Members of the 1199SEIU union, the nation’s largest healthcare workers’ union, kneel for eight minutes and 46 seconds, during a vigil. Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters
Long before a white police officer killed George Floyd and sparked nationwide outrage, long before Covid-19 began killing Black people at twice the rate of their white counterparts, doctors and health experts were raising alarms that systematic racism is itself a pervasive, deadly pandemic – one that kills both instantaneously and insidiously, burdens Black and Brown Americans with generational trauma, contributes to higher rates of infant mortality and heart disease, and even speeds up the ageing process.
Now, amid a national reckoning with entrenched inequality, lawmakers are finally hearing those alarms – and officially declaring racism a public health emergency. The city councils of Cleveland, Denver and Indianapolis have voted to acknowledge a crisis. Officials in San Bernardino county, California, and Montgomery county, Maryland, have done the same. State representatives in Ohio and Michigan are looking to follow suit.
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