Floyd Death, Coronavirus Pandemic Create Dangerous Moment for Black Health | Healthiest Communities | US News
▻https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2020-06-03/floyd-death-coronavirus-pandemic-create-dangerous-moment-for-black-health
It’s a perilous moment for African American health, says Dr. Lisa Cooper, a physician and professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. On whether the videotaped homicides of Floyd and Arbery have placed extraordinary stress on the black community, Cooper says it’s a “yes and no” answer. “Yes, because of the confluence of these events with a pandemic and divisive rhetoric of some of our national leaders,” including President Donald Trump, Cooper says. “No, because although these events are dramatic and were captured on videotape and circulated via social media, in reality, violence against African Americans – sanctioned by our policies and social norms – has gone unchecked for centuries.”
Indeed, history shows the nation has been here before – just without Twitter or cellphone videos. Cooper notes that African Americans also endured the 1918 influenza pandemic, while “the largest numbers of lynchings of African Americans took place between the period of Reconstruction until the end of World War II.” And while witnessing extreme violence can have a negative health impact, “it is really the daily stresses and the chronic exposure to micro-aggressions, (a) lack of control over one’s destiny and lack of ability to protect oneself or one’s loved ones from negative effects of poverty, powerlessness and lack of opportunity that impact health most profoundly,” Cooper says. “These negative social environment exposures can change behaviors, but also genetic and biological processes and be transmitted from one generation to the next.”
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