This month s bookshelf highlights writings illustrating the inconvenient truth that communities of color suffer most, and most severely, when disaster strikes.
The COVID-19 pandemic has confirmed again a fundamental truth about the Anthropocene: When disaster strikes, the vulnerable take the hardest punches. Communities of color have suffered much higher rates of infection, hospitalization, and mortality, both because they are disproportionately represented in frontline service positions and because their access to routine healthcare is more limited.
This pattern has long been observed in studies of environmental and climate justice, as the titles in this month’s bookshelf show. Vulnerable communities of color face more and more serious exposure to environmental hazards and have more limited access to economic, social, and political remedies.
Overview
According to the MDHHS, the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted communities of color in Michigan. African Americans represent nearly 14 percent of the state’s population, yet represent 40 percent of the deaths from coronavirus. (Source: https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/0,5885,7-339-71551 5460 99929 -,00.html)
Recent findings about the effects of COVID-19 on the human body, and how it spreads, are highlighting another reason Black Americans are disproportionately at risk: environmental racism. The interlocking harms of environmental racism and residential segregation, the health effects of those systems, and the particular way that COVID-19 spreads and affects individuals are likely combining to contribute to racial disparities in COVID-19 cases and deaths. (Source: directly quoted https://tcf.org/content/commentary/environmental-racism-left-black-communities-especially-vulnerable-covid-19/?session=1)