Systemic Racism In NJ Added To Pandemic Deaths, Advocates Say

NEWARK, NJ — A “return to normal” isn’t good enough when it comes to coronavirus recovery in New Jersey, an advocacy group in Newark says.

The New Jersey Institute for Social Justice (NJISJ) recently released a study they’ve dubbed “Repairing the Cracks: How New Jersey Can Restore Black and Brown Communities Ravaged by COVID-19 and Systemic Racism.” See the full report here.

Here’s the short version of what researchers found:

“The virus has disproportionately impacted New Jersey’s communities of color, with Black people the most likely to have died from COVID-19 as well as to have been hospitalized for the disease. COVID-19 has also exacerbated preexisting racial inequities in a number of other areas impacting the Garden State’s Black and Brown communities – including financial stability, housing security, mass incarceration and access to democracy. COVID-19 applied stress to these preformed cracks of structural racism — created by decades of intentionally designed policies – causing them to erupt into earthquakes in New Jersey’s communities of color in a time of crisis.”

NJISJ researchers continued:

“A year and a half ago, New Jersey, along with the rest of the country and the world, was faced with a devastating public health crisis – a crisis that has since killed over 680,000 people in the United States alone. At this point, it is hard to imagine a person who has not personally suffered, or who doesn’t know someone who has suffered, from COVID-19. This is true here in New Jersey, where more than 27,000 people have died from the virus, making the Garden State the state with the second highest death rate since the start of the pandemic at a little over three per 1,000 residents. It is also particularly true for Black and Brown communities, who have been getting sick and dying at disproportionate rates due to the manifestation of generations of structural racism.”

Want an example? Look no further than the state’s largest city, Newark, researchers said.

“COVID-19 was the leading cause of death for Black New Jerseyans in 2020,” the NJISJ said. “In Newark, which is about half Black, over 850 people died from COVID-19 between March 2020 and March 2021, exceeding the death tolls of five states during the same period.”

“This disproportionate impact should not come as a surprise,” the NJISJ charged. “Black people and other people of color have higher rates of underlying preexisting conditions on which the virus preys, are more likely to have the front-line ‘essential’ jobs that expose them to the virus, are less likely to get the critical health care they need and face higher rates of unemployment, food insecurity and mortgage delinquency than their white peers.”

For those who doubt that there’s still racial inequity in New Jersey, the nonprofit offers an eye-opening statistic: the state’s staggering wealth gap. The individual net worth for white people in New Jersey is $106,210 – contrasted to just $179 for Black and Latina/Latino residents.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, advocates added.

“Today, New Jersey is also home to some of the nation’s highest racial disparities in the areas of mass incarceration, health and education – just to name a few,” researchers said.

The racial inequalities got even worse when the coronavirus pandemic hit, researchers said. For example, about six months after COVID-19 vaccines began rolling out in New Jersey, only 7 percent of the more than 9.2 million vaccines administered had gone to Black residents.

One explanation for this immense racial disparity? The digital divide.

“In New Jersey, over 7 percent of Black households do not have an internet subscription compared to just 4 percent of white households,” the NJISJ stated. “In Newark, a particularly stark disparity has emerged as Black households in the city are more than twice as likely to be without a computer as white ones.”

“While vaccine seekers have had an option to use a telephone for appointments, long hotline wait times in the spring presented another barrier for New Jersey’s communities of color who are disproportionately front-line essential workers,” the group said.

MOVING FORWARD

According to the NJISJ, here are some things New Jersey needs to do to make sure its pandemic recovery is “equitable and reparative”:

• Address the immediate short-term needs of vulnerable residents (prioritize equitable vaccine administration and distribution, protect New Jerseyans from eviction and foreclosure, and support young people returning home from youth facilities due to the pandemic)
• Establish a “New Jersey Reparations Task Force” to confront and repair the generational harms caused by New Jersey’s legacy of slavery and systemic racial discrimination
• Create a statewide guaranteed income program, which would offer unconditional, regular cash payments to individuals to stabilize and support long-term incomes
• Expand access to wealth through homeownership in divested communities of color
• Close youth prisons and meaningfully fund a youth community-based system of care
• Eliminate barriers to voting by passing same-day voter registration

“This much is clear: the cracks of racial inequity in our foundation that existed before the pandemic have made Black New Jerseyans and other residents of color more vulnerable to the health, economic and other negative impacts of the pandemic,” the NJISJ asserted.

“Across our state, existing racial disparities have led to devastating outcomes for people of color since the crisis began,” the group concluded. “Because these preexisting cracks were created through policy design, so too must be their repair.”

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