COVID-19 and the Language of Racism

On May 25, 2020, Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, murdered George Perry Floyd Jr., and protests erupted in cities and towns across the country. The public health threat of anti-Black police violence in the wake of the pandemic and, more directly, Floyd's murder led many to describe "twin pandemics" of COVID-19 and racism, a framing that circulated widely. As the analysis emerging from the Black Lives Matter movement has made clear, these are not separate threats: the disproportionately high morbidity and mortality rates in communities of color clearly manifest the structural racism that is, in turn, foundational for public health disasters. It is not surprising that women-of-color feminism has laid the groundwork for an analysis emerging from a movement inaugurated by three Black women. Our essay builds on that work to explore an emerging vocabulary these insights have generated: the adoption of phrases such as "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" as the lingua franca of mainstream media, which has gone largely unremarked, as well as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary's redefinition of "racism." We argue for the importance of a changing vocabulary that at once registers and facilitates efforts to address structural racism and the violence it perpetuates.