Blog Series – Covid-19: Stories, Insights and Perspectives Ezelle Sanford; The Myth of Black Immunity: Racialized Disease during the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Corrinne Fahl

The Myth of Black Immunity: Racialized Disease during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society (PRSS) Postdoctoral Research Associate Ezelle Sanford III, and his colleague anthropology Doctoral Candidate Chelsey Carter have written an essay for the award-winning African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) blog, Black Perspectives. In, “The Myth of Black Immunity: Racialized Disease during the COVID-19 Pandemic” Carter and Sanford draw on historical and anthropological analyses to respond to the initial racialization COVID-19. Assertions that COID-19 was a “Chinese Flu” and that Black people were immune represent two sides of white supremacy, promulgated by federal authorities and by the very people who such ideologies continue to oppress. Moreover, such assertions blame the most vulnerable and evade structural critiques that most appropriately explain the novel coronavirus’s disparate impact on African Americans specifically and people of color generally. From the eighteenth-century Yellow Fever outbreaks in Philadelphia, to the contemporary lived experience on the ground in St. Louis, MO, Sanford, and Carter contextualize the reemergence of racialized perceptions of disease.

 To Read, “The Myth of Black Immunity: Racialized Disease during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” visit here: https://www.aaihs.org/racializeddiseaseandpandemic/

Ezelle Sanford III, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow, Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society (PRSS)
Project Manager, Penn Medicine and the Afterlives of Slavery (PMAS) Project
University of Pennsylvania