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The New Yorker Radio Hour
Amid a Pandemic, Catharsis at Seven O’Clock
00:18:32
David Remnick on the hope and catharsis that he finds in New York City’s daily mass cheer, which celebrates all those who are keeping the city alive at their peril. Plus, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the inequality of COVID-19. On the surface, it may seem to be a great leveller—princes and Prime Ministers, musicians and Hollywood A-listers, NBA players, and other prominent people have made headlines for contracting the virus—but the pandemic exacerbates the inequality of the American health-care system. Minorities, and particularly African-Americans, account for a greatly disproportionate number of deaths in places around the country. Taylor explains that the disparity is caused not only by underlying medical conditions that are more prevalent among the poor; even the basic preventative measures urged on Americans by the C.D.C., such as social distancing and sheltering in place, are less accessible in black communities.
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- [00:03]
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In this time of pandemic, the streets of New York City now are so desolate, you half expect tumbleweed to blow along the pavement where cars and cabs once clustered. You hear the wheeze of an empty bus rounding the corner, the flutter of pigeons on the fire escape, the wail of an ambulance, unnervingly frequent for weeks as the pandemic took hold. A sax player who stakes his corner outside a dress shop on Broadway was still there, playing My Favorite things and all the things you are. Now he's gone too. The spectacle of New York without New Yorkers is the result of a social pact. We've absented ourselves from the schools and the playgrounds, the ballparks and the bars, the places where we work, because life now depends on our withdrawal from life. The vacancy of our public spaces is antithetical to the very purpose of the city, which is defined by its encounters, their constancy and their poetry. But the vacancy of the city is what's needed to preserve it. And so you stick your head out the window of an apartment that you have not left in days, you see a single scurrying soul. Her arms full of groceries, she's wearing a mask and walking with the urgency of a thief. She quickens her step as she crosses Broadway, past magnolias blooming on the traffic divider. And like all of us, she's trying to outrun a thing that she cannot see. E.B. white wrote in the summer of 1948, on any person who desires such queer prizes. New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. But these prizes are now a public health requirement. We chafe at the solitude. We try to overcome it with technology. We text, we zoom. We send links about virology. We are all immunologists now. We watch televised briefings. As long as arthouse movies, they're not descending on us from heaven. But then something happens. Joy comes at seven. Or is it sheer catharsis? At seven o', clock, in neighborhoods across the city, cheering breaks out as though the Yankees had clinched the World Series. It spills from the stoops and the sidewalks, from apartment windows and rooftops. We take out our smartphones and start recording the roar, the clapping, the whooping, the tambourines and the wind chimes, the vuvuzelas. The guy across the street is a master of the cowbell. And we don't mind. Before it all dies down, we've sent the recording to a loved one who works in an er, and we send it to others who are sick, in bed or out of range of our dense and canyon city, the city described on the news as the epicenter. The cheering is for all the nurses, orderlies, doctors, EMTs. It's for the courage of professionals who may work without the protective gear that they need. Some of them have seen their salaries cut. Some have fallen ill, and others soon will. We're applauding Anthony Fauci, who must spend nearly as much mental energy trying to finesse the ignorance and ego of his commander in chief as he does in assessing the course of the virus. We're cheering researchers in labs all over the world who are at work on treatments or vaccines. We're cheering people who make the city work at their peril. Grocery clerks and ambulance drivers, sanitation workers, pharmacists and mail carriers, truckers, cops, firemen. The delivery man who shrugs off the straps of his knapsack and jabs at the intercom buzzer with a gloved finger. We cheer those who provide straight information and look out for the most vulnerable among us, the poor, the aged, the incarcerated. And we cheer the artists who have lost their gigs but are posting paintings on Instagram, Facetiming their soliloquies, singing into iPhones. We know the limits of this release, this cheering. There's a feeling of helplessness reflected in it, too. But it's what we have. In a dark time, even the president has appeared to bow before the reality that as many as 1 or 200,000 of us could die in this pandemic. These coming weeks are and will be demanding in ways that few of us could have anticipated. If New Yorkers are in hiding, the virus has shown a knack for seeking. But with time, time and discipline, life will return to the city, our city and your city. The doors will open, and we'll leave our homes. We'll greet our friends face to face at long delayed Easter services and Passover seders. Children will go to class with their teachers. Sidewalks and stores and theaters will fill. One day, remnants of the crisis will be tucked away, out of sight and out of mind. A box of gloves, a bag of makeshift masks, containers of drying Clorox wipes. We'll forget a lot about our city's suspended life, but we'll remember who we lost. We will remember the terrible cost of time squandered. And we'll remember the sound of seven o'.
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Clock.
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Sam this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. On first glance, COVID 19 seems to be indifferent to who we are. Princes and prime ministers, musicians and Hollywood A listers, NBA players, all sorts of prominent people have made headlines for contracting the virus. But when we look at the numbers of illnesses and fatalities, we see something else distinct emerge. We see the inequality that's part of the American health care system. We find the kinds of disparities that cause worse outcomes in many different ways for people who are disadvantaged. Keeanga Yamada Taylor has written for many publications, including the New Yorker, about racial inequality. She's an assistant professor of African American studies at Princeton and the author of Race for Profit. I reached her last week. Now, Professor Taylor, there are some really alarming numbers coming in from all over the country which show that minorities, particularly African Americans, are. Are succumbing to COVID 19 at absolutely staggering rates. In Louisiana, African Americans are 33% of the population, but account for 70% of the deaths from coronavirus. And this is all over the place in Chicago, in Mississippi, in New York. What factor or combination of factors contributes to this shocking disparity?
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So I think that there are a few things. The first thing is that it is almost too easy to point to the kind of underlying conditions that African Americans are particularly vulnerable to, whether that is hypertension, whether it's obesity, asthma, really all of the long term diseases of disinvestment, underemployment, and in some cases poverty. Pre existing conditions necessarily make people more vulnerable to the virus. But it means that if you get the virus, that it can have deadly effects. And then we can talk about the inability to practice social distancing. I think as a prerequisite for effective social distancing, you need to have safe, sound and comfortable housing. You need access to the Internet, you need access to computers. And so I think because of the ways that black people are overrepresented in professions that don't allow for working at home. Only 19% of black people have the ability to work at home because of the types of jobs that they are employed in. Jobs that are typically low waged and degraded, which now ironically, are seen as essential work like magnets to pull people away from the safety of social distancing. And so African Americans in New York City, you still must get on the subway to get to work. And so social distancing is critical, but you have to have a certain kind of income and class position really to be able to fully engage that practice.
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How does this manifest itself in terms of Our health care system in terms of institutional racism and our healthcare system.
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Well, there I think you see both the dynamics of class, but also race. I think it's important to say that 10% of African Americans are uninsured. Then there have been several reports of black women in particular with health insurance who show up to the hospital with the now classic symptoms of COVID and are turned away repeatedly and are only getting tested at the very final hours when it's much too late. So there is a legacy within healthcare practice of not believing black patients when they talk about pain, not really taking seriously the complaints from black patients. So I think that that is a way in which racial issues transcend the obvious class problems in a for profit healthcare system.
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Do we know how testing for coronavirus is being deployed in poor and minority neighborhoods?
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I'm not sure if we have a full picture. There was a scientist at Drexel University in Philadelphia and he found that in zip codes with higher incomes, testing was six times higher than in zip codes with lower incomes and lower rates of insurance. You know, there are these drive up testing facilities that have been created in cities around the country, but you know, it assumes that you have a car to be able to use that. But given the dearth of tests that are available, I can imagine that for the poorest people, those who are most disconnected from the networks where one might find out about where to go to get tested, how to get tested, that the numbers are even lower than they are for the general public.
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I want to ask a question about housing. I've read your really excellent book on race and housing. In looking at this crisis and the shocking infection and death rates for minorities, do you see the legacy of redlining there and how so?
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Well, I think, I mean, there's so many overlapping issues, I think with redlining. We know that residential segregation cuts people off from good jobs, from high paying jobs, from opportunities that could actually improve life chances. And so I think segregation is not just about the relegation of African Americans to a particular city or suburb. It's about the consequences of that. Also. Somewhere like Philadelphia. There are literally thousands of apartments in this city, I'm in Philadelphia, that have been legally designated unfit for human habitation by the city of Philadelphia. But the city does nothing to act on that, because to close these apartments would be to exacerbate a crisis of homelessness that already exists. But part of the reason for many of these places, why they are considered unfit for human habitation is because they don't have proper plumbing, they don't have Proper access to water. That is of even more critical importance right now. We think about people in Flint, Michigan. We think about people in Detro, thousands of black people whose water, access to potable water has been shut off at a time when we are being told to wash our hands as much as humanly possible, when we are being told to practice good hygiene. So all of these issues are intersecting in the most destructive and catastrophic way that we could imagine.
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It's very hard to talk about hope on days when the death count is so, so high in New York and around the country and around the world, too, but particularly in the United States. But does the fact that this has laid bare so many inequalities in this country, does it give you any hope that when we get around the corner of this, that the discussion about inequality and about race will change in any profound way?
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First of all, this is not the first time that the horrors of American inequality have been exposed to people. In 2005, the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina, you know, as Danny Glover said, revealed a third world country in the midst of the United States. I think Even in the 2008 financial crisis and the ways that some people were more devastated than others also created important insights into American poverty. Things that, under normal circumstances go completely ignored. So just knowing about it is not enough. And I think social crises almost always provoke a social response. It's complicated to imagine what that will look like right now because of social distance. So we can't all just go to City hall and shake our fists. We can't all just mobilize and take buses to Washington, D.C. to express our outrage at the sclerotic pace of aid for people on the ground. And so for me, I mean, I do have hope. I have hope not based in some kind of cheap religiosity, but hope that is rooted in an understanding of history and the history of ordinary people really leading the way to find solutions to the social dilemmas of whatever period or circumstance that they emerge in. We can see the very basic gestures of solidarity, whether it is the selfless acts of healthcare professionals, people who are trying to procure food and other resources for the elderly. I mean, there are all sorts of examples that we can point to that show the basic decency of regular people in this society. So that's where I do have hope.
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Professor Taylor, thank you so much. Keeanga Yamada Taylor is a contributor to the New Yorker, and she's an assistant professor of African American studies at Princeton. Her most recent book is titled Race for Profit How Banks and the real estate industry undermine black home ownership. I'm David Remnick and that's our program for this week. I want to thank you for joining us wherever you are. I hope you're healthy and I hope you stay that way. See you next time.
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The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Bottin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, Kalalea, David Krasnow, Gofen Mputubwele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses and Stephen Valentino, with help from Allison McAdam, Meng Fei Chen and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.