Andrew Malekoff
While there is a growing debate in the U.S. about what kids should learn about America’s history in school, I never imagined that public education about COVID-19 racial health disparities might diminish some white Americans’ fears about the virus, as well as their inclination to take safety precautions.
Yet, this is what a study just published by Social Science & Medicine Journal found.
As early as April 2020, the U.S. media started reporting on racial differences in COVID-19 infection and mortality rates. The information was contextualized within a history of pervasive health disparities, fueled by systemic inequities and exacerbated by disproportionate numbers of people of color employed as essential workers.
What are racial health disparities? They refer to the prospects of people of color achieving optimal health as measured, for example, by rates of mortality, life expectancy, burden of disease, mental health, health insurance status and access to care.
The study pointed out, when people faced with life-threatening health concerns engage in “downward comparisons” as a means of coping, they are likely to see people that they consider to be inferior to them with less empathy. They experience them as sufficiently different with respect to heightened vulnerability to disease.
Comparing downward and objectifying others facing COVID-19 challenges go hand-in-hand. Or so it appeared when Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Patience D. Roggensack weighed in on the matter.
In May 2020, Wisconsin held debates about the legality of the COVID-19 shelter-in-place order. Chief Justice Roggensack minimized mounting COVID-19 cases in one local county as being isolated to meatpacking plant workers, mostly people of color, as opposed to what she referred to as “just regular folks.”
The present study, “Highlighting COVID-19 racial disparities can reduce support for safety precautions among White U.S. residents,” found that when threats appear more distant, they elicit less concern about the virus and support for government mitigation policies.
Despite some regular folks’ propensity for making “downward comparisons,” educating the public about COVID-19 racial disparities does not elicit the same reaction in all white Americans.
When health education is presented haphazardly or inconsistently it foments suspicion and indifference, instead of trust and empathy. Alternative ways of thoughtfully informing the public must be devised and implemented for different populations. This must be examined. Lives hang in the balance.
If exposure to information about COVID-19 racial disparities reduces empathy, particularly for individuals with political power, they are unlikely to feel the anguish of others or support public policy to address the challenges they face.
The sorting of fact from fiction and finding consensus on truth has become an immense 21st century challenge in which we have become our own worst enemies.
Not a promising prospect for building empathy outside of one’s own narrow confines.
It behooves us to become more careful consumers of public health information and to pay better attention, as Indian author Arundhati Roy advised, to the gap between “what we know and what we are told, between what is revealed and what is concealed, and between the real world and the virtual world.”
Public health education must serve us all, as a reliable source and force in providing facts about how to take care of ourselves and one another. That will take retooling how information is delivered and a leap of faith that Americans may one day again find common cause and rediscover our stake in one another.
