WASHINGTON -- When Mike Griffin, a black community organizer in Minneapolis, took to the streets in protest, he was grieving for two black men taken during the turmoil convulsing the country: George Floyd, who died after gasping for air under the knee of a white police officer, and his own godfather,
WASHINGTON — When Mike Griffin, a black community organizer in Minneapolis, took to the streets in protest, he was grieving for two black men taken during the turmoil convulsing the country: George Floyd, who died after gasping for air under the knee of a white police officer, and his own godfather, who succumbed to COVID-19.
Story continuesThe precise toll that the coronavirus has taken on people of color remains unknown; not every state collects data. The Trump administration, under pressure from Congress, announced Thursday new requirements for states to do so. But an analysis of data from 40 states and the District of Columbia, released last month by the nonpartisan APM Research Lab, found black Americans are more than twice as likely as whites, Latinos or Asian Americans to die from the coronavirus.
The mass incarceration of black people has only worsened the pandemic’s heavy toll on minorities. Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons at five times the rate of whites, according to the Sentencing Project, a Washington advocacy group. Prisons are breeding grounds for the coronavirus, and jails pose a particular threat because people cycle in and out, spreading disease in their neighborhoods.
For many involved in the protests, the pandemic is deeply personal. Some have lost friends or family members to the coronavirus. Others have lost jobs or are front-line workers — in grocery stores, hospitals, mass transit systems — putting themselves at risk of infection. At the Brown University School of Public Health, about 20 students and recent graduates in the department of behavioral and social sciences wrote the predominantly white faculty a letter demanding a “response to police brutality and anti-blackness,” citing the coronavirus and the recent killings of three African Americans: Breonna Taylor, killed by police in Louisville, Kentucky; Ahmaud Arbery, shot in south Georgia after being pursued by armed white residents; and Floyd.
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