Societies that have a public health system that is highly functioning, well-coordinated,

and well-resourced are obviously going to do better in a public health crisis.

And we have resisted that in the richest country on the planet, in large part for the past

100 years because of racism.

Hello and welcome to Wise is happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

Well, here I am back in the closet for yet another week of quarantine podcasting out there

in the world.

And I've been thinking about, there's sort of an interesting thing, I think that's happened

in terms of the socioeconomic and racial lines of division in the country with respect

to coronavirus, sort of two things at once.

So at one level, as the data has come in, we are seeing that there are massively disproportionate

effects, particularly for African Americans, but for Black and brown Americans versus white

Americans.

We've seen this in the fatality numbers, particularly in places like New York, Louisiana,

and Detroit.

And there's a bunch of reasons that contribute to that, some of which I think we'll probably

discuss in today's conversation.

There's sort of two stacked on top of each other, the fact that African Americans in the

U.S. because of the long legacy of white supremacy and racism are more susceptible to a bunch

of preexisting conditions that essentially compound the danger of coronavirus.

And also the medical care they get now, even in the hospital, there's study after study

that shows the ways in which racism and racial lenses negatively affect their treatment.

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