The Air We Breathe
Why are people of color so disproportionately represented among the sick and the dead? Of the known COVID-19 cases during NYC’s spike in March of 2020, Black people were infected at almost twice the rate as whites, partly due to the exposure of being disproportionately represented in the city’s transportation workforce. Or by being “essential” minimum wage earners and health care workers, also disproportionately women and people of color. While these examples of structural racism are significant, highlighting only these quantifiable numbers is missing an entire reality that factors into the stress of racism.
A Black woman living in the United States today is 27 times more likely than a white man to contract one of the most common autoimmune diseases, Systemic Lupus. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31062841/) The disparity is very high for other autoimmune diseases as well. If you're a white woman, the ratio is far less, but still significant at nine white women for every white man. And this latter ratio stands firm not just for Lupus, but for autoimmune diseases in general. Why is this?
Chinese medicine includes social environment as an aspect of the air we breath. With whom do you con-spire (together + breathe) intentionally or not? Who are you surrounded by, from friends and family to your community, region, state, and nation? And is that social air nourishing? Or is it a kind of mal-aria (bad + air). It’s normal, healthy in fact, to feel like a stranger sometimes. But not if you feel like your life is threatened whenever you go outside. Even if it’s ‘just in the air’, the awareness taken up by this fear eats at a person’s vitality, and over time, this takes a significant toll on the immune system.
90% of rape victims are women. And women account for 90% of autoimmune cases. This may seem like a simple coincidence; I’m not claiming there aren’t other factors involved, but as it stands, the causal relationship of those two matching statistics does ring true.
This violence doesn’t come from nowhere. Consider the pernicious backdrop to these identical statistics in the story of the wholly ignored economic value of raising a child. Over forty years ago, Ann Crittenden pointed out that GDP (Gross Domestic Product, or the estimated “wealth” of a nation) doesn’t account for home births, or breastfeeding, or the nurturing and care needed to raise a healthy child at home. Even though it does figure in the cost of goods and services of birthing and raising a child in relation to day cares, teachers, and nannies, and all the costs of hospital care, from nurses administering baby formula, to doctors, drugs and diagnostic tests. If a child is born at home and home schooled, the efforts of the primary caretaker, still predominantly women, isn’t factored into the GDP, which, again, is the main index we use to value a country’s wealth. In The Price of Motherhood, Crittenden suggests that if included in the math, this primary care taking would account for 70% of our GDP. This fundamental undervaluing isn’t very healthy air for women to breathe. Or really for any of us.
Add to this the poison of racism, and that staggering disparity of 27:1 regarding Lupus diagnoses between Black women and white men begins to makes sense. Survival, let alone living, are not in your favor if you are Black and poor. And taken as a whole, Black America is poor. The median household income for a white family in 2016 was more than ten times that of a Black family, $149,703 to $13,024. The economic disparity surrounding well-being is overwhelming when it comes to race. The least expensive housing in a city is always found in the most polluted neighborhoods. All but one of the bus depots in Manhattan are in, or border, Harlem. But what about the less obvious, tangible health effects of living in a world of fear borne of racist policies like Stop and Frisk, policies that are emblematic of a systemic racist police culture, and by default, a racist society.
That’s some poisonous air. And also where things become difficult to “prove.” Two people on the same street breathing different air? I know this doesn’t makes sense from a materialist world view that tells us that air is only molecules. But air is bigger than this, a reality owned our language. We are rich in idioms like “an air of calm,” “in the air,” and “a breath of fresh air.” Maybe this reality becomes easier to inhale when we consider the benefits of an “air of calm” that allows for a “safe airing of one’s grievances” in order to “clear the air” so that we can all “breathe more freely.”