Report — 'A Pandemic Within a Pandemic': The Racialised Dimensions of Covid-19 in the United States
Chloé Duteil is an AHRC-funded PhD student in History researching coastal environments in Brittany and Wales (University of Liverpool and Lancaster University). Susannah Copson gained a BA in History (First Class) here at the University of Liverpool, and has just completed a LLM in International Human Rights Law at the University of Essex. She is now a Legal Research Intern at Open Society Justice Initiative.
I. Structural Racism
The coronavirus pandemic in the United States has laid bare the deep social, political, and economic inequalities suffered by African Americans that have rendered them particularly vulnerable to Covid-19. It has reasserted the usually abstract and yet manifold incarnations of structural racism. Equally, it has brought together the fragmented knowledge of the inner workings of race in society, synthesising existing - but also novel - niches in which racism has played out.
Our research scoping project engages with national, state, and city news outlets and publications from across the U.S. and Europe to examine reporting on the racial dimensions of Covid-19 in the U.S. North and South through the lenses of region, risk, and access to healthcare. Drawing on a wide range of publications has allowed us to compare, contrast, and give prominence to the entanglements of race and health in specific geographic contexts and social situations. Whilst the publications that we sampled are part of wider dynamics in narratives on race in the U.S., they also brought to the fore adapted forms of reporting that have been invaluable during the pandemic. Interviews with those impacted by the virus through loss or hardship, for example, have made the impact of Covid-19 more tangible, more real, and more urgent. Photographic images have given a human face to the inordinate death toll on Black communities, making it possible for heart-breaking experiences to become visible, and reducing the social distance felt between sufferers and observers removed from the crisis. Sharing the names, faces, and stories of those who died, obituaries became forms of socially-distant memorials that helped place mourning at the centre of the Covid-19 narrative.
Read the full report 'A Pandemic Within a Pandemic': The Racialised Dimensions of Covid-19 in the US (PDF document)