sub-Saharan Africans do not have higher rates of blood pressure or diabetes or heart problems. Scientists have learned that the shortened telomere lengths of African-Americans indicate “one’s exposure to inequality and discrimination” (305).²⁴ Telomeres are the double stranded bits at the end of a chromosome.  They “weather” or wear out with more frequent cell division. “It is a measure of premature aging of the cells, and thus of the person bearing those cells, and of the early onset of disease due to chronic exposure to such stressors as discrimination, job loss, or obesity” (305).²⁵  The result is a build-up of unhealth fats around vital organs.  This fat raises the likely hood of diabetes, cardiovascular problems, and premature death. These health problems play out in a kind of hierarchy. Poor whites have shorter telomeres than wealthy ones. Other non-white groups do also.  Interestingly, wealthier blacks have shorter telomeres and greater health risks because they tend to have the additional stress of feeling like they need to be perceived as on class and education level as their white counterparts. Poorer people tend to find support in their original cultural groups (306).²⁶

This all ties back to Henrietta: while the virus has disproportionately hit populations of people of color, black Americans have been reluctant to participate in medical trials; at the same time, the medical community is waking up to the need for black vaccine study participants “even as antivaccination interests attempt to build on the history of mistrust in the Black community to discourage research participation and increase vaccine hesitancy” (Wolinetz) 1027).²⁷ Ironically, HeLa cells have been involved in the creation of Covid 19 vaccines. The medial research community responsible for obtaining these cells without a black woman’s consent are now trying to earn the trust of black Americans so that they can benefit from the vaccine and improve their likelihood of survival.

I will continue to monitor press and for updates and other perspectives for use as we prepare to do the project below.

Cumulative Project

This unit will culminate in individual or smaller group project that reflects what students have learned in the first two sections of the unit. We will have studied the Tuskegee study and HeLa cells. In both situations we learned about travesties and inequities perpetrated on black Americans. In the end, though, we also were able to trace some progress in terms of policies, reparations, and education. We will study and discuss some explanations of the problems, and sometimes students will draw their own conclusions from the articles above. Considering outcomes of the first two unit sections and their understanding of our current COVID-19 inequities, my students will come up with solutions and create projects around them. I have in mind products like public service announcements, commercials, policy drafts, or funding proposals. 

We will begin by revisiting our first three essential questions: What role does race and/or gender play in healthcare access? What are the long-term effects of this? What role do institutions like government or the medical field play in these inequities? And then we’ll add one more:  What solutions can we provide and promote? Students can select specific issues:  health outcomes, vaccine hesitancy, vaccine access, information access, among others.

Covid-19 Resources

To prepare for the projects, we will read these documents for information and discussion.  These articles are discussed above and are in the bibliography.

5 Ways the Health-Care System Can Stop Amplifying Racism

Caste, Chapter 24

The Racial Gap in U.S. Vaccinations Is Shrinking, but Work Remains

Black People Need Better Vaccine Access, Not Better Vaccine Attitudes

Others will be added as the situation and information are updated.