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Charlotte Lyn Bright, The Two Pandemics, Social Work Research, Volume 44, Issue 3, September 2020, Pages 139–142, https://doi.org/10.1093/swr/svaa012
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Extract
I write these words in early June in the northeastern United States. Incongruously, the sun is shining, birds are chirping, and flowers bloom. This apparent paradise is at odds with the two pandemics gripping this nation and the world at large: coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and racism.
Recent weeks and months have seen a string of horrifying events, one after another. The brutal police violence that took the lives of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and the vigilante murder of Ahmaud Arbery may seem to have little to do with the novel coronavirus that has killed over 400,000 people as of this writing. However, these traumatic, disastrous outcomes are linked by the overarching and systemic racism that affects Black Americans and people of color worldwide.
Other scholars and leaders have characterized racism as a pandemic, sooner and more eloquently than I am doing in these pages. In a recent statement, Dr. Sandra Shullman, president of the American Psychological Association (APA), has identified systemic racism as a pandemic that manifests in pervasive trauma, leading to physical and mental health consequences inequitably borne by African Americans (APA, 2020). Last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics made a clear connection between racism and health conditions among children and adolescents (Trent, Dooley, & Dougé, 2019). The American Medical Association (Ehrenfeld & Harris, 2020) has focused attention on the negative public health outcomes of police violence, which affects Black individuals both with and without direct experience of physically or verbally violent acts committed by police.
