Classifications, racial discrimination and Covid-19

It feels like a lifetime ago when we quarantined for the Covid-19 pandemic. While this was an extremely stressful period, for many it also provided some degree of respite. After the initial shock of being restrained at home, those that were able to work remotely created a routine that was (admittedly) monotonous but nevertheless safe from any serious deprivations.

Not all were that fortunate though. Essential workers like doctors, teachers and construction workers put their lives at risk just by going to work. From a moral perspective this was deemed acceptable. The value of what they offered to society justified – if not outweighed – the personal risk they took. But other groups of people were put under disproportionate risk without any ethical justifications.

Studies show that racial and ethnic minorities disproportionately suffered from Covid-19 when compared with non-marginalised groups, especially during the initial outbreak of the virus. That racial and ethnic discrimination raises one’s risk for poor health was known long before Covid-19.¹ It is just accentuated whenever there is a pandemic or other wider crisis.

Implicit bias

The ways in which Covid-related racial discrimination can unfold are neither simple nor straightforward. This is because different racial and ethnic groups living in different cultures and under different political and economic systems face different forms of injustice. Asian Americans, for example, suffered discrimination due to the automatic associations some people built between Covid-19 and its initial outbreak in China. Automatic associations are a form of implicit bias that all of us suffer from (in different ways) and they are really hard – if not impossible – to overcome. However, understanding how automatic associations are created can help mitigate their effects.

Implicit bias is only one of the many facets of Covid-related discrimination. In 2020, the Institute for Fiscal Studies reported that members of Pakistani and Black African groups in the UK were more likely to die from Covid-19 than people classified as white British. More generally, the report observed that different minority racial and ethnic groups were more likely to be hospitalised, were disproportionately working in jobs that exposed them to higher risk of infection, or experienced greater financial setbacks due to the lockdowns.

Interestingly, the report points out that to appreciate such ethnic and racial disparities, one should avoid making overgeneralisations about all minority groups. Each group faces different forms of Covid-related discrimination due to the different mechanisms that underwrite them. This, again, is not something we’ve learned from Covid-19.

There are important aspects to discrimination that are missed out when we overgeneralise

Grouping things or people together is ubiquitous in everyday life, so it is not surprising that it has drawn philosophical attention. In chemistry, the usefulness of putting things into groups is all too familiar. Chemists classify matter into solids, liquids and gases; or into chemical elements, groups, periods and families. A chunk of matter can be a member of multiple classes: an instance of helium is at the same time a noble element, a member of period 1 and a gas. Classifications help us make generalisations, explain why phenomena occur and make predictions about them. However, they can also be deceptive because broad generalisations often fail to capture important aspects of the phenomena that they are meant to explain.

Grouping things into chemical elements, families or periods has produced empirically well-corroborated explanations and predictions, suggesting that there are independent facts in nature that support the existence of such classes. However, the same cannot be said about the groups we invoke to classify people. As the example with Covid-19 illustrates, there are important aspects to discrimination that are missed out when we overgeneralise. According to some, this is because the ideas of race, ethnicity, gender and the like are social constructions. They are classifications that would not exist if they hadn’t been invented.

Inbuilt discrimination

Moreover, grouping people in such terms seems to impose from the outset the discriminatory mechanisms that are in turn applied to the individuals positioned into those groups. However, there is a counterargument to this. If we do not group people based on their race, ethnicity, or gender then we cannot discuss – nor overcome – the injustices they face as members of these groups. How can we tackle discrimination unless we acknowledge that – say – the colour of one’s skin is what makes people discriminate against them?

Perhaps a way to override this is by reference to intersectionality, a concept that originated from Black feminism. The idea is that each person is a member of more than one group: among other things, they may be Black Caribbean, male and homosexual. In order to fully appreciate the injustice they suffer, one needs to appreciate how membership to each of these groups contributes and shapes a specific person’s experience.

Admittedly this complicates things a lot and may even make it difficult to fully understand how Covid-19 has disproportionately affected some but not others. In any case, this is a discussion that needs to be had and which – I hope – we don’t have to repeat the next time a cataclysmic event dramatically affects our lives.