“It’s almost like structural racism has made black people sick,” Uché Blackstock, an emergency medicine physician in Brooklyn and the founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity, an organization that fights health care inequity.
Blackstock, who works in a gentrifying neighborhood in central Brooklyn, says she is used to seeing a mix of people at her clinic, but with Covid-19, it’s lately “been all black people” — essential workers who don’t have the luxury of leveraging wealth to escape to homes on Long Island, upstate New York, Connecticut, or Rhode Island. Environmental racism, including practices like toxic dumping, has worked in tandem with other kinds of oppression (racial restrictive housing covenants and anti-busing measures, to name two) to produce stress and contribute to high rates of chronic illness.

According to Blackstock, the pandemic is exposing a deep-rooted system of the haves and have-nots. It’s also displaying how black and brown people have a more tenuous existence in New York City since they lack job security, sick leave, and health insurance. They must ride public transportation to get to work on the front lines, many of them driving the buses themselves or cleaning the hospitals where they are directly at risk.