“We may be in the same storm, but we are not in the same boat,” Don Gips, Skoll Foundation CEO, said as he convened a recent town hall discussion, The Color of COVID. Bringing together leading researchers, activists, and social innovators working at the intersection of racial justice and the COVID-19 pandemic, the panelists discussed and illuminated the disparate health outcomes deeply rooted in structural racism and historic injustices. As Gips pointed out, the pandemic has exposed the inequities and weakness of unjust and unsustainable systems particularly in the U.S.

Cheryl Dorsey, President of Echoing Green, and a new member of the Skoll Foundation Board, moderated the first half of the discussion. Dorsey framed the discussion by quoting professor of history and history of medicine, Frank Snowden. “To study pandemics is to understand a society structure, its standard of living, its political priorities,” he said. “The disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on people of color, the higher burdens of cases and deaths, is an indictment and one that elucidates the impacts of structural racism on communities of color.”

Dr. Mary Bassett, director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, elaborated on that statement, citing the Center’s own research that indicated that “among black people between the ages of 35 and 44 our research shows a nine-fold increased risk of death.” Dr. Bassett underscored one of the structural problems of getting reliable data during the pandemic, “an indictment of what’s happened to our public health authorities. The CDC has been effectively muzzled. The data weren’t available by race from the federal government.” Instead Dr. Bassett pointed out, the best sources of data during the pandemic came from journalists, particularly the print media.

Read the full article about the roots of structural racism in COVID-19 responses at Skoll Foundation.