Police killing black people is a pandemic, too
By Osagie Obasogie,
The Washington Post
| 06. 05. 2020
Black lives seem not to matter, which reveals an underlying eugenic ideology in the United States of letting disease and violence thin the herds of undesirable groups.
Photo by AJ Colores on Unsplash
Pandemics are often thought to be unforeseeable acts of God that emerge suddenly to wreak havoc on unsuspecting populations. But that’s not how public health practitioners think about them. More often than not, pandemics have a political economy behind them, in which substandard living and working conditions connected to social inequalities produce opportunities for disease to spread unchecked. That was true for the 1918 flu pandemic that started on farms in Haskell County, Kan., and it also appears to account for the emergence of the novel coronavirus.
Those social and political contexts also help explain another pandemic — one that, like the coronavirus that still rages, is also disproportionately killing black Americans. Make no mistake: Police violence is a public health problem.
Three months into the widespread outbreak in the United States, the data on racial disparities in coronavirus infections and deaths is staggering. Majority-black counties have three times the rate of infections and nearly six times the rate of deaths as their white counterparts, according to a Washington Post analysis from April...
Related Articles
By Joy Zhang, Progress Educational Trust | 08.12.2024
What do China's new ethical guidlines tell us about the country's changing attitude to human genome editing? Professor Joy Zhang reads between the lines...
Recently, China's National Science and Technology Ethics Committee introduced a new set of ethics guidelines on...
By Alcott Wei, South China Morning Post | 07.13.2024
China has banned all clinical research involving germline genome editing under a newly released ethics guideline.
Germline gene engineering relates to altering the DNA in sperm, eggs or early embryos to introduce changes that can be inherited.
“Any clinical research...
By Staff, Japan Times | 07.10.2024
Photo by Roméo A. on Unsplash
How did Japanese society, which was supposed to have transformed into a democracy after World War II, justify discrimination against people with disabilities and openly endorse eugenics?
This is a key question people may...
By Rachel Clayton, ABC News | 07.08.2024
In her early 30s, Michelle Galea wasn't convinced motherhood was for her.
"I didn't know if I wanted a child or if society was telling me I should have a child right now," she said.
But as she watched two...