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 Abstract

Excerpted From: Patricia A. Broussard, Cheryl T. Page, and Angela Downes, Damn It! A Conversation on Being Black, Female, and Marginalized During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Is the World Listening? , 12 Alabama Civil Rights & Civil Liberties Law Review 1 (2020) (469 Footnotes) (Full Document)

 

BroussardPageDownes

 

We are African American women with a combined forty-four years in academia. We are professors of law and have seen firsthand how COVID-19 has ravaged African Americans across this country. As we conversed with one another in the Spring of 2020 about what we were witnessing, we began to look through the spectrum of the law and discrimination, and how this novel Coronavirus is laying bare the inequities and inequalities that have been evident for hundreds of years in the Black community. We felt compelled to put pen to paper and document our conversations in an attempt to give a voice to those most negatively impacted by this deadly virus--those that have long been most underrepresented. We hope that by calling out these disparities, we somehow elevate our nation and change the course of the lives of Black women for the better.

The purpose of the paper is to examine how the law, medical institutions, and society (globally and domestically) are grappling with this pressing issue. Our article looks at how certain segments of our population receive vastly different types of care for medical conditions than do similarly situated people of different races, how our society is dealing with these negatives, and how these disparities have rippling effects in society and on the people mistreated. This article looks at how Black women are much less likely to be insured as a group than are White women and how that disparity has caused Black women to be more susceptible to COVID-19. This critique of this pandemic's impact on Black women examines these issues and more, from the firsthand perspective of Black women.