Imagine that no one had shot video of George Floyd being killed by police in

Minneapolis. There would have been a bland statement that he had died
resisting arrest, and none of us would have heard of him.

Instead, the horror of that video has ignited protests around the world. Racism
in that video is as visceral as a lynching.

Yet there is no viral video to galvanise us about other racial inequities:

— There is no video to show that a black boy born today in Washington, D.C.;
Missouri; Alabama; Louisiana; Mississippi or a number of other states has a
shorter life expectancy than a boy born in Bangladesh or India.

— There’s no video to show that black children still are often systematically
shunted to second-rate schools and futures, just as they were in the Jim Crow
era. About 15% of black or Hispanic students attend so-called apartheid
schools that are less than 1% white.

— There’s no video to show that blacks are dying from the coronavirus at more
than twice the rate of whites, or that a result of the recent mass layoffs is that,
as of last month, fewer than half of African American adults now have a job.

“There is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the
shot or the bomb in the night,” Robert Kennedy said in 1968 shortly before his
assassination. “This is the violence of institutions, indifference and inaction and
slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations
between men because their skin has different colours. This is a slow
destruction of a child by hunger and schools without books and homes without
heat.”

Health statistics bear that out. A black newborn in the United States is twice as
likely to die in infancy as a white newborn, and a black woman is 2 1/2 times
as likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth as a white woman.

“Racism is nothing short of a public health crisis,” Michelle Williams, dean of

the Harvard School of Public Health, told me. “That reality is palpable not just
in the scourge of police violence that disproportionately kills black Americans
but in the vestiges of slavery and segregation that have permeated the social
determinants of health.

“Racism has robbed black Americans from benefiting from the advancements
they’ve fought for, bled for and died for throughout history. That reality
manifests in myriad ways — from underfunded schools to the gutting of health
care and social programs, to financial redlining, to mass incarceration, to voter
suppression, to police brutality and more. And it is undeniably harming health
and prematurely ending black lives.”

The Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society said in a statement a few days ago,
“Structural racism is more harmful to the health and well-being of children than
infectious diseases, including COVID-19.”

Sociologists like Orlando Patterson have noted that while whites increasingly
have progressive views about race in general, they often still favour public
policies that disadvantage African Americans. For example, they may oppose
multioccupancy housing in their affluent suburbs, reducing affordable housing
and perpetuating segregation. Or they may support a broken local funding
system for education that results in apartheid schools.

“Confinement to segregated, poorly funded schools interferes with children’s

life chances,” said Rucker Johnson, a professor of public policy at the
University of California, Berkeley, and author of a book, “Children of the
Dream,” about integration. Johnson found that US public schools achieved
peak integration in 1988 and have since become more racially segregated.

Structural racism doesn’t easily go viral, but it is deadly. A recent study of

insurance records found that when blacks and whites with COVID-19
symptoms like a fever and cough sought medical help, blacks were less likely to
be given a coronavirus test.

I wonder about doctors who didn’t get black patients tested — or officials who
didn’t allocate tests to clinics in black neighbourhoods. I’m sure many were
well-meaning and had no idea that they were discriminating. But unconscious
racial bias is widespread, resulting in what scholar Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has
called “racism without racists.”

Scholars have found, for example, that professional baseball umpires are more
likely to call strikes when they are of the same race as the pitcher (whatever
their race, although this mostly benefits white pitchers). Likewise, professional
basketball referees are more likely to call personal fouls against a player of a
different race.

Much of the research seems bleak, but three things give me hope. First, many
metrics show improvement. Second, robust evidence shows what policies
would help. For example, a careful study by the National Academies of
Sciences, Engineering and Medicine last year showed how we could reduce
child poverty by half — hugely reducing racial inequality. What we lack isn’t
tools or resources; it’s political will.

My third reason for hope has to do with those biased basketball referees. That
research angered the NBA and caused painful controversy — which laid the
groundwork for progress. A follow-up study found that after the first research
was absorbed, those biased calls disappeared. It appeared that once people
were forced to have anguished discussions about racial bias, they were able to
overcome it.

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