Race and ethnicity in pandemic times

ABSTRACT

Social scientists working on race and ethnicity are facing up to the challenge of how the Covid-19 pandemic is impacting on their research agendas. In this introduction, we discuss the emerging evidence about the impact of Covid-19 in terms of race and ethnicity, on migrants and refugees, and on research agendas. By focusing on the discussion that has developed about these issues during 2020 we aim to provide some of the broader background to the specific concerns to be found in the rest of this themed issue. We move on from this overview of key developments to a discussion of the key themes that are explored by the fourteen papers that follow.

KEYWORDS:

• Covid-19
• race
• ethnicity
• migration
• pandemic
• research agendas

There can be little doubt that the Covid-19 pandemic has provided a major challenge to all academic disciplines and sub-fields, across the social sciences, humanities and sciences. Within the social sciences, the shock of the pandemic’s impact on societies across the globe has led to intense discussion about how social scientists can contribute to a rounded analysis of the social, cultural and political consequences of Covid-19. For those working in the interdisciplinary field of race and ethnicity, the impact of the pandemic has been evident from the beginning, particularly as from the very early stages of its global spread questions were raised about the impact on racialized minority communities and vulnerable groups within them.

Although there is a wealth of both historical and more recent academic discussion about the historical and contemporary impact of pandemics, particularly in relation to influenza and more recently AIDS, in practice the social and political impact of Covid-19 forced many disciplines to reflect on what they had to say about a real-world health crisis that had the potential to impact on the future of the whole of humanity (Bassett 2020; Napier and Fischer 2020). It is of course far too early to say what the medium or long-term consequences of this period of reflection will be, although it seems plausible to say that in future questions about global public health and viral pandemics are likely to feature more prominently in the development of future research agendas across not just the sciences but also increasingly the social sciences and humanities. This is already to some extent happening, but it is likely to become more evident over the next few years, particularly as the impact of the pandemic is reassessed on the basis of new research on its social impact in a wide range of different societies and community settings.

If we take the specific case of sociology, we have already seen the embryonic expression of this shift in research agendas. Writing about sociology’s response to the pandemic Raewyn Connell has argued forcefully that “sociology as we know it is not very good in handling a historical moment, unpacking a conjuncture, let alone grasping a radically new situation like this” (Connell 2020, 5). In this environment, it has become evident that both as researchers and as members of specific societies and communities, sociologists have had to engage very directly with questions about the likely impact of the pandemic on the issues that were the focus of their research as well as on wider aspects of the contemporary situation. In doing so they have had to reassess both the conceptual frames that sociologists use to make sense of the social world around them and the empirical focus of their research.

Those sociologists who are focused on research on race and ethnicity have faced this challenge even more directly, particularly since from the very earliest stages of the pandemic questions about its impact on black and minority communities came to the fore both in media discourses and in scholarly debates. It was with this in mind that Ethnic and Racial Studies issued a call for short rapid response papers that addressed the broad question of the impact of Covid-19 on questions about race and ethnicity. As the leading international journal in our field, we felt that there was a need for us to bring together a wide range of short papers, based on both original research and critical thinking, that explored key facets of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on questions about race, racism and ethnicity. Although there had been much discussion about questions of race and ethnicity as the pandemic evolved in the form of mass media coverage and online blogs, we felt there was a need for journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies to provide space for more reflective pieces that draw on research and scholarship more directly. In order to respond as quickly as possible to the pandemic, we asked our authors to submit contributions to a very tight deadline and our referees to help us by providing their comments more rapidly than we usually request. We are grateful to both authors and referees for responding to our call and hope that the resulting themed issue will be of interest to them as well as the wider readership of the journal.

We received thirty submissions after we published the call and we processed them by following the standard peer review procedures that we follow as a journal. Since the call for papers was open and did not specify particular areas of interest the submitted papers differed significantly in terms of both substantive focus and empirical and conceptual framing. The fourteen papers that we have been able to include here have been revised as a result of the peer review process and cover key facets of the impact of the pandemic on questions about race and ethnicity. In practice, there are inevitably facets of the current pandemic that are not covered in this themed issue and we hope that in future issues we shall be able to include regular research papers that address these. We hope to be able to cover these aspects of the impact of pandemic as research develops and covers issues that have been relatively neglected in the immediate aftermath.

Having said that, it is also important to emphasize that the papers we have been able to include in this issue are an important first step in trying to make sense of the complex ways in which the pandemic has impacted on questions about race and ethnicity. We see the papers included in this themed issue as the start of a conversation that has been shaped by the need to respond to the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic, but which will evolve to take account of broader questions about questions of health, global governance, poverty and social inequality and related questions.

Historical comparisons and the present

Before moving on to discuss the impact of Covid-19 on questions about race and ethnicity it is interesting to note that almost as soon as the pandemic became a global issue an important facet of responses to it has been the search for historical comparisons with the ways in which societies responded to earlier pandemics. Given the aftershocks that followed the global response to Covid-19, it is perhaps not surprising that one line of response has been to look back at the history of pandemics and disease in shaping human history. This is partly because there is a wealth of scholarship that has highlighted the role of viruses and bacteria in shaping human history and societies (Kucharski 2020; Snowden 2019; Stepan 2011; Winegard 2019). But much of this body of work has remained outside of the mainstream of sociological research and social research more generally. In the aftermath of the spread of Covid-19 on a global scale, some of this historical knowledge has become a point of reference both in academic research and in popular media coverage of the pandemic. Good examples of this search for historical comparisons are the renewed interest in the impact of the influenza outbreak on 1918–19 and the AIDS epidemic from the 1980s onwards (Bassett 2020). Although both of these pandemics had attracted interest even before Covid-19 (Barry 2010; Kazanjian 2014), there seems little doubt that one of the consequences of the current situation is that there has been renewed interest in looking back at the role of pandemics in previous historical conjunctures in shaping societies.

Part of the reason for this has been a concern to look for earlier examples of pandemics in order to understand how a pandemic on this scale is likely to impact on social and political institutions both in the short-term and from a longer-term perspective. Another important reason for these comparisons seems to lie in the search for routes beyond the pandemic, both through scientific responses such as the search for a vaccine and through social and economic interventions aimed at managing the social costs of the pandemic. More generally, the search for historical points of reference seems to be at least partly the outcome of the growing sense that we can learn something from the past in this time of fear and uncertainty. The search for historical comparisons has been partly framed by the need to ask questions about how societies manage the process of recovery from globalized pandemics.

Some of the comparisons have looked back on the response to the AIDS pandemic from the 1980s onwards. Although there have been panics about other pandemic in the period since AIDS came onto the scene, such as bird flu, mad cow disease and zika (Abeysinghe 2013; Barry 2010; Lakoff 2015, 2017), the social and medical response to AIDS has provided an important point of reference partly because of its global scale as well as the fears that it gave rise to. It has drawn comparisons with the medical and social responses in the early stages of both pandemics, when little was known about both the biological origins of either AIDS or Covid-19, or the ways in which they were transmitted. Nelkin and Gilman use the AIDS pandemic to highlight how devastating diseases are often accompanied by fears and blame:

Perplexing medical questions have always generated fear, prejudice, and hostility. Thus, any disease that is poorly understood is freighted with social meaning. The patterns of blame that prevail in different periods reflect the social stereotypes, fears, and political biases that are associated with threats of social or political change. (Nelkin and Gilman 2020, 347)

As a number of the papers in this issue note one of the features of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the use of narratives that seek to put the blame for the spread of the disease on particular countries or communities. This has been reflected in the efforts by some to name the virus as the “China virus”, an approach that has also impacted on perceptions of Chinese diasporic communities in the West. From this perspective, an important reason for scholars exploring comparisons lies in efforts to make sense of both the social and cultural consequences that follow from pandemics as well as to provide an insight into how societies may be able to move on and manage the health, social and cultural consequences of pandemics.

Whatever the merits of recent efforts to search for historical comparisons between Covid-19 and earlier pandemics there seems little doubt that as the current pandemic progresses there will be more research that attempts to situate it within a broader time frame that explores what we can learn from analysing the present situation in relation to previous pandemics. In this sense, Connell and others are surely right in arguing that sociology, and other social science disciplines, will never be the same in the post-Covid-19 era as they seek to make sense of an event that challenges them like no other in recent times.

Race, ethnicity and Covid-19

Turning now to the impact of Covid-19 within the sub-field of race and ethnic studies. It became clear from the very earliest stages of public debate about the Covid-19 pandemic that its impact on racialized communities, migrants and refugees was an area of public concern. This is perhaps not surprising given the wealth of research pre-dating the pandemic that analysed the complex connections between race, immigration, poverty and inequalities in health (Gómez et al. 2013; Karlsen and Nazroo 2010; Nazroo 2010; Obasogie, Headen, and Mujahid 2017). Indeed, one of the Special Issues we had published in 2012, edited by Patricia Fernandez-Kelly and Alejandro Portes, had addressed the complex connections between health care and immigration from a range of angles (Fernández-Kelly 2012; Fernández-Kelly and Portes 2012). We have also published other papers over the past decade that have addressed both directly and indirectly questions about the relationship between health and racial and ethnic inequalities.

But what became clear in the period following the spread of Covid-19 on a global scale from early 2020 onwards is that issues around race, class and poverty were seen as intimately linked to the impact of the pandemic on specific communities. This was particularly the case in the discussion that developed in the U.S. about the differential impact of the pandemic in terms of patterns of residence, locality and socio-economic deprivation. As one study notes about the situation in the U.S.:

In the United States, race-ethnic disparities in COVID-19 cases emerged rapidly. Although data remain woefully incomplete, the proportion of cases and deaths among Black, Latino, and Indigenous Americans ranges from twofold to fourfold higher than the presence of those groups in the population. And deaths for people of color are occurring at younger ages. (Bassett 2020, 230)

Similar trends have been reported in other countries. In the UK, for example, there was intense discussion throughout 2020 about what seemed to be the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on relatively poor racialized communities who were already seen as suffering from poor health outcomes, both in terms of physical and mental health. There was also an on-going discussion in the UK and other European countries about the likely impact of the pandemic on vulnerable migrant and refugee groups.

At the same time, there was intense discussion in the UK about the impact of the pandemic on frontline health professionals and support workers in the National Health Service, many of whom were from minority or migrant backgrounds. Such concerns were expressed both within minority communities and in official reports such as those produced by Public Health England (Paton et al. 2020; Public Health England 2020). These concerns were partly linked to the long-established reliance of the National Health Service on a labour force with a high number of doctors, nurses and support workers from a range of ethnic and racial backgrounds. A similar pattern could be traced in the context of care homes for the elderly.

More generally, there emerged evidence from the very early stages of the pandemic that it was impacting particularly heavily on minority communities. Given previous research on disparities in health in relation to race and ethnicity, this was perhaps not a surprising development. For example, there is a wealth of research over the past few decades in the broad research field of race, ethnicity and health that has highlighted the intersections between social divisions and health outcomes (Stewart, Cobb, and Keith 2020; Yang, Park, and Matthews 2020). In relation to conditions such as diabetes and hypertension, there is a strong body of research that has focused on the often messy and complex relationship between social and economic disadvantage and differences in health outcomes based on race and ethnicity. But what this research has also emphasized is that there is need to take fully into account not just the interplay between race and ethnicity and the wider environment that helps to shape social divisions and inequalities and how they are experienced.

It is also important to explore more fully but factors such as geographical location and access to, and quality of, health services, heterogeneity within ethnic groups and the social nature of ethnicity and the negative impact on health of experiences of racism and discrimination. A wide range of studies in the U.S. have over the past few decades have sought to disentangle the interplay between residential segregation and health outcomes. In an overview of these studies, Kathryn Anderson has helpfully highlighted the complex ways in which forms of residential segregation can play an important role in shaping adverse health outcomes for both African American and Latino communities over time (Anderson 2017). More recently research in the UK has also highlighted the need to focus more attention on the role of structural inequalities in shaping health outcomes for minority communities. A good example of this body of research can be found in a study by James Nazroo and colleagues on the phenomenon of severe mental illness, which highlights the important role that racial and ethnic inequalities structured by institutional racism play in shaping mental health outcomes for particular communities (Nazroo, Bhui, and Rhodes 2020).

Part of the difficulty faced in addressing this dimension of the pandemic is that it is difficult to disentangle the legacies of discrimination and exclusion from the situation faced by particular minority communities in which entrenched patterns of segregation and social exclusion have become the norm. This is an issue that forms a core theme in a number of the papers in this issue and is a recurrent point of reference in both academic debates and in popular media coverage of the pandemic. Additionally, a number of scholars have drawn attention to the important role that gender plays in this area. Research by Denise Obinna in the U.S. has drawn attention to the complex ties between class, race and gender in shaping the health of African American women (Obinna 2020). Although Obinna argues that such inequalities have a deep historical context, she also forcefully makes the case that the Covid-19 pandemic has accentuated an already deeply problematic position for black women:

For African Americans, inequality manifests in different forms with race-related health disparities being some of the starkest and most resistant to change. Being African American and female amplifies these disparities –a reality which COVID-19 has brought into clearer focus. (Obinna 2020, 3)

From this perspective, the impact of Covid-19 is significant and important, but it cannot be separated from the historically shaped structural inequalities that both pre-dated the pandemic and are likely to continue to be a key facet of the everyday realities of African American communities in the period to come (Chandler et al. 2020; Yang, Emily Choi, and Sun 2020).

At this stage of the pandemic, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about the impact of Covid-19 on racialized communities, but it is worth noting that a number of preliminary studies have already begun to shed some light on this issue. One study of structurally vulnerable neighbourhoods and racial-ethnic inequalities has noted that:

The consequences of the pandemic reach far beyond COVID-19 morbidity and mortality. The effects of social and economic insecurity and the trauma of massive loss of life will continue to impact societies around the world for generations. Just as we are seeing during the pandemic, residents of colour in structurally vulnerable neighbourhoods are at risk of bearing the brunt of these long-term consequences if nothing is done. (Berkowitz et al. 2020, 3)

Indeed, what became evident from early 2020 onwards was that one of the features of the Covid-19 pandemic is that although it has impacted on all societies at a global level it has also been experienced differently by black and minority communities, by migrants, by refugees and other vulnerable groups more generally (The New Yorker 2020). What is needed in the future is a body of research that seeks to address the complex social, health and related issues that can help us to make sense of this situation. We still know relatively little about the everyday processes that have led to this situation in societies with a diverse social make-up, health systems and economic institutions. It will be important in the coming period to develop research, and policy interventions that are to some extent shaped by it, that addresses the role of both social and economic inequalities in shaping the impact of the pandemic.

Global migration, race and the pandemic

Another key facet of the pandemic has been the growing body of scholarly evidence that it has had a profound impact on both the movement of migrants and refugees in various geopolitical environments and on the perception of these groups and how they are portrayed in both popular and media discourses. This is perhaps not surprising, since over the past two decades questions about migration and refuge have been a key political issue in various parts of the globe. In 2015, the so-called “refugee crisis” had impacted on many European countries both in a political and societal sense (Lucassen 2017; Pruitt 2019). In the United States, the issue of migration became one of the central preoccupations of the 2016 Election, leading to the election of Donald Trump (Durand and Massey 2019; Waldinger 2018). In this conjuncture questions about immigration and refugees were both heavily politicized and divisive in many societies.

As Wemyss and Yuval-Davis (2020) have noted in their discussion of bordering practices during the pandemic

Some of the bordering practices operating during the crisis reflect continuing and intersecting political projects of governance and of belonging. Very few states have recognised all migrants as fully entitled members of society during the pandemic; only a few states have recognised the right of all members of societies for minimum income during the pandemic; and policies aimed at the exclusion and deprivation of all those who live in national and global grey limbo zones are endangering the lives of millions across the globe. (Wemyss and Yuval-Davis 2020, 15)

Perhaps the most obvious impact of the pandemic has been the tendency for nation-states to use bans on travel and controls at the border as one of the mechanisms for responding to Covid-19, with obvious consequences for migrants and refugees. The impact of the pandemic has, if anything, tended to accentuate the difficulties already faced by migrants and refugees. Whether specifically because of measures introduced to tackle the spread of Covid-19 or initiatives that were introduced on the basis of fears and concerns about migration more generally there seems little doubt that the pandemic has impacted on global migration in a wide range of ways. Given the changing rules about travel that were put in place as a result of the pandemic, the most direct consequence for many migrants and refugees was the search for routes that would allow them to move even at a time where lockdowns had become the norm.

Given the already vulnerable position of many groups of irregular migrants and refugees, there is now growing evidence, including in some of the papers included in this themed issue, that Covid-19 is likely to increase their sense of insecurity. A report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on the management of migration during the Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the almost complete closure of borders to most migrants and refugees. But it also noted that “it is important to recognize the bigger question of how COVID-19 may fundamentally change migration overall” (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2020, 9). What seems evident is that as the situation evolves after the pandemic is under control the impact on migrants and refugees will in all likelihood remain significant in various parts of the world.

This is likely to be the case both for migrants who are looking to move, even at such as difficult time, as well as for those who are settled but who will face questions about their access to rights and resources. In the context of the pandemic much of the attention has been focused on controls at the border but of equal importance are the increasing economic and social pressures faced by settled minority communities. Even before the pandemic became the focus of so much political and policy debate the previous decade had witnessed intense debate in many countries about the position of racialized minorities in terms of their rights as citizens and their position within national cultures. This was exemplified in the U.S. in the role of immigration and the border with Mexico in the 2016 Presidential Election, which in many ways provided the launching pad for Donald Trump’s successful campaign. In the British context, the Brexit Referendum in 2016 also brought together concerns about immigration with preoccupations about the impact of race and multiculturalism on “Britishness” (Kellner 2017; Sayer 2017). Given these trends were already part of the political context even before the impact of the pandemic it remains to be seen how it helps to shape the development of future policies about migration, refuge and citizenship. Will the pandemic help to give voice to populist pressures to close borders and narrow the boundaries of who has rights to citizenship and belonging? Or will it allow for other voices that articulate ideas about a common humanity and the need to “welcome others”? These are questions that are likely to be faced even more directly in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Rethinking research agendas

It is perhaps too early, while we are still in the midst of the pandemic, to make a reasoned judgement about the longer-term impact of the pandemic on both current and future research agendas about race, racism and ethnic relations. Even at this early stage, however, it is worth noting that as a consequence of the pandemic it seems likely that scholars and researchers in the field of race and ethnicity will have to at least engage in conversations about how they can begin to rethink their on-going research agendas. Although, as we have noted above, there is a reasonably long-standing body of research on race, ethnicity and health there has been relatively little focus on this dimension of race and ethnic studies within the mainstream research agendas in this field. Rather, it has been left to researchers in the sociology of health and public health to address questions about health in relation to race and ethnicity.

Given the on-going discussion about race and health disparities in the context of Covid-19, it is particularly noticeable that the mainstream of research on the sociology of race and ethnicity has been relatively slow to respond to the challenges posed by including health as a core issue in research. Although journals such as Ethnicity & Health have done much to broaden scholarly research agendas over the past three decades it remains the case that in much of the theoretical and empirical research on race and ethnicity questions about health and well-being remain at best a marginal. Ethnic and Racial Studies has been interested since its inception in broadening the boundaries of research on race and ethnicity and responding to new challenges as they arise. We have sought to provide a space for cutting edge research that crosses academic disciplinary boundaries and seeks to provide new understandings of the role of race and ethnicity in contemporary societies. In the current conjuncture, there can be little doubt that over the next few years one of the questions we shall need to address more fully in the pages of the journal is how to understand the role of the Covid-19 pandemic in the context of race and ethnic relations. We very much look forward to playing a role in the coming period in publishing high-quality research-based papers that address the wide-ranging implications of Covid-19 for scholarship and research in the core areas that we cover as a journal. Although the papers in this themed issue are almost exclusively focused on the situation in the U.S. and in parts of Europe, we very hope that there will be other contributions in the future that provide us with an insight into the impact of Covid-19 in other parts of the globe. We offer this themed issue in the spirit of initiating conversations and debates that will no doubt continue in the period to come.

The fourteen short papers we have been able to include in this themed issue are best seen as the beginning of a conversation, and one that will be of interest to our readers and the wider communities of researchers, scholars and students that we serve. We also look forward in the future to receiving standard research papers that explore key facets of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on issues linked to the broader aims and objectives of our journal. We feel that an important role for a journal such as Ethnic and Racial Studies is to provide a space for responding rapidly to evolving social issues and to reflect emerging areas of scholarship and research as well as to set out possible avenues for future scholarly investigation. Although it is almost impossible to make predictions about the future impact of the Covid-19 pandemic it does seem to be the case that it will continue to help shape social and economic relations in the coming period. Given this situation, scholars and researchers working on race, ethnicity, migration and related issues will have to remain responsive to the ways in which it will help to frame the issues that we research in the coming period.

More generally, the pandemic has brought to the fore the need to bring questions about health much more centrally into research agendas on race and ethnicity. How this can be achieved in the short-term remains unclear, but the discussions that have begun to take shape in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic have at least highlighted important gaps in knowledge that need to be addressed through investment in responsive research programmes that encourage researchers to tackle them through research focused on particular national contexts as well as through comparative and collaborative research. It is only through addressing these noticeable gaps in knowledge that researchers in this field will be able to engage fully with the public debates about the impact of the pandemic on black and minority communities, and the links between geospatial poverty and the differential impact Covid-19 in terms of race (Ward 2020). These are major challenges for scholars of race and ethnic relations but given advances over the past decade or so in the field as a whole we should be well placed to bring the empirical and conceptual tools needed to address them.

It is also important to note that during the period of the pandemic we have also seen another crisis come to the fore, namely the issue of police violence against black communities. The killing of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd at the hands of the police in the U.S. became the symbolic spark that ignited a series of both national and international mobilizations under the banner of Black Lives Matter. While the issues surrounding the role of the police and more generally of extrajudicial killings can be traced back over a longer period the degree of anger that grew out of the deaths of Taylor and Floyd led to a series of public protests that continued through the summer of 2020 and focused attention on a broader debate about the continuing role of deep-seated inequalities faced by African Americans, and other minority communities, and the failure to address their root causes. It is not surprising in this context that scholars such as Alyasah Sewell and Jean Beaman have argued that there is a need to explore the ties between the Covid-19 pandemic and police violence against black individuals through the lens of the systemic racism that structures the everyday experiences of deprived communities, both in the U.S. and globally (Beaman 2020; Sewell 2020). This is an issue that is also taken up in a number of the papers included in this themed issue.

It will also be important for researchers of race and ethnicity to become an integral part of conversations outside of academia about these very same issues. This is particularly the case in relation to the conversations about how best to develop policies to deal with the differential impact of the pandemic. Much of the discussion that has developed through 2020 has been shaped by researchers from other fields who have had little or no engagement with the wider research and scholarly literature in race and ethnicity. This is not to say, of course, that their interventions are not relevant or important. But it will be important for race and ethnic scholars to engage more fully with the policy networks that have emerged in the aftermath of the pandemic in order to ensure that their key findings about the differential impact of Covid-19 on ethnic minority communities become part of the policy debates that will help to shape distribution of resources both at the national and the local level. It is only by engaging with these policy debates that the voices of researchers working on race and ethnic relations will be heard in the public sphere.

Key themes in this issue

The fourteen papers that make up this themed issue cover a range of facets of the impact of the Covd-19 pandemic in relation to race and ethnicity. Given the on-going nature of the health crisis that has been caused by the pandemic, the papers are inevitably interventions that seek to shed light on both specific dimensions of the pandemic as well as on broader questions that take us somewhat beyond the immediate impact of the pandemic. We have grouped them around some key themes in order to help readers explore some of the connections that run across them and to allow readers to make some connections as they go through individual papers. We begin the issue with three papers that address some of the broader ideological and political constructions of the pandemic. The first paper, by Freeden Blume Oeur, explores the changing dynamics of race relations during and beyond the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on Du Bois reflections on disease and extrajudicial killings the paper endeavours to situate the current pandemic against the broader historical background of slavery and racialized exclusion. Although it is perhaps too early to come to definitive conclusions the issues raised in this paper raise important points for reflection. This is followed by Joe Feagin’s and Jingqiu Ren’s account of anti-Asian hate crimes as a result of the pandemic. The third paper in this part, by Samuel Perry, Andrew Whitehead and Joshua Grubbs explores the relationship between white Christian nationalism and views about Covid-19. Both of these papers raise important questions about the ways in which cultures of fear and blame have taken root in the aftermath of the pandemic.

The next two papers are concerned more specifically, and largely from a conceptual angle, with the interrelationships between racism and xenophobia and the pandemic. In the paper by Adam Dunbar and Nicole Jones, the focus is on the ways in which the policing of public health guidelines may in practice be racialized through the reproduction of stereotypes about minority communities. This is followed by the paper by Amanuel Elias, Jehonathan Ben, Fethi Mansouri and Yin Paradies that takes up the idea that the articulation of forms of “Covid-racism” may have consequences for the ways in which racism and xenophobia are articulated in the post-pandemic world.

The impact of the pandemic on minority communities forms the main thematic frame for the next four papers. Karina Santellano’s paper focuses on the difficulties experienced by Latinos and African Americans in accessing support from the Paycheck Protection Program that was set up in the aftermath of the pandemic. Ryon Cobb, Christy Erving and Carson Byrd provide an account of the psychological distress experienced by Black Americans. The impact of the pandemic on psychological distress has been an important undercurrent in public debate. This is followed by a paper in which Cary Wu, Yue Qian and Rima Wilkes analyse the impact of the pandemic on Asian Americans and Asian immigrants. The final paper in this part, by Angela Simms, uses data from specific local settings to analyse how layers of racial disadvantage help to shape the impact of the pandemic. The issues covered by this paper are likely to be an important point of reference in developing future research agendas.

The final five papers are focused on various dimensions of the impact of the pandemic on migrant and refugee communities. The first paper, by Maika Isaac and Jennifer Elrick, explores how the labelling of migrant workers as essential in the context of the pandemic may have an unintended consequence in terms of pressures for improved legal status. This links up with some of the themes addressed in the paper by Nasar Meer, Emma Hill, Timothy Peace and Leslie Villegas, which investigates the impact of the pandemic in terms of pressures to enforce controls on immigration and refuge. In their paper Lucas Drouhot, Soren Petermann, Karen Schönwalder and Steven Vertovec seek to explore the impact of the pandemic on attitudes to diversity in Germany. After the decision by Angela Merkel in 2015 to admit up to one million refugees to Germany the issue of attitudes to cultural and religious diversity became an important issue of public debate, and this paper looks back on this on-going conversation from the perspective of the pandemic. The penultimate paper by Benjamin Opratko et. al. outlines the notion of “cultures of rejection” in order to explore the impact of the post-pandemic environment on ideas about rejection and welcoming in relation to attitudes to migrants and refugees. The final paper by Giorgia Dona is focused on the experience of gendered and racialized migrants in the context of the pandemic and hostile environment to immigration created by successive British governments. Dona’s paper engages with an issue that is very much at the heart of public discourse in post-Brexit British society and provides an insight into how the pandemic may shape future policy debates.

Taken together the papers included in this themed issue provide a snapshot of some of the key areas of debate about the impact of Covid-19 on race and ethnic relations. Although we are aware that there are necessarily some gaps that result from our efforts to bring this themed issue together over a relatively short time period, we very much hope that our readers will agree that these papers provide an important insight into both the impact of Covid-19 and highlight key areas that require further research, analysis and discussion. Ethnic and Racial Studies is committed to providing a forum for high-quality research into the on-going impact of the pandemic on race and ethnic relations and therefore giving voice to a wide range of scholars and researchers from all over the world. In the meantime, we hope our readers will find this themed issue helps them to think through some of the key issues that have been raised by Covid-19.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).