Racial capitalism and COVID-19

Abstract

The aim of this article is to revisit the racial disparities in health outcomes from COVID-19 and to problematize the overly simplified attribution of these numbers to race. This article calls for a deeper understanding of society’s wider economic arrangements in which these racial disparities are produced. It considers why a proposed public-policy measure that targeted racism—though without substantively accounting for the underlying form of capitalism through which it materializes—in an effort to remediate the differential health outcomes from COVID-19 between whites and racialized others was problematic and incomplete. Such an approach neither sufficiently accounted for structural conditions that led vulnerable racial minorities to develop comorbidities at a much higher rate than the local white population nor did it explain the labor market dynamics that resulted in vulnerable racial minorities being more likely to be employed in low-paid, frontline work as compared to white workers, which made the most effective way by which to avoid contracting the virus (i.e., physical distancing) all but impossible. This article finds that should the unsettling numbers related to the racial health disparities that unfolded during the pandemic be analyzed from a critical perspective, it would show how race is a cog in the machinery of neoliberalism, which culminates in racial capitalism. Specifically, racial capitalism fosters the economic stratification necessary to yield the consequences it had in terms of disparities in health outcomes from COVID-19. This article uses COVID-19 to illuminate how racism and capitalism function symbiotically to organize society, and responding to the former is perfunctory without interrogating the latter.