657
Views
2
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Part II – Conceptualizing anti-racist social work practice and research

Dual pandemics or a syndemic? Racism, COVID-19, and opportunities for antiracist social work

ORCID Icon, ORCID Icon, ORCID Icon, & ORCID Icon

References

  • Abrams, E. M., & Szefler, S. J. (2020). COVID-19 and the impact of social determinants of health. The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, 8(7), 659–661. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2213-2600(20)30234-4
  • American Public Health Association. (2021). Racism is a public health crisis. Retrieved April 7, 2021, from https://www.apha.org/topics-and-issues/health-equity/racism-and-health/racism-declarations
  • Anyane Yeboa, A., Sato, T., & Sakuraba, A. (2020). Racial disparities in COVID 19 deaths reveal harsh truths about structural inequality in America. Journal of Internal Medicine, 288(4), 479–480. https://doi.org/10.1111/joim.13117
  • Azhar, S., & DeLoach McCutcheon, K. (2021, September). How racism against BIPOC women faculty operates in social work academia. Advances in Social Work, 21(2/3), 396–420. https://doi.org/10.18060/24118
  • Azhar, S., & Gunn, A. (2021, August). Navigating intersectional stigma: Strategies for coping among cisgender women of color in two qualitative studies. Qualitative Health Research, 31(12), 2194–2210. https://doi.org/10.1177/10497323211025249
  • Bailey, Z. D., & Moon, J. R. (2020). Racism and the political economy of COVID-19: Will we continue to resurrect the past? Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, 45(6), 937–950. https://doi.org/10.1215/03616878-8641481
  • Bajaj, S. S., & Stanford, F. C. (2021). Beyond Tuskegee—Vaccine distrust and everyday racism. New England Journal of Medicine, 384(5), e12. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMpv2035827
  • Bedford, H., Attwell, K., Danchin, M., Marshall, H., Corben, P., & Leask, J. (2018). Vaccine hesitancy, refusal and access barriers: The need for clarity in terminology. Vaccine, 36(44), 6556–6558. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2017.08.004
  • Bell, M. P., Berry, D., Leopold, J., & Nkomo, S. (2021). Making Black lives matter in academia: A Black feminist call for collective action against anti-blackness in the academy. Gender, Work, and Organization, 28(S1), 39–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12555
  • Bell, C. C., & Dunbar, E. (2012). Racism and pathological bias as a co-occurring problem in diagnosis and assessment. In T. A. Widiger (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Personality Disorders (pp. 694–709). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199735013.013.0032
  • Bent-Goodley, T. B. (2006). Oral histories of contemporary African American social work pioneers. Journal of Teaching in Social Work, 26(1–2), 181–199. https://doi.org/10.1300/J067v26n01_11
  • Bogart, L. M., Ojikutu, B. O., Tyagi, K., Klein, D. J., Mutchler, M. G., Dong, L., & Kellman, S. (2021). COVID-19 related medical mistrust, health impacts, and potential vaccine hesitancy among Black Americans living with HIV. Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes (1999), 86(2), 200. https://doi.org/10.1097/QAI.0000000000002570
  • Bowles, D. D., Hopps, J. G., & Clayton, O. (2016). The impact and influence of HBCUs on the social work profession. Journal of Social Work Education, 52(1), 118–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/10437797.2016.1112650
  • Brodie, N., Perdomo, J. E., & Silberholz, E. A. (2021). The dual pandemics of COVID-19 and racism: Impact on early childhood development and implications for physicians. Current Opinion in Pediatrics, 33(1), 159–169. https://doi.org/10.1097/MOP.0000000000000985
  • Buchanan, L., Bui, Q., & Patel, J. (2020). Black Lives Matter may be the largest movement in the U.S. history. New York Times. Retrieved May 25, 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html
  • Bunch, L. (2021, June). A tale of two crises: Addressing Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy as promoting racial justice. HEC Forum, 33(1–2), 143–154. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-021-09440-0
  • Carlton-LaNey, I. (1999). African American social work pioneers’ response to need. Social Work, 44(4), 311–321. https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/44.4.311
  • Carlton-LaNey, I. (Ed.). (2001). African American leadership: An empowerment tradition in social welfare history. NASW Press.
  • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2021a). COVID data tracker. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home
  • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2021b). Estimated disease burden of COVID-19. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html
  • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2021c). CDC COVID-19 vaccination program provider requirements and support. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/vaccination-provider-support.html
  • Copeland, P., & Ross, A. (2021). Assessing antiracism as a learning outcome in social work education: A systematic review. Advances in Social Work, 21(2/3), 766–778. https://doi.org/10.18060/24139
  • Corbie-Smith, G. (2021, March). Vaccine hesitancy is a scapegoat for structural racism. In JAMA Health Forum (Vol. 2, No. (3), pp. e210434–e210434). American Medical Association.
  • Crenshaw, K. (2016, October). The urgency of intersectionality [Video]. https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality
  • DeBruin, D., Liaschenko, J., & Marshall, M. F. (2012). Social justice in pandemic preparedness. American Journal of Public Health, 102(4), 586–591. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2011.300483
  • Devakumar, D., Selvarajah, S., Shannon, G., Muraya, K., Lasoye, S., Corona, S., Paradies, Y., Abubakar, I., & Achiume, E. T. (2020). Racism, the public health crisis we can no longer ignore. The Lancet, 395(10242), e112–e113. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31371-4
  • Dobbins, J. E., & Skillings, J. H. (2000). Racism as a clinical syndrome. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 70(1), 14–27. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0087702
  • Ferlatte, O., Salway, T., Trussler, T., Oliffe, J. L., & Gilbert, M. (2018). Combining intersectionality and syndemic theory to advance understandings of health inequities among Canadian gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men. Critical Public Health, 28(5), 509–521. https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2017.1380298
  • Godlee, F. (2020). Racism: The other pandemic. BMJ, 369. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m2303
  • Gravlee, C. C. (2020). Systemic racism, chronic health inequities, and COVID -19: A syndemic in the making? American Journal of Human Biology, 32(5), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.23482
  • Grégoire, H., & Yee, J. Y. (2007). Ethics in community-university partnerships involving racial minorities: An anti-racism standpoint in community-based participatory research. In Partnership perspectives IV (Vol. I, pp. 70–79). Community-Campus Partnerships for Health.
  • Hall, R. E. (2021). Social work’s feminist Façade: Descriptive manifestations of white supremacy. The British Journal of Social Work, 52(2), 1055–1069. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcab093
  • Harvey, M. (2021). The political economy of health: Revisiting its Marxian origins to address 21st-century health inequalities. American Journal of Public Health, 111(2), 293–300.
  • Horton, R. (2020). Offline: COVID-19 is not a pandemic. The Lancet, 396(10255), 874. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)32000-6
  • Hounmenou, C. (2012). Black settlement houses and oppositional consciousness. Journal of Black Studies, 43(6), 646–666. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934712441203
  • Hudson, K. D., & Mehrotra, G. R. (2021). Pandemic and protest in 2020: Questions and considerations for social work research. Qualitative Social Work, 20(1–2), 264–270. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473325020973315
  • Johnson-Agbakwu, C. E., Ali, N. S., Oxford, C. M., Wingo, S., Manin, E., & Coonrod, D. V. (2022). Racism, COVID-19, and health inequity in the USA: A call to action. Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, 9, 52–58. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40615-020-00928-y
  • Kahn, J. (2017). Pills for prejudice: Implicit bias and technical fix for racism. American Journal of Law & Medicine, 43(2–3), 263–278. https://doi.org/10.1177/0098858817723664
  • Kaiser Family Foundation. (2021, April 28). Latest data on COVID-19 vaccinations race/ethnicity. https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-data-on-covid-19-vaccinations-race-ethnicity/
  • Khosla, N. N., Perry, S. P., Moss-Racusin, C. A., Burke, S. E., & Dovidio, J. F. (2018). A comparison of clinicians’ racial biases in the United States and France. Social Science & Medicine, 206, 31–37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.03.044
  • Krieger, N. (2020). ENOUGH: COVID-19, structural racism, police brutality, plutocracy, climate change—and time for health justice, democratic governance, and an equitable, sustainable future. American Journal of Public Health, 110(11), 1620–1623. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2020.305886
  • Krishnan, L., Ogunwole, S. M., & Cooper, L. A. (2020). Historical insights on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the 1918 influenza pandemic, and racial disparities: Illuminating a path forward. Annals of Internal Medicine, 173(6), 474–481. https://doi.org/10.7326/M20-2223
  • Laurencin, C. T., & McClinton, A. (2020). The COVID-19 pandemic: A call to action to identify and address racial and ethnic disparities. Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, 7(3), 398–402. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40615-020-00756-0
  • Laurencin, C. T., & Walker, J. M. (2020). A pandemic on a pandemic: Racism and COVID-19 in Blacks. Cell Systems, 11(1), 9–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cels.2020.07.002
  • Leitch, S., Corbin, J. H., Boston-Fisher, N., Ayele, C., Delobelle, P., Gwanzura Ottemöller, F., … & Wicker, J. (2020). Black lives matter in health promotion: Moving from unspoken to outspoken. Health Promotion International, 36(4), 1160–1169. https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/daaa121
  • Marmot, M., & Wilkinson, R. (Eds.). (2005). Social determinants of health. Oxford University Press.
  • Martínez, M. E., Nodora, J. N., & Carvajal Carmona, L. G. (2021). The dual pandemic of COVID 19 and systemic inequities in US Latino communities. Cancer, 127(10), 1548–1550. https://doi.org/10.1002/cncr.33401
  • Matsuzaka, S., Hudson, K. D., & Ross, A. M. (2021). Operationalizing intersectionality in social work research: Approaches and limitations. Social Work Research, 45(3), 155–168. https://doi.org/10.1093/swr/svab010
  • McCleary, J., & Simard, E. (2021). Honoring our ancestors: Using reconciliatory pedagogy to dismantle white supremacy. Advances in Social Work, 21(2/3), 259–273. https://doi.org/10.18060/24146
  • McCoy, H. (2020). Black lives matter, and yes, you are racist: The parallelism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal, 37(5), 463–475. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10560-020-00690-4
  • Mendenhall, E. (2020). The COVID-19 syndemic is not global: Context matters. The Lancet, 396(10264), 1731. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)32218-2
  • Nana-Sinkam, P., Kraschnewski, J., Sacco, R., Chavez, J., Fouad, M., Gal, T., & Behar-Zusman, V. (2021). Health disparities and equity in the era of COVID-19. Journal of Clinical and Translational Science, 5(e99), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1017/cts.2021.23
  • Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. (2018). Maternal, infant, and child health. Healthy People 2020. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/topics-objectives/topic/maternal-infant-and-child-health/objectives
  • Økland, H., & Mamelund, S.-E. (2019). Race and 1918 influenza pandemic in the United States: A review of the literature. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(14), 2487. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16142487
  • Ortega-Williams, A., & McLane Davison, D. (2021). Wringing Out the “Whitewash”: Confronting the Hegemonic Epistemologies of Social Work Canons (Disrupting the Reproduction of White Normative). Advances in Social Work, 21(2/3), 566–587. https://doi.org/10.18060/24475
  • Ostrach, B., & Singer, M. (2012). At special risk: Biopolitical vulnerability and HIV/STI syndemics among women. Health Sociology Review, 21(3), 258–271. https://doi.org/10.5172/hesr.2012.21.3.258
  • Pinto, R. M., Spector, A. Y., & Valera, P. A. (2011). Exploring group dynamics for integrating scientific and experiential knowledge in community advisory boards for HIV research. AIDS Care, 23(8), 1006–1013. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540121.2010.542126
  • Poussaint, A. (1999, August 26). They hate. They kill. Are they insane? [Op-Ed piece]. New York Times.
  • Quesada, J., Hart, L. K., & Bourgois, P. (2011). Structural vulnerability and health: Latino migrant laborers in the United States. Medical Anthropology, 30(4), 339–362. https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2011.576725
  • Rahman, R., Ross, A., & Pinto, R. (2021). The critical importance of community health workers as first responders to COVID-19 in USA. Health Promotion International, 36(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/daaa069
  • Ross, A. M., Cederbaum, J. A., de Saxe Zerden, L., Zelnick, J. R., Ruth, B. J., & Guan, T. (2022). Bearing a disproportionate burden: Racial/ethnic disparities in experiences of US-based social workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Social Work, 67(1), 28–40. https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/swab050
  • Shim, R. S., & Starks, S. M. (2021). COVID-19, structural racism, and mental health inequities: Policy implications for an emerging syndemic. Psychiatric Services, 72(10), 1193–1198. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.202000725
  • Singer, M. (2009). Introducing Syndemics: A critical systems approach to public and community health. Jossey-Bass.
  • Singer, M., Bulled, N., Ostrach, B., & Mendenhall, E. (2017). Syndemics and the biosocial conception of health. The Lancet, 389(10072), 941–950. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(17)30003-X
  • Skillings, J. H., & Dobbins, J. E. (1991). Racism as a disease: Etiology and treatment implications. Journal of Counseling & Development, 70(1), 206–212. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-6676.1991.tb01585.x
  • Tan, S. B., DeSouza, P., & Raifman, M. (2021). Structural racism and COVID-19 in the USA: A county-level empirical analysis. Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, 8(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40615-020-00905-5
  • Thakur, N., Lovinsky-Desir, S., Bime, C., Wisnivesky, J. P., & Celedón, J. C. (2020). The structural and social determinants of the racial/ethnic disparities in the US COVID-19 pandemic. What’s our role? American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, 202(7), 943–949. https://doi.org/10.1164/rccm.202005-1523PP
  • Thomas, J. M. (2014). Medicalizing racism. Contexts, 13(4), 24–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/1536504214558213
  • Thomas, J. M., & Byrd, W. C. (2016). The “sick” racist. Du Bois Review, 13(1), 181. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X16000023
  • Tipirneni, R. (2021). A data-informed approach to targeting social determinants of health as the root causes of COVID-19 disparities. American Journal of Public Health, 111(4), 620–622. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2020.306085
  • Weaver, L. J., & Mendenhall, E. (2014). Applying syndemics and chronicity: Interpretations from studies of poverty, depression, and diabetes. Medical Anthropology, 33(2), 92–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2013.808637
  • Wellman, D. (2000). From evil to illness: Medicalizing racism. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 70(1), 28–32. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0087669
  • World Bank. (2018). Current health expenditure per capita. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.PC.CD
  • World Health Organization. (2019). Social determinants of health. https://www.who.int/social_determinants/en/

Reprints and Corporate Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

To request a reprint or corporate permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below:

Academic Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

Obtain permissions instantly via Rightslink by clicking on the button below:

If you are unable to obtain permissions via Rightslink, please complete and submit this Permissions form. For more information, please visit our Permissions help page.