THE NATIONAL BLACK ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE NETWORK’S

HEALTH AND RACIAL JUSTICE STATEMENT 

The National Black Environmental Justice Network (NBEJN) stands strong on the Principles of Environmental Justice that strengthen coalitions, alliances and collaborations and commitment to fight on multiple fronts to eradicate underlying conditions that create and perpetuate disparities and vulnerability. Our platform and action plans are built around data driven solutions using an equity lens to inform policies that address health, environmental, and economic justice challenges facing African Americans in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic.  

The disproportionately higher rates of infection, hospitalization and deaths are linked to lingering and persistent health, social, economic, and environmental inequities facing black Americans—conditions rooted in oppression, discrimination, medical apartheid, and structural racism.  Government has been slow to respond to and design proactive measures and plans to address glaring racial, health and environmental disparities brought to light by COVID-19.  This slow response is not new.  It fits a pattern documented in The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities (NYU Press 2012). 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) preliminary data revealed 45 percent of COVID-19 deaths were white, 33 percent were black, and 8 percent were Hispanic—although African Americans make up just 13 percent of the U.S. population.  An independent analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation found 27 percent for African Americans compared to 21 percent for whites were at higher risk of serious illness if infected with COVID-19.  A report by APM Research Lab, The Color of Coronavirus: COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the U.S., found counties with higher black populations account for over half of all COVID-19 cases and almost 60 percent of deaths. 

African American COVID-19 patients are nearly three times more likely than whites to be hospitalized. The COVID-19 mortality rate for African Americans is 2.2 times higher than the rate for Latinos, 2.3 times higher than the rate for Asians and 2.6 times higher than the rate for Whites. Also worth noting, one in four African American coronavirus patients have to be moved to an intensive care unit compared to just one in 10 white patients.  

COVID-19 exposes the racial divide in our nation’s nursing homes and prisons which have a high proportion of African Americans. It also shines a national spotlight on longstanding health care shortcomings, socioeconomic and racial disparities for African Americans, including alarming health disparities (asthma, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, obesity, kidney disease) and social vulnerabilities (poverty, uninsured, lack of transportation, located in food deserts and pollution “hot spots”). 

The findings are clear—government response to natural and human-made disasters and pandemics has not treated all impacted communities the same—contributing to glaring racial disparities.  As the coronavirus death toll surpassed 100,000 in May 2020, Black Americans suffered a disproportionate share of fatalities.  This is unacceptable.  Real solutions to address COVID-19 will require the nation to tackle the persistent underlying health conditions, income inequalities and disparities in access to health care that hurt black people more than the general population  

UNDERLYING HEALTH VULNERABILITIES

African Americans have the highest death rate and lowest survival rate of any racial or ethnic group for most cancers.  Among men, the overall cancer death rate was 47 percent higher for blacks than for whites. 

African American adults are 60 percent more likely than non-Hispanic white adults to have been diagnosed with diabetes by a physician and twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to die from diabetes.

The prevalence of hypertension is higher in blacks compared to whites.  Black adults are up to two times more likely to develop high blood pressure by age 55 compared to whites.

African Americans suffer from kidney failure at a rate more than three times higher than whites. African Americans constitute more than 35 percent of all patients in the U.S. receiving dialysis for kidney failure, but only represent 13.2 percent of the overall U.S. population.

African Americans are almost three times more likely to die from asthma related causes than the white population. Black children are 10 times more likely to die from asthma.

African Americans are 3 times more likely to suffer from sarcoidosis than white Americans. This lung-scarring disease is 16 times more deadly for blacks than for whites.

Over 11.5 percent of blacks and 19.0 percent of Hispanics compared to 7.5 percent of whites are uninsured.