Dr. Robert Bullard did an interview with Texas Monthly about racial disparities in COVID-19 and environmental exposures, and how the coronavirus takes advantage of vulnerabilities and disadvantages that are built into our country because of structural and institutional racism.
Dr. Bullard talks about communities that were already stressed by being saturated with polluting facilities: incinerators, landfills, refineries and petrochemical plants, coal power plants. These make the air quality bad, and contribute to many underlying health conditions: asthma respiratory illnesses, diabetes, and high blood pressure.
He talks about how structural racism has placed more of the polluting facilities in communities of color, adding more stress and ill health to the social and health disparities caused by unequal distribution of resources caused by racism.
He talks about the impact of a virus that attacks the respiratory and cardiovascular system, and layer that in with people living in neighborhoods where it was already hard to breathe.
It’s a very good and very important discussion, one that everyone in the country and especially policymakers need to understand.
