Abstract
Over the course of the last few months, we have seen how structural racism has compounded the impact of COVID-19 on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in the United States, resulting in disparate rates of infection and death. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how the consequences of deeply entrenched inequities are fatal to BIPOC communities, whether death is a result of the novel coronavirus or the everyday violence of structural racism that manifests as poor health outcomes. We examine the formation of the Community Health Board Coalition (CHBC), a BIPOC-led organization in Washington state, to show how 15 communities have organized for health and healing amidst the collective trauma associated with COVID-19. We note that biopower—literally power over life, the unspeakable—and slow violence have been normalized and escalated in our communities. The use of an antiracist lens and decolonial practices have assisted us in our survivance (survival and resistance). We use autoethnography and testimonio as decolonial theory and method to give voice to individual and collective experiences that brought us to our roles as CHBC founding members and inaugural cochairs.
Highlights
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is acute in Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities
Community Health Board Coalition (CHBC) was successful in realizing our demands to local and state public health organizations for rigorous and inclusive COVID-19 data that captures racial, ethnic, and linguistic disparate impacts on BIPOC communities
When I was not taking a class, I bicycled to the grand graduate library at the nearby university, to study medical anthropology journals. Maybe it was a lack of confidence, maybe it was the fact that I spent years working on healing from what we so academically call “Adverse Childhood Experiences” but I never imagined myself as a professor
Summary
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is acute in Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. Across the United States, BIPOC face disparate impacts of COVID-19 due to structural racism Those living in the most impoverished, crowded, and racial and economically polarized regions experience substantially elevated rates of COVID-19 infection and death (Chen and Krieger 2020). In Washington state, BIPOC are disparately burdened by COVID-19, including higher rates of infection, death, economic impact, and incidences of hate/bias and racial profiling. COVID-19 is a revealer; and it is showing that during a global pandemic, racism continues to be the greatest indicator of a person’s opportunity at life or death. While this fact may be surprising to some, it has long been an inescapable truth for BIPOC communities. Community organizing is a vital strategy for unleashing the collective power necessary to uproot inequities at the core of health disparities (Pastor et al 2018)
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