Structural racism in the age of coronavirus

As the grim data on racial disparities of who’s losing their lives to COVID19 continue to roll in, Rebecca sits down with Angela Hanks of the Groundwork Collaborative for a deep-dive into how structural racism is exacerbating the coronavirus pandemic for black people — and especially black women. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

“It’s often said that when white America gets a cold, Black America gets the flu. Though the data available on racial disparities of who’s losing their lives to coronavirus are limited, what’s emerged so far has been grim. Less than 30 percent of people in Chicago, Illinois, are Black — yet 70 percent of the lives lost to COVID-19 thus far are Black lives. In the entire state of Louisiana — with a Black population at 32 percent — Black people also make up 70 percent of COVID-19-related deaths…

“One look at New York City, the epicenter of this global crisis in the U.S., shows that suffering is not equal as Black and brown communities are being the hardest hit. Though Governor Andrew Cuomo has committed to additional testing in these areas, he also says he will launch a study to explore ‘why the disparities exist.’ But we already know why. And we have for a long time.”

So write Angela Hanks and Kendra Bozarth in a recent article for Ms Magazine titled “Structural Racism Is Exacerbating the Coronavirus Pandemic for Black People — Especially Black Women.” Continuing Off-Kilter’s ongoing series of conversations on poverty and inequality in the era of COVID-19, we have Angela back on the show for a deep-dive on the factors driving racial disparities in coronavirus-related deaths — and why we need to center race in both our immediate and longer-term policy response.

This episode’s guest:

• Angela Hanks, deputy ED, Groundwork Collaborative (@angelahanks)

For more on all this:

• Read Angela’s and Kendra’s full piece in Ms Magazine
• Here’s Tracey Ross on the U.S. Surgeon General blaming COVID19 racial disparities on black people
• Here are two of our faves from friend-of-the-show Gbenga Ajilore on the policies we need to tackle structural racism
• And here’s an oldie but goodie on the health disparities facing black women, which we discussed on the show a while back with lead author Jamila Taylor

TRANSCRIPT:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas.

Continuing our ongoing series of conversations about poverty and inequality in the era of coronavirus, “I’s often said that when white America gets a cold, Black America gets the flu. Though the data available on racial disparities of who’s losing their lives to coronavirus are limited, what’s emerged so far has been grim. Less than 30 percent of people in Chicago, Illinois are Black, yet 70 percent of the lives lost to COVID-19 thus far are Black lives. In the entire state of Louisiana — with a Black population at 32 percent — Black people also make up 70 percent of COVID-19 related deaths. One look at New York City, the epicenter of this global crisis in the U.S., shows that suffering is not equal, as Black and brown communities are the hardest hit. Though Governor Andrew Cuomo has committed to additional testing in these areas, he also says he will launch a study to explore, ‘why the disparities exist.’ But we already know why, and we have for a long time.” So write Angela Hanks and Kendra Bozarth in a recent article for Ms. Magazine titled Structural Racism is Exacerbating the Coronavirus Pandemic for Black People — Especially Black Women. So, I was thrilled to sit down with Angela and have her back on the show, virtually, of course, to talk a little bit about her piece and what we know so far. Let’s take a listen.

I’m thrilled to have Angela back on the show. Angela Hanks, you are the deputy executive director at the Groundwork Collaborative. And it’s been too long since I’ve had you back on. You’ve been doing a ton of writing and thinking and analysis around coronavirus, but in particular and most recently, these just horrifying numbers coming out, showing the racial disparities of who is losing their lives to this virus. I was reading from your piece, which was published a few days ago at this point in Ms. Magazine. Even more has been coming out in the days since. Catch us up. What do we know so far about these racial disparities?

ANGELA HANKS: Thanks, Rebecca. I’m really glad to be back. Although certainly, it’s unfortunate to be back under such grim circumstances. So, you mentioned some of the disparities at the beginning. I think there’s a couple of things to know about them. One, we have data from a few cities and states, so Louisiana, Chicago, St. Louis, Michigan. The reality is, even though we’re seeing some really disturbing trends emerge, we still don’t have enough data. You know, there is a challenge with not being able to address a problem that you can’t measure. And so, not really fully understanding how COVID-19 is affecting Black communities is going to make our response weaker.

Now, that said, there are some things that we do know, absent a full data set, on who is contracting and dying from COVID across the country. We do know that discrimination across employment, housing, healthcare has caused more Black people to contract and die from COVID-19 than any other community at this point. Those deaths and those disparities are not about sort of Black people just happening to be disproportionately employed in lower-wage jobs or happening to have less access to healthcare. It’s really about deliberate policy choices that’ve made Black people sicker, lower income, and less equipped to deal with either a public health crisis or an economic crisis. And at this moment, we’re facing both.

VALLAS: Well, and let’s dig into those policy choices. You and Kendra write — I want to read from this piece again — “It is not merely an accident or coincidence that Black people appear to be more likely to contract or succumb to COVID-19. It is the direct result of policy choices, often intentional, that have led to widespread racial inequality and poor health and economic outcomes for Black people, even outside of the coronavirus pandemic.” So, I know you’re not alone. I’m not alone in having sort of banged our heads against the walls when Governor Cuomo said what he said, right, making it sound like we have no idea why we’re seeing these disparities. You’re saying the exact opposite. We know exactly why we’re seeing these disparities, and you actually did a lot of work in this piece to connect the dots to very specific policy choices. Talk a little bit about the structural racism that weaves throughout so much of our policy landscape and has for so long that really got us where we are.

HANKS: Yeah. There are a lot of factors, and I think an important thing to know is that they’re often interlocking and build upon one another, which makes the outcomes especially devastating. So, starting out with housing, there’s a hashtag that floats around Twitter that’s #HousingSegregationAndEverything, which is often true and I think applies to this crisis as well. Residential segregation has led to Black people having lower wealth, less access to healthy food, to quality medical care. And it has made Black people more likely to live in polluted areas, which is the environmental racism that folks often talk about. These things put together are often the culprit of underlying health conditions that Black people disproportionately face. So, really, these policy choices are rooted in maintaining racial hierarchy, in ensuring that there is continued racial inequality. And really, because they compound on one another, it’s not just that you address one and you address them all. You really have to take them all in turn.

So, if residential segregation has made folks less likely to have wealth, it means that they’re less likely to be able to weather economic shocks. It means they’re less likely to pay for healthcare and be able to go to the doctor. It means they’re less likely to be able to get out of a polluted area. All of those things compound, which again, make it much more difficult to address any of the crises that we’re facing, and frankly, any crisis of any kind.

I mean, you know, we’re in this very unique situation with COVID-19, and what is very likely a very deep recession that we are already in. But to be frank, these underlying policy choices that have led to widespread discrimination make Black people vulnerable to any kind of economic shock. We saw this during the last recession. You know, the last hired, first fired principal always comes into play. Certainly in the last crisis, we were dealing with foreclosures that disproportionately fell in Black communities for many of the reasons I just mentioned. So, these things are always worse for Black communities. And in this case in particular, because it compounds so many of those underlying discriminatory policies that’ve made Black people less able to weather a crisis, it just means that the impact will be so much worse this time around, absent an action.

VALLAS: You also point out — and this is something that’s starting to get some level of attention but really hasn’t been talked nearly enough about in the context of who are the nation’s quote-unquote “essential workers” and the sort of invisibility of so many of these people outside of moments like this one — you point out that Black workers are disproportionately represented in the jobs that are deemed most essential in a moment like this one, whether that’s home healthcare workers or bus drivers or you even point out phlebotomists, a job title that I hadn’t even thought about, and yet one that is disproportionately filled by Black workers. You point out that these jobs have been systematically undervalued. They pay low wages. But especially in this particular moment, these jobs are also, you point out, lacking in even the most basic protections. And you quote a Black Amazon worker who was quoted in one of the recent Amazon strikes that received a lot of well-deserved attention. She said, “How can we be essential workers when our lives are not considered essential?” Talk a little bit about those essential workers and the significance of Black people being disproportionately represented among their ranks.

HANKS: Yeah. So, you know, in some ways it feels like cruel irony, but I don’t want to dismiss the intentionality in sort of the policy choices that are made here, that many of the folks who are essential in this current environment are Black workers or low-income workers, often both, who lack the basic protections on the job that they need to stay healthy and safe themselves. So, we have Black workers who are overrepresented in many of the jobs that have been deemed essential in this crisis, whether it is home health aide, personal care aide, phlebotomist. These are often traditionally low-wage jobs that offer little in the way of benefits. So, that means that the folks who are putting their lives on the line every day to deliver groceries, to work in a warehouse, to work as farm workers are also the workers who are least likely to have health insurance, who are making the lowest wages, who are really living at the margins in so many ways and are fundamentally not equipped, again, because of intentional policy choices to weather this crisis.

So, the other thing is Black workers are also less likely to be able to work from home than white workers. So, being forced to go out into the world in order to ensure that you and your family can have any kind of livelihood during a crisis, during a moment where we know we’re in a recession already, it really forces this very difficult choice. Frankly, it sort of eliminates the illusion of choice, right? Like, you can’t make that choice because either you go hungry or your family is sick or you risk your life to put food on the table. And these are really choices that Black workers and brown workers disproportionately are having to make every day during this crisis.

VALLAS: You were talking a little bit before, Angela, about the various environmental and low-wage work-related and other types of factors that drive some of these health-related disparities that we’re seeing. But you also note in the piece, and I actually want to use your words here, you and Kendra say, “The health of Black people has always been neglected.” And you’re not just describing the kinds of disinvestment or intentional policy choices or segregation or the other types of policy-driven pathways that have led to that type of neglect. You also are referring to significant disparities in the type of treatment that Black people receive within the healthcare system itself. And that’s particularly true among Black women. Talk a little bit about the discrimination in care that gets so little attention, but that is so much of the reality for particularly Black women seeking healthcare.

HANKS: Yeah. So, of course, it’s important to think about and consider the reduced access to healthcare writ large. But the reality is for Black people and especially for Black women, getting access to healthcare isn’t even enough, because once we have access to that healthcare, we still experience medical discrimination. So, what that means is that Black women going into the doctor are less likely to be believed about their symptoms, are more likely to be dismissed by their doctors. You know, the most famous example from a couple of years ago was Serena Williams, a Black woman who is quite wealthy and privileged in many ways, being in the hospital, giving birth to her daughter, and having the doctors not believe her that she was unwell and ultimately finding out that she had blood clots that the doctors had refused to even do a chest X-ray to look for. You know, that’s someone, again, who has quite a lot of privilege. So, imagine being a lower-income or middle-income Black person at a time of crisis and really being de-prioritized because of your identity. So, it’s both the policy choices that exist in the public sphere, but there’s also the interpersonal racism that still persists that is certainly exacerbated by those policy choices. But it does mean it’s sort of another compounding way that Black workers are more at risk during this crisis.

VALLAS: And I want to be really clear, what you’re describing is not just supported by personal experiences in droves. It is also supported by research that actually has looked into this type of discrimination and has documented it. So, it’s something that there really is a significant growing body of literature supporting and documenting, for anyone listening to this and going, really? Is there discrimination in healthcare? It is out there. It is pernicious. And in a moment like this, as you point out, because we’re talking about a virus wherein many people who have been infected don’t actually exhibit the symptoms or don’t exhibit the symptoms for some level of time while they have the virus in their system, the incredible danger, the obvious danger of being doubted by a hospital or an emergency medical provider or some other kind of medical professional when you’re trying to find out if you have the illness and trying to get tested, trying to get care and having that compounded by the color of your skin, as you and Kendra put it, it’s beyond negligent and will worsen the public health crisis.

I want to also switch gears to another aspect of this that’s very much related to that kind of pernicious, if somewhat invisible, discrimination that Black people face in the context of a health crisis, either individual or collective like this one. And that’s to sort of point out that, as folks may remember, this was just a few days ago when this was starting to take this turn in the public narrative, the news of the health disparities, the racial disparities in who was losing their lives to coronavirus, and Black people being disproportionately among the ranks of people losing their lives. As that was starting to come out, we started to see people try to explain why that was. And one of the really, really quick responses, actually, that came from the Surgeon General, Jerome Adams, was to caution Black people and other people of color to, “Avoid alcohol, tobacco, and drugs. We need you to step up,” said the U.S. Surgeon General to communities of color. And as my former colleague and good friend Tracy Ross said on Twitter, and I think she really sums it up nicely here, “Before people realized Black people were suffering from COVID-19 at high rates, the conversation was about testing and care. Now that we’re learning how many victims are Black, it’s about personal responsibility. This train is never late.” Angela, I know you saw this. Curious to hear your thoughts.

HANKS: Yes. Well, unsurprisingly, I totally agree with Tracy’s assessment. You know, I mean, there’s a lot happening there. But this, I think, demonstrates this combination, again, these intersecting ideas of both anti-Blackness and of a conservative economic narrative that tells all of us, but especially people of color, that we’re on our own, right? As soon as this becomes a problem of individual failings, it absolves the government of having to do anything. And frankly, certainly if the individual failings are on behalf of people of color, then it makes it that much easier for folks in positions of power who would be happy to have a less robust government response to simply blame the people who are the most harmed at this moment. I think I saw someone say recently that they wished there was a way to tell Black people who are at risk of the extent of the risk without sort of setting off the alarm bells to folks in the administration and elsewhere who would be happy to have a less robust response if it means that this, because this harms communities of color.

These narratives around personal responsibility that exist are highly racialized. They always have been. And certainly, to Tracy’s point, when they come out, you know, it may not sound like, oh, well, who cares if Black people die? But fundamentally, the idea of personal responsibility is rooted in racism. These are sort of subtle and sometimes not so subtle dog whistles that are put out there that make it easier for government to not respond or just to respond inadequately when it comes to people of color.

VALLAS: And back to the incredibly powerful quote from that Amazon worker pointing out the devaluation of the lives of essential workers the comparison to the Black Lives Matter movement seems to sort of make itself.

HANKS: Yeah. One thing that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit is what this entire crisis says about the way we think about our government and the labor market and how we value people and workers. And the thing that I just keep coming back to, and I think the Amazon worker’s quote really demonstrates this, is how deeply and systemically our economy and our labor market devalues people of color and how much more it makes our economy at risk for any kind of shock, and certainly for a public health and economic crisis. You have to look no further than the nearly 17 million people who are sort of right away unemployed and filing for unemployment right after many states order folks to stay inside. This is an economy that is built on extraction and exclusion, right? There are other governments in other countries that haven’t had the kind of mass unemployment that we have. One of the reasons why our economy is reacting so substantially to this public health crisis is both because there’s been inadequate response on the public health side, but also because our labor market wasn’t that healthy to begin with. And part of that is because we devalue workers of color.

We don’t have the unemployment data. We have March unemployment data, which doesn’t really measure the full scope of the crisis. But you can already see that Black women are more affected by job loss than other groups. Certainly, I think that will bear out to an even greater extent in the April unemployment numbers. And what that says to me is that we have a labor market that’s fundamentally built on extracting from workers of color and makes us more vulnerable to shocks in general and means that the folks who are least equipped to weather a crisis themselves are the ones who will bear the brunt of that crisis in the moment. So, when workers lack basic protections, when we don’t have real policies that help build worker power to allow for things like work-sharing or subsidies for folks on the job, when healthcare is tied to employment, so all of a sudden there are millions of people who are unemployed and lack health insurance during a public health crisis. We know that many of those people, again, due to residential segregation and other factors, lack the wealth to be able to weather that crisis. I mean, we’re just dealing with a labor market that, even though we were at 3.5 percent unemployment before this started, we’re really seeing that there was some really deep rot at the center of that. And this crisis is only exposing it, not creating it for the first time.

VALLAS: So then, a big part of the piece that you and Kendra wrote, really, was not just about the problems, but was about the set of solutions that are not new ideas, that are not newly needed, but that are longstanding asks of many people, yourself included, who have been really ringing a lot of these alarm bells for a long time before the pandemic hit U.S. shores. And you issue an incredibly strong call to basically center race in our policy response to this crisis and in the rebuilding that we ultimately end up doing of our economy on the other side of whatever this recession ends up looking like. And I’d love to, rather than just sort of walk through kind of some of the top lines, I’d love for you to explain the call for race-conscious policy for anyone who feels like they’ve heard that term. You know, maybe they’ve heard Senator Elizabeth Warren talk about that term or others, but maybe they don’t feel like they quite understand what it means. Talk about race-conscious policy, and maybe offer a couple of examples for how it can inform the solutions that address the problems you were describing before on so many different fronts.

HANKS: Yeah, of course. So, I tend to be pretty skeptical of the concept of race-neutral policy. You know, pretty much every policy has some sort of racial implication. And so, when we talk about race-conscious policies, what we’re really talking about is actually addressing the needs of communities of color. So, in this instance, we talked about many of the challenges that are unique to communities of color, whether it’s residential segregation or environmental racism or a lack of basic protections on the job or just employment discrimination, broadly. All of those things, if they are not addressed in a race-conscious way, those disparities will continue to persist and in some cases deepen. So, when we talk about race-conscious policy, what we need to do is start with the specific problems that people of color are facing and then build policy from there.

So, for example, as I mentioned, one of the big labor market problems right now that’s making this crisis worse for Black workers is that the work of folks who are Black workers who are involved in these typically low-income professions is devalued in part because of who does them, right? So, care jobs, for example, are essential jobs that are also super precarious, are often done by women, especially women of color. And so, making those jobs better quality jobs that offer things like healthcare and fair wages and some ability to bargain with their employers makes people of color better off. And so, really, starting from that specific problem of what would it take to have a stronger labor market that means that people of color are less vulnerable to economic shocks allows you to develop policy that responds to that particular need.

There are certainly other examples of this, but I think the important thing to think about is race-conscious policy is really about making sure that our policy is addressing the specific problems that are arising. And it’s fundamental in order to be able to reduce and hopefully eventually eliminate racial inequality in our economic systems.

VALLAS: So, Angela, in the last couple of minutes that I have with you, just thinking about who I might want to put in charge of, say, the job of handling this response, the economic response, and also of reopening the economy, something that President Trump talks about pretty much every time he opens his mouth, or his phone to send a tweet. I actually have been thinking a lot about who I might want to put in charge of that kind of a project, and folks who listen might be able to guess some of those names. I think you certainly would be a great contender for a task force like that, given your significant expertise with these issues. But I can’t think of a less-qualified group to take on that task than the people who have been appointed to this task force! You and I were actually just talking about that before we started rolling. And it feels like we would be remiss if we did not give our listeners just a little bit of an overview of who’s been selected for this really, really important job and a little bit about them.

So, Angela, maybe you and I should tag team and walk through the list. It starts with Secretary Mnuchin. And my favorite memory of Mnuchin is when it came out that he had been named the Foreclosure King in the context of the Great Recession because of how much money he made off of foreclosures over his career. But tell us a little bit about your take on this group and whether this is the set of folks that we should have taking on this task and hopefully centering race in their policy decisions.

HANKS: Yeah. So, first, we should start out with the fact that this idea of reopening the economy is sort of absurd. It’s a false choice that we have to choose between the economy and public health. And frankly, our economy will be much worse off if we send people back out and stop doing the things that we’re doing right now to flatten the curve. So, I think the idea of this in general is just patently absurd. But moving on from there, this is a team that I would be very nervous to trust with anything, let alone something that has the significant stakes that this has. So, most of these folks have little to no economic experience. As you mention, this is an all-white panel. Certainly, if you’re going to develop race-conscious policies to help the economy, this is maybe not the group to do it, particularly if you want to talk about Steve Mnuchin as the Foreclosure King. If you look back to the last crisis, being one of the architects that made it more difficult for Black families to recover from the crisis and further fueled it for them, is not the person who would put in charge of making the economy better for Black people or anyone else.

You know, this is also, I think, a group of folks who fundamentally misunderstand the stakes of this crisis. The idea that we would open up the economy, the idea that that’s even a thing you could do, the idea that this is the group that would do it is just fundamentally silly. And it makes me nervous to even put this out there, because, frankly, there might not come, you know, nothing may come of this committee. But I do think that there is some risk that states or localities that might be inclined to take the advice of these people who are uniquely unqualified to do this is not insignificant. And so, we might not wind up with anything from this council to re-open America, but it could happen that folks in other states may be harmed by even the suggestion that this is what we should do.

VALLAS: And, I should get the name right, right? Because the name of this task force, or actually it’s a council, is the Council to Re-open America. So, it’s not even the economy. It’s America. So, let’s get that right.

So, I mentioned that we have Secretary Mnuchin, the Foreclosure King, as one of the members of this Council to Re-open America. I was also perhaps not surprised at all, I should say, Angela, to see Wilbur Ross on there as well, Commerce Secretary, a guy who is famous for owning and publicly wearing velvet slippers that he allegedly paid $645 for. We should also name, let’s see who else is on this thing. We’ve got Larry Kudlow, who is an economic adviser to Trump and who has been one of his chief architects and brainstormers behind his various proposals to cut what he calls “entitlements.” We know them as Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and other vital programs. We should also name Mark Meadows, who is known to listeners of this show, House Republican, member of Congress, who was one of the architects of the House Republican plan to take SNAP, food stamps, away from 1.2 million people. And then, of course, we have we have Jared. We have Ivanka. And then we have the U.S. Trade Representative, Robert Lighthizer, who seems to be probably the most qualified person for a panel like this, but has also been somewhat famous for having a life-sized portrait of himself in his home. Angela, I think you said it well when you said you wouldn’t trust this group with much of anything, let alone anything to do with economic and health policy. But yet, that is the cast of characters that make up this Council to Re-open America, such as it is.

HANKS: Right. And I think a couple of things are important here. I mean, one, you’re looking at a group of people who have either made their wealth or made their careers on extracting from everyday people. So, certainly their idea of what’s good for the economy, I think, is fundamentally skewed and different from the rest of ours. And two, I think this idea of reopening America is really rooted in an ill-informed concept that the stock market is the economy, right? Part of the reason that Trump is doing this is because he’s worried about what’s going on with the stock market, not because he’s worried about the health of the real economy or the health of people in the economy. A more reasonable approach to this, because this is totally an unreasonable approach, is to actually focus on making sure that people are well, because that’s what’s going to get our economy on track. And fundamentally, just the ideas that compelled Trump to establish this council, the ideas that I assume this council is likely to come up with are rooted in faulty ideas of how our economy works, and frankly, I think, will actually deepen the recession that we’re already in.

VALLAS: Almost every time I see someone tweeting, “Oh, my god. How is the stock market doing so well? Look at unemployment numbers. We’ve got close to 17 million people filing for unemployment in just the past three weeks,” I think of you, Angela. I think of your colleague, Michael Linden, because you two are two of the people most frequently in my head and in my ear reminding me and reminding so many of us that the stock market is not the economy. They are not one and the same. And just words that really bear repeating in a moment such as this even more than usual.

Angela, in the last maybe 30 seconds or a minute that we have, what should folks be keeping an eye on in the next couple of weeks as debates and discussion continue around the next installment of the CARES Act to get the much needed assistance to states, localities, workers, and families that still has not quite happened in the way that it needs to at the federal level?

HANKS: Yeah. So, in the next weeks and months, I think there will be a really significant need for us to move forward with these race-conscious policies that we’ve discussed in order to make sure that our economy is more able to weather this recession. So, a couple of weeks ago, or oh, gosh, last week, we worked with several organizations, including the Center for American Progress, to put out a list of principles to help guide the next phase of legislation. We’ve had a couple of big pieces of legislation that’ve been passed in order to help people immediately. Certainly, we will need to have more. Again, we’re dealing with — I can’t emphasize enough — an unprecedented crisis. And so, the next phase really has to focus on both providing immediate relief to states and localities and essential workers, but also to shoring up our economy for the long-term.

So, some of those principles include building economic resilience for the long-term; addressing rampant inequality, attacks on public institutions, and blind faith in markets that’ve made this crisis possible and certainly have made it worse than it needed to be; reinforcing essential responders, including workers, small businesses, and state and local governments. Again, essential workers are healthcare workers. They’re also grocery store workers and warehouse workers and farm workers and child care workers and folks who are on the front lines in so many ways of this crisis. Similarly, states are not equipped to deal with this challenge on their own for a variety of reasons, including their budgetary constraints. The federal government really has to step in to provide some help. Repairing the economy by helping people. Again, doing big bailouts to corporations or tax cuts for the rich, as Trump has floated in the past, is not what’s going to get our economy on track. Fundamentally, we have to invest in the workers. We have to invest in making sure that people are paid decent wages, that they have the benefits that I was discussing before, or else our economy will not get back on track.

And then finally, an important part of this, if you’re thinking about what’s happening at the bottom of the distribution, you always have to think about what’s happening at the top. We have to prevent a further accumulation of corporate power. During the last recession, corporations used it as an opportunity to accumulate power that made our economy less resilient and has helped contribute to the volatility we’re facing now. The next response has to address corporate power, or else we’re going to see inequality by race and other factors exacerbated in the long-term.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Angela Hanks. She is the deputy executive director at the Groundwork Collaborative and the co-author of the article we’ve been talking about. It’s titled Structural Racism is Exacerbating the Coronavirus Pandemic for Black People — Especially Black Women. It’s in Ms. Magazine as of last week, and you can find it, of course, on our nerdy syllabus page, along with a lot of other things that Angela and I have been talking about today. Angela, thanks so much for taking the time to come back on the show.

HANKS: Thanks so much for having me.

VALLAS: And that does it for this episode of Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced by Will Urquhart. Transcripts are courtesy of Cheryl Green. Find us on the airwaves on the We Act Radio Network and the Progressive Voices Network, and say hi and send us your show pitches on Twitter @OffKilterShow. And of course, find us anytime on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time.