Say Their Names

by Curtis Bunn

  Guilford, who was on blood pressure medicine, followed her advice and holed up at home. His daughter-in-law provided him an inhaler and an incentive spirometer, a device that measures lung functionality and teaches how to take slow, deep breaths; it is usually used when a patient has pneumonia.

  His doctor prescribed “a bunch” of medicine for his cough and Tylenol to reduce the fever. None of it mattered much. The coronavirus had taken over.

  “I started getting headaches, but to the tenth power. I got flu symptoms. When I did take a shower, I was in there with the water running on me, exhausted. I literally had to wait and talk to myself: Okay, now reach for the soap.

  “I would be in bed at night gasping for air. I became so exhausted I could not pick my head up off the pillow. I was super weak, like something was weighing on me so heavily that it was holding me down. My fever stayed for a week.

  “To go to the bathroom was about a fifteen- or twenty-foot walk. It took everything in me to get there. Then, I would have to hold on to the wall for five minutes to catch my breath. And I never could. I couldn’t breathe.”

  That last sentence was a variation of the same phrase that George Floyd would manage to get out about two months later as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin buried his knee into Floyd’s neck as he lay on the ground, hands cuffed behind his back, helpless.

  America in general and Black America in particular was gasping for air, for life, under the force of a pandemic that zeroed in on the underserved and a tessellation of police brutality against people of color.

  As a Black man, Guilford lived with the threat of police overzealousness daily, so much so that it was routine for him to feel anxiety when a cop car pulled up behind him on the street. He knew how to comport himself to mitigate an escalation. Living with COVID-19, however, was the more fearful and deadly threat. There was no playbook on how to survive it.

  He barely ate—partly because his appetite diminished and also because he did not have the energy. The virus attacked seemingly all parts of his body to the point of his feeling defenseless against it.

  “It was a blessing to have good friends. People used apps on their phones to order me food and have it delivered. I appreciated it big time, but I could hardly eat it. Not that I wasn’t hungry. I couldn’t chew. It took too much energy.”

  After another week of struggling to breathe so desperately that he felt like he was in an ocean, without a raft, with weights tied to his ankles, Guilford faced a harsh possibility: that he would die.

  “I started getting my affairs in order—when I had the energy. I seriously did not think I was going to make it. The breathing was so constricted that I felt like I was drowning. I couldn’t catch my breath to save my life. It was crazy. It was horrible.

  “It was so bad and I was so exhausted and the psychology of it all…I said, ‘Fuck it. I’m tired.’ I started checking on my life insurance and making sure everything was in order. It was that bad. I was ready to check out.”

  For a former Wall Street executive who had traveled extensively, lived in London, appreciated the arts, loved attending sporting events around the world, laughed heartily, appreciated his family, and had more to embrace…preparing himself to die illuminates the physical and emotional despoliation the coronavirus had inflicted.

  But as he lay on his back, at home alone, ready to release himself from the trauma, Guilford thought about his three grandchildren.

  They need me. They are worth living for.

  And in that moment, Guilford did not so much fight back as he did not give up. His eleven-, eight-, and seven-year-old grandkids inspired him.

  Guilford’s battle with COVID-19 continued another two weeks before he finally began to feel a breakthrough. He had lost about twelve pounds but he gained some energy—and his breathing was less constricted.

  He felt optimistic when he went for a coronavirus test, the swab to the back of the nose. It was positive, and he was devastated.

  It was depressing.

  Although he felt better, he still slept most of the day. He was psychologically spent, especially after weeks of quarantining. Each day was like the previous day.

  Six weeks after his ordeal began, Guilford’s COVID-19 test was negative.

  With it came relief. He had survived—but he was hardly okay. His legs and back had atrophied, so he had to undergo muscle reactivation therapy—after his legs were taken out of the casts that were placed on them for weeks.

  His throat was sore from all the coughing.

  But he was alive.

  “My doctor told me to consider myself lucky. I didn’t feel lucky going through it. But by the death count, I understand it. I was…you know, I was close. It beats you up physically and beats you up psychologically. You start to think about your mortality.

  “I’m still not 100 percent. My breathing isn’t the same and I get tired quicker than usual. But I’m here.

  “This thing, the coronavirus made me think about my life, what’s important, who’s important. There was a time when my career defined who I was. Now? Fuck that.

  “Now, I think about how to be a better friend, a better person. All the Gucci shoes and Zegna suits and material things…they mean nothing. It’s an American phenomenon to have a big house and all the fancy stuff. If I die, some people may grab some stuff, the rest will be thrown out or go to Goodwill.

  “But I have to leave behind more than that. That’s why relationships mean more now than ever. I reach out to my friends who are older to let them know what they mean to me, how important they’ve been in my life. I’m okay telling another man I love him.

  “I was by myself, afraid, and at peace with dying. Through the good and bad, I was at peace. But I found something to keep me going: my grandkids. After this, I’m going to love on them and watch them grow up.

  “And I am going to do things that matter, and be around people who matter. I’m going to double down on life. I’m going to Africa. I always wanted to go and had planned to go in 2020. But COVID-19 shut that down and almost took me out.

  “I don’t know if my health will be compromised the rest of my life. I am not 100 percent recovered. I am back at work, but it’s still there, the effects of it. But I’m alive.”

  Racism Can Make You Sick

  In the parlance of the African American community, “the rona” was a disease that was not as tough as poverty, substandard schools, joblessness, or other forms of discrimination that have plagued their existence.

  Their history of battling centuries of oppression made Black people impervious to the coronavirus.

  That was the word spread via social media—half jokingly, half seriously—in the early days of the worldwide pandemic. A face had not been put on COVID-19, and the prevailing thought was that white people and other non-Blacks were the primary victims.

  That was spectacularly wrong.

  Soon, the musings and nicknames stopped when a disheartening and frightening realization emerged: “the rona” attacked African Americans more prolifically and fatally than any other race.

  Worse, it was harder on Black people than other ethnic groups because of underlying health issues tied to some of the same elements they had joked prevented them from contracting the deadly disease.

  The disparity of the outbreak became more evident with the release of data each week. By the time the coronavirus reached a peak in May 2020, the devastation on the Black community was palpable.

  “When white America catches a cold, Black America catches pneumonia,” Steven Brown, a researcher at the think tank Urban Institute, said.

  The numbers were telling.

  Even though Black people make up around 13 percent of the American population, they were infected with COVID-19 and died at rates three times that of whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

  For Black people in the United States, the coronavirus was a crippling juggernaut.

  It was as if the pandemic did an MRI on the Unit
ed States and exposed the drastic systemic inequalities rooted in racism that dated to the first ships carrying enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean. That “original sin” of America created a history of white supremacy, manifested, centuries later, by, among other things, expansive health disparities.

  These disparities had always been there. The coronavirus illuminated them.

  These inequalities were the results of several facts: food deserts, environmental disadvantages, poor patient care, and the influence of medical myths among them.

  Food deserts provide limited availability of fresh fruits and vegetables in African American communities, leaving residents no recourse but processed foods or options full of sodium, fat, and unhealthy chemicals. Those unhealthy alternatives promote high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes, among other chronic illnesses.

  In some places, such as Flint, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey, clean water remained an issue. Residents, mostly African American, in Flint were saddled for seven years with contaminated water—it flowed muddy brown out of the faucet in some cases, sparking tears, outrage, empathy, and sympathy—but still no drinkable water. At least a dozen people died, and eighty were sickened.

  In a twisted piece of irony, the people of Flint paid some of the highest monthly water bills in America, upward of $200…for water they could not drink. Then, in 2019, when the water was declared lead-free and drinkable by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, most Flint residents opted for bottled water from somewhere else. They had been without clean water for so long they did not trust that issue had been fixed.

  “The anger, the lack of trust…it’s all justified,” Michigan state senator Jim Ananich said.

  In January 2021, the Michigan governor, Rick Snyder, who presided over the state while Flint suffered and did not stop the suffering, was indicted (and has pled not guilty), along with eight other state officials, on forty-two criminal charges related to the Flint water fiasco, including willful neglect. The likelihood of guilty verdicts for Snyder and Co. may have been low, but the acknowledgment that they were woefully negligent provided a modicum of satisfaction.

  The next month, a federal judge in Michigan gave preliminary approval of a $641 million class action suit against the state for the water travesty. Judge Judith Levy wrote in her ruling: “There may be no amount of money that would fully recognize the harm the residents of Flint have experienced, including their anxiety, fear, distrust, and anger over the events of the last seven years…This litigation—however it concludes—need not be the final chapter of this remarkable story.”

  Remarkable, but not unfamiliar. In a town called Coal Run, Ohio, an unincorporated community, the government denied public water service from 1956 to 2003. Why? Because most of the town’s citizens were Black.

  Federal funding built waterlines up to and around the town—but not in it—forcing residents to retrieve water from nearby Zanesville or collect rainwater and store water in containers, risking contamination. In court in 2008, a jury awarded the citizens of Coal Run $11 million for “pain and suffering” because the government violated state and federal civil rights laws by not providing access to public water the same as provided for the white residents in neighboring towns.

  Fair housing advocates and organizations around the country insisted that kind of discriminatory practice could return under a Ben Carson–proposed plan that would diminish housing discrimination protections laid out in the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) mandate.

  Carson, the head of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) at the time, advocated for producing more affordable housing, while simultaneously eliminating regulations and accountability, thereby allowing the potential for even more segregation and discriminatory practices.

  The AFFH mandate was designed to correct discriminatory housing practices and the lasting impacts of government and privately sponsored residential segregation. It provided an effective planning approach to aid program participants in taking meaningful actions to overcome historic patterns of segregation, promote fair housing choices, and foster inclusive communities that were free from discrimination.

  “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was instrumental in creating the Fair Housing Act. It was a direct gift from Dr. King to the nation,” said Lisa Rice, president and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance. “You could say he gave his life for this. It was a key part of his dream.”

  HUD’s proposal came as the number of housing discrimination complaints reached a record high in 2019.

  Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said Carson displayed “willful ignorance of racial policies. Increasing the supply [of public housing] would not result in fair practices or access to [Black and brown] people protected under the FHA. Our nation has expended an incredible amount of resources creating the disparities that plague our communities. What we need are resources, commitment, resolve, and a strong rule to promote fair housing.”

  Five words that were startling but revealing: “Our nation…creating the disparities.”

  Trump committed to abolishing the program, saying that Black people moving to the suburbs would decimate home values and increase crime. His and Carson’s suggestion of more public housing amounted to a new wave of segregation: Keep disenfranchised Black people in subsidized housing, which are always located in food deserts or environmentally deficient areas, thereby causing two crises in one—housing and health.

  A study called On the Path to Health Equity by Enterprise, a nonprofit that focuses on America’s affordable housing crisis, said that 80 percent of an individual’s health and social and environmental conditions are determined by where they live.

  “Everyone deserves to be healthy,” Oktawia Wójcik, PhD, senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said. “But now that involves much more than health care—it needs to be intermingled with other sectors, like community development, to really create healthier, more equitable communities.”

  “It’s another reason I marched with Black Lives Matter,” said Trevor Nigel Lawrence, an entrepreneur in Oakland. “The George Floyd horrific tragedy brought light to more than the issue of police brutality. We are now addressing housing and the environment, which is important to me. It addresses the criminal justice system and health and wellness. It’s all connected.”

  The coronavirus in 2020, though, crippled the country. The Trump administration’s inept response to COVID-19 intensified the devastation of the disease. The White House COVID-19 Task Force amounted to a vaudeville show of inconsistency and misinformation, which led to confusion about what information to process and what to dismiss. Purportedly established to work in unison, the task force became a sideshow for Trump’s dissemination of falsehoods and self-promotion. A cohesive, coordinated national response plan was never devised.

  Rather, Trump, focused on the economy, sacrificed lives by contradicting the science, and Republican governors—ostensibly functioning as puppets—walked in lockstep with the president’s misguided direction.

  All of this played out on cable news shows, with experts and specialists sharing data that reiterated the point: Black people were pounded by COVID-19.

  But they often failed to delve into the heart of the matter. Factually, they were correct. But why did COVID-19 drastically strike people of color? To listen to them, the impression could have been extrapolated that the color of one’s skin made a person vulnerable to the coronavirus. This gnawed at African American health professionals such as epidemiologist Linda Goler Blount, president of the Black Women’s Health Imperative, the nation’s only organization focused solely on the well-being of African American women.

  “We have a problem with how we talk about data,” she said. “People in my profession, the public health arena, and media tend to talk about data in ways that are conflated and gives the listener, reader, viewer, the impression that what they are talking about is because of race, because they’re Black.


  “COVID-19 was not devastating to Black people because we’re Black. There’s no biological determinant for getting COVID-19.

  “It devastated us because of the lived experiences of people who are Black that puts us in this predicament,” Blount said. “And it’s the effect of chronic, generational toxic racism and gender discrimination and what that does to our body, to our immune system, that raises our risk for many things, like diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and COVID-19.”

  The wreckage of the coronavirus has been about racism, not race.

  From Africans’ arrival to the United States, Black people have suffered from health inequities that cause chronic disease—and false narratives about their vulnerabilities. When the 1918 influenza epidemic began, African American communities were already beset by many public health, medical, and social problems, including racist theories of Black biological inferiority, racial barriers in medicine and public health, and poor health status. To address those issues, African Americans established separate hospitals and professional organizations and repudiated racist scientific theories. Black people were forced to set up hospitals because of racism, too. Whites wouldn’t care for them.

  Influenza actually had a less devastating impact on African American communities by the numbers, but it overwhelmed their limited medical and public health resources, so Black people got sicker and stayed sick longer. The recognition that the rate of influenza in African Americans was not higher than whites did not derail racist theories about the biological inferiority of Black people or overturn conceptualizations of Black people as disease threats to white people. When the epidemic ended, the major problems that African Americans faced remained.

  Long before that, Black people endured health crises and myths that caused havoc. Case in point: the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia was the largest in the history of the United States, with more than 4,000 people dying. That summer, powerful citizens such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other government figures fled.