Even still, COVID-19 statistical impacts on black bodies illuminates racial capitalism’s hold now

Ajnesh Prasad, “Racial capitalism and COVID-19”, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2 May 2024, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-03095-1

The statistics from the COVID-19 pandemic appear to have substantiated the claim long-held by social scientists that health outcomes are unequally distributed and experienced by different racial and ethnic groups (e.g., Dovidio et al., 2008; Nelson, 2002). Indeed, the numbers circulated about the pandemic suggest that minority racial and ethnic groups were disproportionately affected by the virus (Laurencin & McClinton, 2020; Williams & Blanco, 2020). This empirical evidence led academics, government officials, health professionals, and social justice activists to declare COVID-19 to be a racialized disease—that black and brown bodies are inequitably subjected to its most detrimental health outcomes (Yearby & Mohapatra, 2020).

Research on COVID-19 published in the last four years is unequivocal in its conclusion that the pandemic exposed different groups to different forms and levels of vulnerability (e.g., George et al., 2024; Mandalaki et al., 2022; Zulfiqar, 2022). Given the racialized social structures that organized society prior to the spread of the virus, statistics illuminating how racial and ethnic minorities are subjected to disproportionate harm from COVID-19 perhaps make sense. Indeed, it is consistent with Judith Butler’s (2004) writings on the nature of vulnerability and grievable lives within the existing paradigm of neoliberal capitalism. For Butler, while all lives are exposed to some degree of vulnerability, the types and the intensity of vulnerability will, to a significant degree, be determined by where a group is socially and economically situated within society (for a similar argument using a Marxist lens, see Das, 2023; Mair, 2020). It is the task of critical social scientists to account for the underlying conditions that pose uneven—and that is to say, of course, the inequitable—vulnerability to different groups. Thus, in this article, I argue that to more fully make sense of the antecedents behind the numbers concerning disparities in health outcomes from COVID-19, racial capitalism—which provisions for gross levels of economic inequality between whites and racialized others—must be duly accounted for.

Before proceeding, a caveat merits note. My position in this article should not be read as negating race in conceptualizing the health effects of COVID-19. I fully appreciate how race pivotally informs the parameters for social relating (Hall, 1996; Prasad, 2023a, 2023b) and, thereby, plays a significant role in configuring the consequences of a global pandemic like COVID-19. Notwithstanding this point, I have found that the tenor of the discourse that inscribes race as the cause of the phenomenon to be insufficient insofar as it fails to miss the broader economic conditions within which race is socially constructed. Accordingly, my aim here is to illuminate how race functions not in isolation, but rather, in close proximity with neoliberal capitalism. More specifically, I contend that race operates discursively within the parameters of neoliberal capitalism to produce a form of racial capitalism that ensures gross economic inequality between whites and racialized others. Working from this purview, the detrimental and uneven outcomes of COVID-19 are, as one scholar aptly described it, reflective of “a crisis of capitalist life” underpinned by neo-liberalist logic (Mezzadri, 2022, p. 380, emphasis in original). As such, should the unsettling statistics related to the racialized health disparities produced by the pandemic be read through this perspective, it would show how race is a cog in the machinery of neoliberalism, which culminates in racial capitalism. Racial capitalism fosters the economic stratification necessary to yield the consequences it has in terms of health disparities from COVID-19.