A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind

by Harriet A. Washington

People of color are least likely to have the option of working from home, which means they’re less likely to be able to practice social distancing and avoid crowded workplaces and mass transit.7 Adequate protective gear has been scarce for most “essential” workers in factories and the disproportionately ethnic workers who operate and clean mass transit and staff hospitals, nursing homes, and restaurants. Decades of credit and mortgaging practices such as redlining, and the biases that precluded access to such initiatives as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, or G.I. Bill, have made it less likely that people of color will own their own homes.8 This consigns them to apartment life, which, with its shared corridors, elevators, and crowded living spaces, further works against social distancing. Even the commonsense measure of wearing protective masks presents health hazards for African American men, who have been hounded by police and ejected from stores by security guards who claim to have taken the masks for potential criminal gear. But forgoing a mask presents its own hazards: police officers have preferentially assaulted people of color for not wearing masks in public.