 So, if you're joining now, please say where you're from or you're listening from in the chat. Today is going to be a really, really good talk, I'm really looking forward to it. It's part of the economics of COVID-19 seminar series that's been run by SOAS and Open Economics. Today's topic is the effects of structural racism and its effects on black Americans, especially black women. This is particularly pertinent if you have been following the news with, you know, black Americans really bearing the brunt of the health and financial impacts of the pandemic and this is also true of the UK as well, which is where I'm talking from. So, really looking forward to hearing more about this. Just for some introductions, my name is Justin Kanzer-Ando, I'm a currently a master's student at SOAS and I'm a member of the Black Economist Network. With me today, who I'm really happy to present, is the amazing Dr. Nina Banks. She's an associate professor of economics at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. So Nina's work focuses on social reproduction and migrant households, black women in work and the economics of Sadie Alexander, the first black economist in the US. And in Bucknell, she teaches courses on US women's economic history, gender and migration and poverty in the US. So please, if you are on Twitter, just follow her on her socials, Nina underscore eBanks just to see what she has going on. So yeah, just to talk a little bit about this seminar series. So it's been co-organized by Open Economics Forum and the Department of Economics. The Open Economics Forum is part of the Rethinking Economics Network and it's a network of students and academic scholars in several countries that promote pluralism in economics and this is a really good time to talk about pluralism in economics when COVID-19 is really changing and affecting everything. I'd also like to give a mention to the Black Economist Network, which I'm a part of, and Nina was actually featured on recently. It's a UK-based organization and it seeks to connect and support and inspire black economists whilst tackling the notable lack of diversity in the field and coming up in economics is something that I've noticed, so it's a really good organization. So if you just want to follow more of these organizations and how they're doing, I'll just give you the socials now. So for SOAS Economics, it's at SOAS Economics on Twitter and then for Open Economics it's at Open Econ Forum and with Rethinking Econ, it's Rethinking Econ at, sorry, and then the Black Economist Network it's at the Black Econ underscore. So this series is, like I said, is aiming to provide a critical perspective on the economic development relating to COVID-19 and there's been a few webinars so far and the recordings are on the Facebook page if you're going SOAS Economics and there'll be more to come. Just to talk about how today will go. So after my introduction, Nina's going to speak for about 25 to 30 minutes and afterwards we'll have some time for some questions. So all of you guys are muted, so if you can just put your questions in the chat, we'll collect them up and then at the end I'll be able to read them out to Nina. Apart from that, there's not much else to say so whenever you're ready, Nina, take it away. Thank you Justin and thank you Marie and the SOAS Department of Economics and the Open Economics Forum for asking me to participate in your webinar series. And welcome to those of you who are joining in. As the pandemic has progressed in the U.S., I have been reminded of the words of the Kerner Commission that they stated over 50 years ago, quote, our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal. The report called attention to racial disparities that gave rise to two Americas. And that's what we see today in very stark relief with the coronavirus. We see a white America that has the job flexibility and security to work from home. The wealth to weather declines in earnings and health insurance to cover sickness in contrast to a black community that has little choice but to work at low wage essential jobs with no wealth to tide them over if they lose jobs and no health insurance coverage if they get sick. We see white families with well-stocked refrigerators and pantries and black families struggling to get food through food pantries. Middle-class white women with husbands at home who complain on social media about having to do a lot of care work, so much so that it has become a national care crisis, while lone black mothers often in harm's way as essential workers struggle to provide care for their children and nobody cares. So I'm going to discuss the impact of COVID-19 on black Americans by emphasizing the impact on black women by using an intersectional feminist lens. And I want to begin by pointing out that the lived experiences of African American women, that is women who are descended from people who were enslaved in the United States, gave birth to black feminism or what is now increasingly being referred to as intersectional feminism. Black feminism's key analytical insights are one, the simultaneity of oppressions and therefore the necessity of struggling against multiple forms of oppression, including economic arrangements that reproduce inequalities. Two, the importance of positionality and relations of power between and among different groups. Three, the use of lived experiences as a valid form of knowledge. And four, the recognition that women are gendered differently based on their race, ethnicity, sexuality, citizenship status, class, caste position and so on. Although black American women develop the foundational theory of intersectional feminism, issues of gender and race continue to be largely framed around the concerns of white women and black men, which continues to render black women invisible. Most discussions of COVID-19, for example, tend to focus on women's increased care responsibilities while working at home, but in a manner that is decontextualized from race or the discussions focus on the disproportionate impact that the virus is having on black communities through employment, incarceration and discriminatory policing without giving a breakdown of how these problems impact women who are at the intersection of structural racism and patriarchy. This is a reflection of data limitations, as well as perceptions of white women and black men as the defaults for women and men, excuse me, women and blacks respectively. In terms of data limitations, economist Rhonda Sharpe of Wiser Policy notes that there is a lack of data disaggregated by race, gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic status through an intersectional lens. We have some data by race and gender, but not sufficient data on their intersection with respect to infection and death rates by race and gender as overlapping categories. This would give us a much better picture of the impact of the virus on demographic groups. Some of the best data have been compiled by the AMP research lab. They estimate that black American mortality rates for COVID-19 is more than two times the rates for Latinos, Asian Americans and white Americans. This death rate has remained over twice as high as the other groups since they began tracking it. In numbers that we can visualize, AMP estimates that if black deaths from COVID-19 were at the same level as white deaths, at least 10,500 black Americans would still be alive. Black Americans are just 13% of the population in the US, but account for 27% of deaths across the country, with some localities having extremely high rates of racial disproportionality. And I want to emphasize that these numbers are an undercount since the United States has not done sufficient testing and has not included many deaths that took place in people's homes. And we also do not know the infection and death rates for black women. The question then is why should we be concerned about black women in particular? And my response is that black women's unique work history means that black women occupy an outsized role in sustaining black families. Moreover, African American women have been the central figures in the history of women and work in the US. And black women's history of work explains their precarious position today as the frontline essential workers. So I'm going to talk about some of the structural and ideological factors that explain black women's precarity as workers and as caregivers and why use of the general categories of women or blacks does little to explain black women's position. While white women have been socially valued as mothers, white Americans have viewed black women primarily as workers without regard for their caregiving needs as mothers. And so compared to other women in the US, African American women have historically had higher work burdens going back to the period of slavery as well as higher levels of labor market participation regardless of age, marital status, or presence of children at home. From data compiled by Claudia Gold know that in 1880, married black women were five times more likely to be in the labor force compared to married white women. And unlike white women who left the labor force after marriage, black women usually remained in the labor force for the duration of their lives. This discrepancy reflected labor market discrimination against black men, and it imposed a double bind on black women. At a time when social expectations were that married women fulfill the role of full-time homemakers, whites condemned black women as unfit wives and mothers for their employment outside of their households, yet ridiculed black women as lazy and trying to act the lady if they tried to remain out of the labor force. Public policies in the US have always reinforced discriminatory treatment of black women based on the view that black women are workers rather than mothers with caregiving needs at home. This has been especially evident with protective welfare legislation that enabled poor lone women to stay at home and care for their children. White case workers provided cash assistance to poor lone white mothers, but excluded black women from assistance for most of the history of welfare. Without cash assistance, black women had few options other than work as private household domestic workers for white families. Black women's domestic work and private households lessened white women's unpaid household work burdens and enabled them to have free time in order to do other activities. Unlike poor white women, poor black women were not able to stay at home as stay at home moms. This meant that the state simultaneously facilitated the social reproduction of white families while undermining black women's ability to provide care and social reproduction for their own families. Social reproduction refers to processes throughout society that help to reproduce the well-being of the family on a daily and intergenerational basis as well as the reproduction of the labor force. When black women were finally able to receive welfare cash assistance in the 1960s, it led to a backlash that resulted in the dismantling of the program in 1996 and an erosion of the national safety net. Further, as Mutari Power and Feigert have shown, the state compounded black women's lack of protections as mothers by also excluding them from work protections during the New Deal era. Beginning in the 1930s, New Deal minimum wage, over time pay, and collective bargaining legislation excluded domestic service and agriculture, the main sectors where over 90% of black women worked. As a result, black women, including those with school age children, have always been more likely to be in the labor force compared to other mothers because of discriminatory employment and employer and government policies against them. Prior to the pandemic, nearly 80% of black moms with children at home were employed compared with an average of just 66% of white Asian American and Latinx moms. Black women's labor force participation in economic precarity is linked to black men's economic precarity. Since the 19th century, black men have always experienced higher levels of unemployment and irregular work compared to white men. Consequently, married black women have been financial contributors, even co-breadwinners to two parent households because of black men's low earnings. Now, the 1970s is a critical decade that ushered in structural economic and policy changes for workers in the U.S. It was the beginning of deindustrialization and massive job loss for black men living in urban areas, as well as the beginning of mass incarceration of black men. These factors affected black women's prospects for marriage and sharing the burdens of maintaining families. Up until the 1970s, black women were more likely to be married than white women. Mass incarceration and dwindling job prospects for black men, however, have dramatically decreased marriage rates for black women and increased their work burdens. Moreover, the marketization of women's work that had previously been performed at home enabled black women to finally move out of private household work and into the growing service sector. The decade also saw the return of married white women into the labor force in large numbers. The legacy of black women working without important worker protections has continued today since black women are concentrated in low wage, inflexible occupations that lack paid sick and maternity leave. Prior to the pandemic, black women and men were both concentrated in jobs without employer-provided retirement plans, health insurance, paid sick and family leave, and paid vacations. Despite black women's longer work history compared to other women, the median annual earnings for full-time year-round black women workers is approximately 20 percent less than white women's earnings and only 61 percent of what comparable white men earn. This is due to black women's disproportionate employment in low-wage service and minimum and sub-minimum wage jobs. A third of black women compared to one-fifth of white women are employed in services. When we add black men's economic precarity to the analysis, it means that over 70 percent of black mothers are the breadwinners in their household, and 75 percent of these breadwining moms are lone parents. The takeaway is that white and black women's labor market experiences are not comparable, and unlike white children, black children's well-being is very much dependent on the well-being of their mothers. Other factors based on structural racism also explain why black Americans are more likely to have worse COVID-19 outcomes compared to other groups in the U.S. These include the racial wealth gap and residential segregation. The median wealth of white families is 10 times greater than that of black families in 2016 dollars, and the gap has grown over time. African-Americans hold only 3 percent of national wealth according to economist Sandy Darity. The huge wealth disparity that exists between whites and blacks is based on the cumulative effects of racially discriminatory policies that have benefited whites and disadvantaged blacks going back to slavery, but most definitely including the huge educational and housing subsidies white Americans received in the post-World War II period through the GI Bill. Racially discriminatory lending and housing policies enabled white Americans to achieve upward social mobility through home ownership in federally subsidized suburban communities. The racial wealth gap will enable white families to be in a much better position to ride out the pandemic compared to black families. Again, black and white women are not comparable when it comes to economic status, especially when we look at marriage effects. Single white women without college degrees have more wealth than single black women with college degrees, and marriage widens the racial wealth gap for women who have college degrees. Additionally, three-quarters of whites own their own homes compared to just 42 percent of blacks. Not only is home ownership a source of intergenerational wealth, home ownership for families who are remote working enables them to have access to more living spaces, to extra rooms, backyards, green areas that make home confinement less emotionally taxing and social distancing easier. With respect to living spaces, African Americans continue to be the most residentially segregated community in the U.S. today. Racial segregation is the result of racially discriminatory government and private lending and housing policies. The neighborhoods where we live affect our access to educational and job opportunities. The neighborhoods where we live also affect health outcomes. Black communities in the U.S. are less likely to have access to healthcare providers in nearby neighborhoods. Black communities also experience environmental racism by being disproportionately burdened with environmental contaminants that include toxic waste dumping, lead contamination, and poor air quality. Black children have asides that are over two times the rates for white children. Pollutants that trigger asthma include outside pollutants as well as indoor living environments with mold, dust mites, cockroaches, rats, pets, and secondhand smoke. Environmental racism tied to residential segregation also means that black communities experience racial disparities in access to healthy foods. Black households in the U.S. were two times more likely to be food insecure compared to the national average prior to the pandemic. And this is due to a variety of factors including food affordability and lack of accessible grocery stores within black communities and the prevalence of convenience stores and fast food restaurants instead. Food sold in convenience stores and fast food restaurants tends to be heavily processed and, as a result, black community members experience a higher incidence of diet related health effects that include diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and obesity. Along with asthma, these health conditions that are based on environmental racism and racial segregation worsen the chances of surviving COVID-19. These environmental justice issues of class and race are also issues of gender since providing food for children is typically women's responsibility. Low-income black women who are lone parents are especially vulnerable to the difficulties of accessing nutritious food because of high food prices and lack of access to cars. Reliance on public transportation in order to get to grocery stores or to work puts black women at greater risk of contracting the virus through community spread and then passing it on to family members. And finally, since the pandemic began, a number of recent surveys provide a snapshot of the impact of the coronavirus on black women's economic and emotional well-being. A lean-in survey taken in mid-April found that black women were experiencing the worst effects of the virus. Over half of black women in the survey that is 54% said that they had lost their jobs to layoffs or had their work hours or pay reduced as a result compared to 44% of black men, 31% of white women, and 27% of white men. Asked how long they could survive if they lost their income, 34% of black women said less than one month compared to 28% of black men, 25% of white women, and 11% of white men. Black women with children in the survey also reported having heavier workloads based on the number of unpaid work hours involving household work, child care, and elder care compared to white women. Lone black women with children reported spending 12 hours more each week on child care compared to white women with children, and black women reported spending twice as much time on elder care and care for sick relatives as white women. In addition to their unpaid workloads, black women in the survey were much more likely than white women were to have to report to work as essential workers, 51% of black women compared to 38% of white women. Essence magazine conducted a study of black women in late April and released their findings last week. One out of every four black women in the survey reported that they knew someone who had died from the coronavirus, and nearly half, 44% knew someone who had contracted the virus. COVID-19 is placing a very heavy emotional toll on black women, with 64% reporting that it has affected their emotional well-being, and 43 saying that it has affected their physical health. A recent analysis by Ida Wingfield discussed the disproportionate impact of the virus on black health care providers, who are just 5% of physicians and 10% of nurses, although, again, black Americans are 13% of the population. Black health care providers often work in underserved communities in facilities that are underfunded out of a desire to help these vulnerable communities. But these are the communities that have been hardest hit by the virus, and so Wingfield says that repeated exposure to COVID patients puts our tiny population of black health care providers at great emotional and physical risk. Part of the stresses that black health care providers face is in dealing with racial stereotypes and biases about black patients from medical colleagues. That, of course, reinforces what we know about the biases black people encounter in seeking medical testing and treatment. The additional concern is that as the coronavirus advances, that black patients will be placed low on the queue for ventilators due to underlying health conditions such as diabetes and asthma that are, again, outcomes of environmental racism. I'm going to read a quote from Professor Wingfield's analysis because it expresses so well the burden placed on black women in the US at every turn. Quote, describing the downside of being a black woman doctor in a public facility that served mostly low income patients of color, a surgeon named Jenna told me, funding gets cut. We don't have the things we need, but administrators know we'll still come in and work to get our patients what they need. It makes me feel exploited. It makes me feel like Mammy, honestly, because we empathize. No one has more empathy than black women. But that's not rewarded in the structure of how medicine works. So we just keep on working and working with less and less. This echoes so much of what we know about black women. In March, Leilani Jordan, a 27-year-old African-American woman with cerebral palsy, contracted coronavirus from her job as a greeter at a grocery store in Maryland. Her death brought national attention to the health risk faced by grocery store workers who were not then receiving personal protective gear from management. Ms. Jordan told her mother that she wanted to work at the store despite the risk in order to help people. Her final paycheck was just $20. Given black women's history at the intersection of patriarchy and structural racism, it is not surprising that black women are disproportionately represented among essential workers in low-wage industries. In fact, when we take a long view of our history, what we see is that black women have always been the essential women workers performing both paid and unpaid devalued work so vital to the functioning of the economy. Yet most of what has been written about the care work of women in the context of COVID-19 has focused on the unequal care work married women are shouldering at home relative to men during the pandemic, while very little has been written about black women's struggles to combine care with jobs as essential workers. In other words, this illustrates the ongoing tendency to view white women through the prism of motherhood and black women through the prism of worker. And so I'm going to end there and just in terms of policies that I would recommend as with most progressives, I recommend a variety of universal policies. Universal policies, I think, are more feasible politically in the United States. They tend to have less opposition. And so of course, we need universal provision of health care through a single payer system. We need federal job guarantees. We need paid family and sick leave for all employees. Universal government subsidized child care and elder care. We, of course, need to have a functioning safety net with increased benefits and the removal of work and time stipulations. And I think that for African Americans in particular, we certainly need reparations. And we also need to have a return to affirmative action policies in both employment in the private sector and public sector, as well as in the educational realm. So I think I'll stop there. Thank you very much, Nina. That was very eye-opening. And some of those figures are really sobering to find out about the experience of black women throughout this pandemic. And I think we have a few questions in the chat. And people don't be hesitant to keep asking questions if you need. So, yeah, at the end, you were talking about some of those policy recommendations. And I just wanted to know if you could expand on some of them, for example, reparations. How would that work to support black women, especially? How would that need to be implemented? Well, you know, I would refer everybody to the work of Sandy Darity on the issue of reparations. He and Kristen Mullen just published a book from Here to Equality, which outlines their vision of affirmative action reparations in the United States, right? And so it gives us a long comprehensive view going back to slavery. I have not yet read it, but of course, I'm familiar with his work. And so, of course, there needs to be a study by experts on, you know, in terms of who would benefit, it would be African-Americans, people who are the descendants of people who were enslaved in the United States. I, you know, I support that. There's some disagreement among people over that, but I certainly think that the disparities are owed to people who are the descendants of people who were enslaved in the United States and who created the basis for wealth in the economy and then continued to experience the effects of disinvestment in their communities and structural racism for centuries up until the present. And so there's a panel or panels that would study the issue and then determine the amount and how that would be distributed. Right, and so one of the key issues, of course, is to make sure that the money, right, and so reparations could take a variety of forms, cash payments as well as in-kind payments. But the tricky issue, of course, is to make sure that the assets remain within the African-American community. You know, and so in terms of your question, how would that help African-American women in particular? I mean, it would certainly help to close this tremendous racial wealth gap. And wealth, as we know, is really important in helping to cushion the blow of an economic downturn. It would also enable African-American women to have ongoing income. So I think that those are, and certainly the ability, you know, part of it might involve home ownership or money that is targeted towards higher education. I mean, African-Americans carry more student loan debt burden than other populations in the United States, right? So there are many, many, many benefits of a reparations policy for African-Americans. And it is a debt that is owed and that is long overdue. Yeah, I agree with you on several of those counts. And I think some of the policies you were mentioning will have long-term effects, like in terms of accumulating wealth and so on. But someone asked a question about what do you think are the most important short-term policies that could be put in place to support Black women compared to the long-term effects policy which you kind of touched upon. Okay, so if we're looking at Black women who are the essential workers, I mean, hazard pay, and I think that hazard pay that's ongoing, if we're looking at short-term, right, instead of programs that revamp the structure of work and the pay system over a longer period of time, in the immediate crisis, hazard pay would certainly be beneficial and beneficial. You know, I've been thinking about this issue of food insecurity, I think, since March or late February, and been very concerned about food insecurity for Black communities in the United States, other low-end communities as well. But I've been thinking about it in terms of Black women and elderly people in particular. So I keep thinking that if we had a government that was well-functioning, one of the things that our government would do would be to, and this has to happen really at the national level and it needs to be coordinated with state and local communities, but we need to have the national government purchase the food that is going to waste, and I know that, you know, it looks that Donald Trump has signaled that the USDA, United States Department of Agriculture would be purchasing some of the food that farmers are destroying because they aren't able to sell it to restaurants and all of these businesses that have shut down. But that, I think, has been more politicized, that Donald Trump understands that farmers are part of his base. But what we need is a massive effort to purchase food and then to have it distributed throughout the country to areas where there is a great need, and there's a great need in rural areas as well as urban areas, and I, you know, the National Guard, for example, could be called out to help distribute that food. So for me, that's one of the immediate issues is food insecurity because it raises all kinds of issues in terms of social distancing. How do you social distance? If you've got to leave your house to get food, that's a big issue. If you don't have access to nutritious food, it makes it more difficult to be able to withstand the coronavirus. So for me, there's the issue of hazard pay as well as food insecurity. Those, I think, are some of the pressing issues that women face. Childcare, of course, is an issue and I know that there have been efforts to provide childcare for essential workers. The question that I have about that is affordability. There have been subsidies that have been provided. Are they going to be ongoing? Where are the locations of the centers? Again, how do low-income black women get to those daycare centers? There are lots of these kinds of immediate concerns that black women have. I think that if we had coordination from the national level to the state and the local level, that would really help to alleviate many of the oppressive conditions that African-American women are facing. Those are very important steps and I think with the fiscal stimulus as well, it could have been more targeted in terms of food security is affected by your income, essentially. That has been a disaster, in my opinion. The fiscal stimulus, the one-time payment, I understand that Nancy Pelosi and some Democrats are attempting to have another round, a larger payment, I think $6,000, but $1,200 and $500 for children who are 16 and younger is just not sufficient. No, it's okay. We didn't last very long. Just on some other questions that people have posed, and I just want to say to everyone who's watching, if you look at the chat, Rhonda Sharp is posting really good links referring to what Nina's been talking about, so please check that out and thank you very much Rhonda. Earlier you were talking about the marriage statistics and how it's much worse for black women after they get married compared to white women, and someone wanted to know, is there any data on different kind of combinations, like interracial marriages or lesbian couples? Is there any data about how it affects them? How it's affecting them, how that affects their income and earnings in their life outcomes? So, you know, interracial marriages are increasing in the United States. I think that they are now about one out of every 10 marriages in the United States. White Americans and black Americans are both the least likely to engage in interracial marriages. In other words, most whites still marry white people, most black people still marry black people. For interracial marriages that involve blacks in the United States, the majority are of black men and other women who are not black. I think about one-third of interracial marriages that involve blacks in the United States are black women marrying someone from another racial group, racial or ethnic group. So there's not a lot. I don't have data on the top of my head over same-sex marriages, which are, you know, in terms of the ability to marry now, we have more data and so, you know, we would say that there's an increase, but there's always been, there've always been same-sex relationships. They also have a tendency to be, I think, more interracial compared to different-sex couples. I guess to go back to the other couple, the other issue in terms of marriage is that marriage to a white male certainly improves women's economic status. And so black women are primarily married to black men, white women are primarily married to white men. And so even though black women and white women are fairly close in terms of their median earnings, the fact that white women have access to the earnings and the wealth of white men makes them tremendously better off compared to black women. Yeah. And just onto kind of this separation between the different sides of the American society. You were talking about the environment in which black people live and how that affects their health. And I think there's been a difference in response between the rural Americans to the lockdowns and so on. And so could you just talk a little bit about how kind of race is involved in that difference between blacks in mostly urban environments and maybe perhaps whites in mostly rural environments and their reaction to the pandemic? Okay. Because I think that there's a lot involved in that question and I haven't really given it a lot of thought, but some things that come to mind are that living in a densely populated urban area and having to rely on public transportation certainly increases the risk of community spread, right? So there are all these factors that are tied to living in a densely populated urban area, racially segregated. Those are some of the reasons why we see higher COVID infection and death rates for African-American and I think also Latinx communities in the United States. But there have also been high death rates for African-Americans who live in rural communities. And so there are some cases that are based on contact tracing where we know that there were family gatherings and that large communities, rural communities that have African-Americans have also been decimated as a result of COVID-19. So there are lots of African-Americans who live in rural communities who are also disproportionately affected by the virus. I think that white Americans have the perception now since the data started coming out that COVID-19 is disproportionately affecting black Americans, I think that rural white Americans and white Americans who live in small towns, I live in a small town, are somehow under the impression that the virus is less of a threat to them. And so I think that as our country is now starting to open up again prematurely that the COVID infection and death rates are going to start to escalate in these small towns and rural communities where white people disproportionately live. Yeah, and I think as you said with black people and black women in these essential jobs it will tend to, the premature opening up and turn around and affect them even more with great magnitude. It will, right? And I think that that's part of the narrative as well is that white people thinking that this is somehow a black person's problem primarily have been taking to the streets, armed militia calling for the United States to open up prematurely. And you're absolutely right. It ends up putting the essential workers at greater risk. Yeah, and I think it's an interesting, because you've talked a lot about the history of America and how it's caused this kind of difference in impact. And I just wanted to know if you could talk about the rest of the world. I don't know if you know too much about it, but in the UK we had a study that said black people are four times more likely to die than whites due to COVID. So if you could talk about maybe general reasons across the world, why just maybe a pattern? And I've just read very little about the situation of blacks in the UK and that the rates are four times greater. And so I guess I have a few thoughts on that. One is that there are some overlaps with the African American situation in terms of jobs that place people at disproportionate risk. For some communities perhaps there's also the issue of residential segregation that is tied in, discrimination against black people in the healthcare system, access to healthcare within one's community. What was really striking when I looked at the data for the UK by race is that it was broken down by region of origin, which I thought was very unusual and I couldn't understand why blacks in the UK who they were listed as people who I think originated from African countries versus those from the Caribbean from Caribbean countries. And so the question I had is, were they looking at immigrants only? And if not, and I suspect that they weren't, why the tendency to group black populations in the UK based on region of origin? And so I guess it suggests that black people, it's a good indication that black people in the UK are viewed as outsiders. Yeah, this is very interesting. I saw a discussion recently about how black British people feel about themselves and the overwhelming consensus was we don't feel, if we ever go back to our parents' land, we feel like we're British but then in Britain we don't feel quite British. There is definitely that perception which many black British people feel, so that's really a studio observation. And so someone's asked a question which kind of it slightly relates, it's talking about that some journalists have cited that the reason why this black people are more risk, aside from all the stuff you said, is because there's a difference in culture between blacks and whites. And so what do you think cultural differences or what factors do you think that plays in the whole context? I don't know what those cultural differences would be. I think that there is this ongoing tendency to invoke stereotypes when it comes to explanations. And so there are always ideological supports that justify structural inequities and structural racism. And in the United States, this dominant narrative is always one of individual responsibility. So there's always the tendency to somehow blame black people for worse outcomes. And so we certainly see that with COVID-19. And so an example would be the health disparities higher in terms of diabetes or obesity or even asthma. African-Americans are often blamed for this. And we got this certainly from the surgeon general of the United States who is African-American who talked about the need for African-Americans to really get it together in terms of our eating habits. So cultural differences are not the problem. This is not a problem of behavior, of individual behavior or group behavior. Black dysfunction, the argument of black dysfunction is what is always pulled out as a way of justifying and explaining away profound disparities that are tied to systemic racism and patriarchy. Yeah. And I think there needs to be kind of overall challenges. We need to address kind of these overall structural differences, which is what you've been talking about. And just to kind of wrap it up back to the health of COVID-19 and how to address the health crisis, you mentioned in your talk that there are inequalities because of black people's co-mobilities that there might be refuse ventilators. And we know as well that there's higher child birth mortality rates for black women in America. So do you have any ideas of how we could address or challenge the biases that lead to different health outcomes? And are you talking about in the case of the ventilators? So kind of starting off with COVID-19 in general as well, because there is that bias in general outside of COVID-19. OK. So I think that we certainly need to have more black health care providers in the United States. That's not going to solve the problem. But that's one part of the problem is that we need to have health care providers who are culturally competent and knowledgeable. And this goes back to my recommendation for affirmative action programs. And that doesn't mean that we let non-black health care providers off the hook. They also need to be held accountable to their racial biases, presented with the racial biases and held accountable for those racial biases. We certainly need to have black communities need to have greater access to health care facilities to primary health care providers. And those are some of the things that come to my mind in terms of the health care system in the United States. Access to health insurance is fundamental to this, of course. And then that goes back to the need to have universal access to health care, health insurance in the United States through a single payer system. We have a health care system that has always been tied to people having access to good jobs. In order to have decent health care insurance, you have to have access to a decent job in the United States. That's typically been the case. And so we need to have a system that provides health insurance for all people in the country, including people who are unauthorized immigrants. That's a whole other area that I didn't get into, because I'm looking specifically at African-Americans. But there are tremendous disparities affecting Latinx communities, and most definitely native communities in the United States as well. They're also grappling with the effects of structural racism and high infection and death rates as a result of those effects. And Asian-American communities, too, are dealing with effects from an increase in physical violence and verbal violence and loss of businesses. It's also having a devastating impact on Asian-American communities. Yeah, there is really a lot to address. But unfortunately, that's kind of all we have time for. So I don't know if you want to make any concluding remarks. Just kind of sum up everything that you said and kind of what we need to look out for moving forward. I guess what I would say is that COVID-19 has put a spotlight on the glaring inequities of race in the United States, as well as the contradictions of the value that we place on particular jobs. And I wish that I could be optimistic that government action will be taken to address the systemic inequities that have worsened health and economic outcomes for black Americans. But I suspect that this crisis will deepen racial disparities for generations to come. And I wish that I could end on an optimistic note, but I'm not optimistic about this. Well, that's a sobering truth that we kind of all just have to kind of accept so we can try to find different ways out. But thank you very, very much, Nia. That was really enlightening and a really good discussion that was necessary to have. And thank you everyone for joining us. Thank you, Justin, for moderating for doing such a fantastic job moderating this discussion. Thank you very much. Thank you everyone for joining us. I really hope you join us on the next webinar on this series, which is going to be on COVID-19 and the economics of housing. And the speakers are going to be Josh Ryan Collins from UCL and Rachel White from London Rental Union. So please join us. That will be on the 20th around the same time as well. So thank you very much. And I hope you guys stay well in the lockdown. Thank you very much, Nia. Thank you, Justin. You take care.