A morbidly twisted example of irony is when white Americans catch the Coronavirus, but black Americans are those dying from it. Even though African Americans make up 13.4% of the entire American population, black communities account for over half of all Coronavirus cases in the country, and approximately 60% of all deaths.

Though there have sadly been thousands of white Americans to pass away due to the virus, those numbers cannot compare to the pace at which African Americans are dying. Compared to any other group in the United States, African Americans are most likely to die from COVID-19. The public-health crisis has morphed into a grave lesson in racial, socioeconomic, and class inequality.

Though the pandemic still has some way to go, the demographics it has offered up to this point are enough to see this devastating effect. Taking Albany, a small city in Georgia, as an example, there are over thirteen hundred confirmed cases, with close to one hundred deaths. 81% of those who died were African American.

The same goes for states like Michigan. This is not the first time Michigan’s black communities have been disproportionately exposed to hazardous environments, taking the Flint water crisis into consideration. Even though African Americans make up around 14% of the state’s population, 35% of reported infections of Coronavirus along with 40% of its deaths can be attributed to the black communities. African American communities in Chicago, Louisiana, Philadelphia, and more have also been direct witnesses to these events.

This situation is certainly not without precedent. It is a proven fact that African American communities, and minorities in general, are unequally exposed to dangerous environments and resources, with not enough access to proper care. This all leads to African Americans already suffering from health conditions such as asthma, heart disease, diabetes, and now, they have Coronavirus to add to the list.

There are many who will excuse the number of deaths as the direct effect of these underlying health conditions, but those conditions are generated and even nurtured by the federal government’s lack of inclusion for black Americans.

These are all crucial factors that lead to one undeniable conclusion: racial discrimination is present and persistent in public health infrastructure. This lack of consideration in a system has increased black vulnerability to premature deaths, with black people being poorer, generally underemployed, living in substandard conditions, and benefitting from inferior health care systems. These are only a few aspects in which they roughly compare to white Americans, and there is still more to consider, including mass incarceration and housing discrimination.

Even without taking race into consideration, the government’s response to Coronavirus was delayed, cheap, and overall disastrous. There is not proper access to health care systems, including the necessary aspect of testing. There has recently been a study that found that testing has been administered much more in zip codes with higher incomes and a lesser proportion of minorities. Testing in higher-income neighborhoods is almost six times the amount that it is in poorer neighborhoods.

Trump and his supporters’ past misconduct has likely hastened the disproportionate black deaths. As stated before, the underlying health conditions and general lack of better resources is directly fueled by institutional racism. There was even an emergency room in public Provident Hospital that was closed in the predominantly black South Side of Chicago, being just one of many examples of this institutional neglect.

Coronavirus has also decidedly brought out the worst in the nation’s prison systems, with thousands of inmates and officers all over the country testing positive for the virus, and no action taken besides hand sanitizer and face masks. After hearing all of these facts, one shouldn’t be surprised to hear that there is a thirty-year-gap in life expectancy when comparing the black neighborhood of Englewood and the white neighborhood Streetville in Chicago.

Structural racism is a problem that the United States has consistently been an example of. This global pandemic has brought disparities, systematized preference to white Americans, and the ostracism of black communities into the light.

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