Institutional Racism
Institutional racism occurs within our political and societal hierarchies and the opportunities available to BIPOC. This can range from governmental positions, jobs in the workplace, healthcare, and most explicitly the criminal justice system. Systems like that of the criminal justice system have taken a turn to criminalizing impoverished Black Americans simply due to not being able to pay their bonds while keeping them in jails. In addition this is heightened due to the prison-industrial complex, in which companies in Corporate America profit off of incarcerating mass numbers of people. Couple this with the Republican backing of large corporations in which the Black vote is severely missing, the political system itself is also rigged to deprive Black citizens of their right to vote. As you can see institutional racism occurs at multiple levels of society that are all interconnected in a capitalist system to discriminate against Black people.
Coronavirus
As mentioned before, the hardest hit communities in the United States due to Coronavirus are the Black, Indigenous, and Latino communities, generally impoverished and under provisioned areas.
The graph demonstrates the much disproportionately higher rates of hospitalization for BIPOC as compared to the majority of white people.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIN PATRICE O'BRIEN, REDUX
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PHOTOGRAPH BY SEBASTIÁN HIDALGO, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
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These photographs of an Amazon worker and of a mailman show that people still have to attend to their jobs due to rampant income inequality, more physical or essential labor, and lack of benefits such as paid leave. This exposes them to the virus at much higher rates than white people.
