Racism has a powerful snowball effect which can keep oppressed people at disadvantages in health care, policing and financially. Some experts point to the importance of economic inequality as a factor in the disproportionate rates of COVID cases and use-of-force by police in the black community.

“Another critical adverse precondition lies at the heart of black-white difference in health outcomes: excess black financial precarity, captured best by the chasm in racial wealth,” said said William A. “Sandy” Darity, Jr., Ph.D., an economist and professor of public policy at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and the co-author of “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century.”

In fact, Darity calls the black-white wealth gap a “comorbidity” just like high blood pressure or diabetes.

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