Since the early 2000s, I’ve devoted several Noozhawk columns to Black History Month and racism.
MLK Day in January, Black History Month in February, and Juneteenth (June!) all provide opportunities to explore history more robustly than the presentations when many of us were in school. This year, however, I experienced a crisis of writing confidence in the topic.
I grew up in a nearly all-white Los Angeles suburb. I was a young child during the 1965 Watts riots; they seemed a country away. My college freshman dorm included two Black women, neither of whom I became close to at the time. (One is now a friend.)
Among our good friends I count one interracial couple we still visit from our years in Boulder, Colorado. I have a couple of handfuls of friendships with people of color. What do I know?
I know economics, so it is from that perspective that I tackle Black History Month this year. Economic facts and figures have exposed the legacy of racism in housing, education and jobs.
Now research out of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine examines the economic impact as pertains to health care.
The study, reported in the medical journal JAMA, reported a significantly higher mortality rate in Black versus white Americans. The result was 1.63 million excess deaths over a period of two decades. A staggering 80 million years were shaved off the lives of Black Americans because of unequal medical care.
Dr. Clyde Yancy, chief of cardiology at Feinberg School of Medicine and author of the study, examined health statistics in neighborhoods that were red-lined in the 1930s. Red-lining was the process by which predominantly Black neighborhoods were deemed too “high risk” for mortgages and other investments.
Dr. Yancy found that formerly red-lined Black neighborhoods continue to be poorer and sicker today. Higher rates of infant mortality, cancer, and heart disease are the biggest factors leading to the early deaths. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a heart condition can lead to sudden cardiac arrest, is often not diagnosed in Black patients.
Nearly a century after red-lining, these same areas suffered higher rates of Covid infection and death. In Chicago, for instance, Black Americans suffered 50% of the Covid cases and 70% of the Covid deaths.
“It’s very clear that we have an un-even distribution of health,” Dr. Yancy said.
“If we are who we say we are as a civil society, there’s no way we can allow this kind of disproportionate suffering to occur,” he said. “We have to begin to say, ‘This is our pivot point.’ … We need to go forward and try and strive for health equity.”
Making substantial progress in improving health care in the Black population will not solve racism, but it will save lives. A level playing field for housing, education and jobs would also bring us into regular contact with one another, improving diversity and broadening everyone’s perspective.
Better vigilance by the medical field is imperative; better health care will also be a natural consequence of living and working together.
A plethora of online classes is available to learn about racism and underlying biases.
I took one offered by the UC system and found it eye-opening. Another is offered by linkedin. Patagonia offers grantee organizations a program called “Whiteness at Work.”
Some nonprofit organizations work on solving equity issues for people of color. The Fund for Santa Barbara invests in groups “advocating for and actively leading social housing justice campaigns in Santa Barbara County.”
A young friend of mine works for the Los Angeles affiliate of The Greenlining Institute, which works on helping communities of color build wealth and live in healthy places.
I wonder if we can be intentional about expanding our regular circles and getting to know the diversity of people we see in our everyday lives.
As William Butler Yeats advised, “There are no strangers here; only friends you haven’t yet met.”
Racism, perhaps even more especially implicit bias, require the darkness of ignorance or indifference. We can each examine our discomforts, bringing them into the healing light.