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 Ian Sample, The Guardian | 07.04.2024
Biological models of human embryos that can develop heartbeats, spinal cords and other distinctive features will be governed by a code of practice in Britain to ensure that researchers work on them responsibly.
Made from stem cells, they mimic, to...
By Michael Hiltzik, LA Times | 07.02.2024
Photo by Claire Anderson on Unsplash
Second only to the Supreme Court’s ruling Monday on when presidents are immune from criminal prosecution, the biggest case of the court’s recently completed session involved the age-old conflict between judges and government regulators...
By Shivam Jadaun and Shivani, JURISTnews | 06.27.2024
Image by European Council from Flickr
In some European Union nations, the forced sterilisation of people with disabilities is still a widespread and concerning practice that blatantly violates their fundamental rights and human dignity. The scope of forced sterilisation in...
By Stephen Groves, Associated Press | 06.13.2024
Photo by Ajay Parthasarathy on Unsplash
Senate Republicans blocked legislation that would make it a right nationwide for women to access in vitro fertilization and other fertility treatments after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer forced a vote on the matter...