The racialized pandemic: wave one Covid-19 and the reproduction of Global North inequalities perspectives on politics

We document the broad patterns of Covid-19 as it affects communities of color. We present a theoretical framework rooted in Global North democracies’ racial-ethnic legacies to analyze the health and economic disparities between these communities and the white majority population. Marshalling first-cut empirical evidence from the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Sweden we find patterns consistent with how the burden of racial-ethnic legacies endures: people of color have worse health and economic outcomes under normal circumstances, inequalities the Covid-19 crisis has exacerbated. Contrary to many initial commentators’ views, the virus does discriminate. Health inequalities based in patterns of racial-ethnic inequality reproduce those inequalities. Recent scholarly work focuses on income inequality, but this dependent variable is itself in part an effect of structural factors maintained and expressed in racial-ethnic legacies including health inequalities. We also find that governments’ initial responses have failed to mitigate the disproportionate impact of this health and economic crisis on communities of color because they did not acknowledge or address the particular challenges that these groups face.