The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted America’s enduring racial disparities, which are fuelled by decades of unequal treatment, unequal opportunity, and structural barriers like job discrimination and poor schools. Blacks have been infected with covid-19 at three times the rate of whites, and their death rate is twice that of whites. (The same is true for Hispanics.) The coronavirus is also having a hugely disparate impact on Black people’s finances and prospects. For myriad reasons, Black Americans will have a harder time rebounding economically from the pandemic, and the fact that they began this period far behind whites in average income, wealth, and home-ownership rates will only make it more difficult. On average, Black workers earn just seventy-three per cent of what white workers do, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, which also found that Black college graduates earn 22.5 per cent less than white college graduates. Median household income for white households was seventy per cent higher than for Black households in 2018, $70,642 versus $41,692. As a result of these disparities, Black people will be evicted disproportionately from their homes, a process that is expected to accelerate following the July 24th expiration of a federal moratorium on evictions from buildings or homes with a government-backed mortgage. (The moratorium might be extended as part of the latest emergency-relief bill that Congress is debating.)
“The issue of preëxisting conditions doesn’t just happen,” Hamilton said. “There’s a whole political economy that’s made Blacks more vulnerable to having preëxisting conditions.” He cited such factors as lack of medical coverage, poor living conditions, and environmental degradation. Another factor is that Black people disproportionately live in apartment complexes (where it is easier for the virus to spread), rather than single-family homes. According to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, twenty-nine per cent of Blacks live in buildings with five or more units, which is twice the rate for whites; fifty-four per cent of Blacks live in single-unit dwellings, compared with seventy-four per cent of whites.
As a result of this historic disparity in wealth, white people, when facing coronavirus-induced layoffs, are less likely to fall behind on their rent, auto loans, or mortgages. “In the pandemic, if you’re someone who doesn’t have wealth or savings to fall back on, it doesn’t even have to be an unexpected expense, just paying your basic expenses will be especially challenging,” Valerie Wilson, the director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy said. “Will I have money to get dental work done or have my car fixed? Will I be able to stay in my home? Will I be able to feed my kids? You have all these secondary losses that follow on the loss of a job.”