scholarly journals Racial Capitalism: A Fundamental Cause of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic Inequities in the United States

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 504-508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Whitney N. Laster Pirtle

Racial capitalism is a fundamental cause of the racial and socioeconomic inequities within the novel coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) in the United States. The overrepresentation of Black death reported in Detroit, Michigan is a case study for this argument. Racism and capitalism mutually construct harmful social conditions that fundamentally shape COVID-19 disease inequities because they (a) shape multiple diseases that interact with COVID-19 to influence poor health outcomes; (b) affect disease outcomes through increasing multiple risk factors for poor, people of color, including racial residential segregation, homelessness, and medical bias; (c) shape access to flexible resources, such as medical knowledge and freedom, which can be used to minimize both risks and the consequences of disease; and (d) replicate historical patterns of inequities within pandemics, despite newer intervening mechanisms thought to ameliorate health consequences. Interventions should address social inequality to achieve health equity across pandemics.

2021 ◽  
pp. 153568412110547
Author(s):  
Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana

Academics largely define gentrification based on changes in the class demographics of neighborhood residents from predominately low-income to middle-class. This ignores that gentrification always occurs in spaces defined by both class and race. In this article, I use the lens of racial capitalism to theorize gentrification as a racialized, profit-accumulating process, integrating the perspective that spaces are always racialized to class-centered theories. Using the prior literature on gentrification in the United States, I demonstrate how the concepts of value, valuation, and devaluation from racial capitalism explain where and how gentrification unfolds. Exposure to gentrification varies depending on a neighborhood’s racial composition and the gentrification stakeholders involved, which contributes to racial differences in the scale and pace of change and the implications of those changes for the processes of displacement. Revising our understanding of gentrification to address the racialization of space helps resolve seemingly contradictory findings across qualitative and quantitative studies.


Author(s):  
Michael McCann ◽  
Filiz Kahraman

Scholars conventionally distinguish between liberal and illiberal, or authoritarian, legal orders. Such distinctions are useful but often simplistic and misleading, as many regimes are governed by plural, dual, or hybrid legal institutions, principles, and practices. This is no less true for the United States, which often is misidentified as the paradigmatic liberal constitutional order. Historical and critical scholarship, including recent studies of law under racial capitalism, provide reason to identify American law as a dual state in which legal forms that govern property ownership, contract relations, and civil liberties of free citizens differ from the more illiberal, authoritarian legal forms that rule over subaltern populations, particularly racialized, low-wage workers, Indigenous populations, the poor, immigrants, and women. This dual state, we argue, did undergo changes to adopt more procedurally liberal, professional, overtly deracialized legal forms after World War II, but these changes masked more than tamed the continuing illiberal, authoritarian violence that targeted marginalized citizens. While constantly changing, the American legal system is best understood not as a singular liberal order but instead as a hybrid system of mutually constitutive liberal and illiberal and authoritarian legal practices. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Volume 17 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Sara E. Gorman ◽  
Jack M. Gorman

In 2014, a deadly epidemic of Ebola hemorrhagic fever ravaged three countries in West Africa. While the disease barely hit the United States, it caused widespread panic that sometimes threatened the safety of African immigrants in the United States. Five years later, a global pandemic of a novel coronavirus, later named COVID-19, quickly picked up speed around the world. In the face of a serious and very real threat, many Americans ignored the warnings and a vocal minority even insisted that the pandemic was not real. While the particulars of each of these examples might be quite different, they have something very important in common: science denial. This introductory chapter provides an overview of how such widespread science denialist views come into existence and how they spread. The authors outline the eight chapters of this book, which go into depth on different psychological mechanisms behind this phenomenon. Finally, they provide a preview of some of the solutions we have devised in response to this grave problem.


Author(s):  
Jane S. Sillman ◽  
Ajay K. Singh

The general internist needs to be up to date in contraception management. Each year nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended. Counseling about contraceptive options, provision of a back-up method, and information about emergency contraception can decrease the risk of unintended pregnancy. This chapter focuses on the aspects of contraception emphasized in Medical Knowledge Self-Assessment Program (MKSAP) 14: hormonal contraception, use of barrier methods, intrauterine devices, and emergency contraception.


Author(s):  
Jean K. Quam

George Wiley (1931–1973) was a reformer, organizer, and social activist. He is credited with organizing poor people into a significant political force in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He founded the Poverty/Rights Action Center in Washington, DC.


2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Pickup ◽  
Dominik Stecula ◽  
Clifton van der Linden

The novel coronavirus reached the United States and Canada almost at the same time. The first reported American case was January 20, 2020, and in Canada it was January 15, 2020 (Canada, 2020; Holshue et al., 2020). Yet, the response to this crisis has been different in the two countries. In the US, President Donald Trump, prominent Republicans, and conservative media initially dismissed the dangers of COVID-19 (Stecula, 2020). The pandemic became politicized from the early days, and even though Trump and Republicans have walked back many of their initial claims, there continue to be media reports of partisan differences in public opinion shaped by that early response. At the same time, the response in Canada has been mostly characterized by across-the-board partisan consensus among political elites (Merkley et al., 2020).


2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 389-420
Author(s):  
Julie Gibbings

AbstractGerman coffee planters in nineteenth-century Alta Verapaz, Guatemala were also ethnographers, archaeologists, and geographers who published their works in Germany, the United States, and Guatemala. Their published works, as well as coffee plantation records, government correspondence, judicial records and other archival materials reveal how German coffee planters-cum-ethnographers drew upon ethnographic knowledge and representations to forge a reliable labor force. Like ethnographers in Britain's colonies, German settlers in Alta Verapaz understood the potential symmetry between ethnography and the governance of indigenous peoples. Their ethnographic knowledges also push us to reconsider distinctions drawn between German cosmopolitan ethnographic traditions and British functionalist ones and demonstrate how ethnographic knowledge and cultural difference could be deployed to forge new kinds of racial capitalism. In Guatemala, the intimate relationship between the rise of capitalism and ethnography shaped the anti-communism of mid-twentieth-century anthropology in the region.


2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-258
Author(s):  
Raj Verma

The world has declared COVID-19 (a disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus or novel coronavirus) to be a pandemic. China has been chastised by various countries, especially the United States, for suppressing information and not taking necessary measures which could have helped in controlling the spread of and/or eradicating the disease in the earlier stages. Consequently, China has undertaken numerous measures to change the COVID-19 narrative and disassociate itself from COVID-19. It launched a campaign to question the origins of SARS-CoV-2, blamed the United States for spreading COVID-19, claimed victory in combating COVID-19 domestically, and provided aid (“mask diplomacy”) to countries. These actions betray China’s concern about its image. The country wants to portray itself as a Good Samaritan, a responsible and reliable partner, and an essential global power. Additionally, China has grave concerns about regime stability and survival. President Xi’s legitimacy is built on technocratic competence. The outbreak has the potential to seriously dent his personal legacy.


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