Race, Space and Disease
Race, risk and space are three vectors which define the urban spatial strategies of fighting an infectious disease like Covid-19. In the past, rather crudely, an epidemic allowed for the elimination or segregation of perceived carriers of disease, and indeed the ghettoisation of infected people had elements of structural racism. Today, racial difference combined with urban spatial use (of living and working) is emerging as a significant definer of the risk of contracting Covid-19. In UK, for example Black people are 1.9 time as likely to die as White people (ONS, 2020), whereas in Singapore migrants living in dormitories and travelling in crowded lorries stoked up the infection transmission rate (Guardian, Apr 2020). So what can we learn from the racialised affect of the disease?
The first ofcourse is to note that blaming individual morality of communities is unhelpful and even racist. In India, during the early stages of the pandemic Muslims were blamed for congregating at a religious gathering and spreading the infection, ignoring that Hindus, too had assembled in large numbers before the lockdown. In Singapore, Kokila Annamalai an activist working for migrant labourers noted that people blamed them for being unclean and for their eating habits. Global cities like Toronto, as SARS 2003 had made vivid are more susceptible to virus transmission across borders but this risk also strikes at the heart of urban communities - its diversity and multiculturalism.
Secondly, the pandemic has revealed the structural racism which, compounds the risk of not only countering Covid-19 (or any other life threatening ailment) but of being segregated from mainstream society. Existing structural racism in housing, employment, citizen rights have accentuated the risk of countering the virus among racial and ethnic minorities. In the UK, there is evidence that BAME have higher death rate than White people. Why? Because there is an element of invisibilation of their public service… “1 in 5 members of the BAME community work for the NHS” (BBC 19 Jun 2020) . When the nation was asked to clap for keyworkers, they should have been reminded, too, of the structural racism that goes on in the public health care system. The British Medical Journal’s special issue on Racism in Medicine cautioned against biological determinism in explaining the higher rates of deaths in the BAME community. Not just underlying health conditions but structural racism in the health care profession they explained was a key factor. BAME members experience differential career progression, pay levels, complaints processes and bullying at work. They have precarious contracts, visas and are often too scared to ask for PPE.
Finally, race and urban spatial organisation are closely connected. When Leicester went in to a further two-week lockdown in the U.K., it was unsurprising given that its predominantly BAME populated inner city has overcrowded housing, with small businesses co-existing cheek by jowl with homes and essential public services. The ONS found that under a third of Black communities live in overcrowded households compared to 2% of White British. In China, African students were sent out of their homes by landlords or left in desolate campuses as cities went into lockdown. Meanwhile, in India slums like Dharavi closed off from the rest of the city turned into refugee camps. In Singapore migrant workers were assured that they would be looked after by the state, but locked in dormitories with assured risk of transmission “felt like living in a prison” (Guardian, Apr 2020). Crucially, spatial reorganisation to manage the risk of infection takes the form of enclosing or removing real or perceived carriers of the disease. What this enables, however, is racialised linking of their status as disease carriers, with their residence and their economic utility for the system. The spaces migrants and minorities live in increase their risk of countering disease, and equally reorganising these spaces to fight the pandemic leads to further marginalisation and discrimination. What is needed in response to the racialised effect of the corona virus pandemic is systematic and concerted effort to introduce legal measures to stop structural racism and public health measures to reduce the risk of death. These are separate measures but need to be addressed simultaneously for real change.
