Nicole Cardoza Nicole Cardoza Nicole Cardoza Nicole Cardoza

Protect the aging population from COVID-19.

Today’s Anti-Racism Daily is inspired by my grandmother, who, unlike me, has been relatively even-keeled with the events of the past few months. It’s not because she, as an African American woman, feels impassive to recent events. She’s just been here before; rallying during the Civil Rights movement, watched her family survive sickness and disease. For her, fighting for justice and overcoming the odds is a daily practice. I think about the challenges she could face as COVID-19 persists, and researched the disproportionate impact of this pandemic on aging communities of color as part of our weekly series. I’d love to know your thoughts.


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By Nicole Cardoza

Our country is working to maintain a sense of normalcy as COVID-19 persists. But as we do, we can’t forget about the racial disparities of its impact, especially how these disparities intersect with other marginalized groups. One that is particularly vulnerable is the aging population. 

A KHN analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that African Americans ages 65 to 74 are 5x more likely to die from COVID-19 than white people. In the 75-to-84 group, the death rate for Black people was 3.5x greater. Among those 85 and older, Black people died twice as often. In all three age groups, death rates for Hispanics were higher than for whites but lower than for Black people (KHN).

“People are talking about the race disparity in COVID deaths, they're talking about the age disparity, but they're not talking about how race and age disparities interact: They're not talking about older black adults.”


Robert Joseph Taylor, director of the Program for Research on Black Americans at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, for KHN.

Some of the health outcomes for older people of color can be attributed to a lifetime of stress related to racism. People of color have historically endured more stress and anxiety throughout their lives than their white counterparts while navigating racism and discrimination. As a result, we accumulate this tension in our bodies, leading to a wide variety of adverse health implications. This concept is called “weathering,” coined by Arline Geronimus, and can occur from a wide range of stressors, from experiencing police brutality to microaggressions, and everything in between (NPR).

In the scientific community, weathering is identified as “allostatic load,” which measures the substances the body releases after periods of stress. When our bodies are called into “fight or flight” mode, our stress-related neurotransmitters, called catecholamines, quickly release corticotropin, which in turn triggers the release of cortisol, giving our body a jolt of adrenaline to respond to the stressor. Although it can be useful in short situations, the lives of people of color are filled with stress-inducing events. Over time, this allostatic load accumulates. A study that compared the average allostatic loads for Black people and white people found that the mean score for Blacks was roughly comparable to that of Whites who were a full ten years older, demonstrating that people of color age more rapidly than their white peers (Science Direct).

After a lifetime of wear and tear from chronic stress and anxiety, it’s no wonder that aging communities of color are more likely to have pre-existing medical conditions that make them more susceptible to contracting the disease (CDC). Communities of color, particularly Black people, are more likely to have complications like diabetes, chronic kidney disease, obesity, heart failure and pulmonary hypertension (KHN).

But aging communities of color are also more likely to distrust medical care, which means that they're less likely to listen to precautions for contracting COVID-19 and interact with the healthcare system for testing and treatment. And for good reason. As discussed in a previous newsletter, our healthcare system has a legacy of providing inequitable treatment across racial groups. But beyond this, there’s are a series of gross acts of medical violence against communities of color throughout history. These have forced these communities to be wary, disenfranchising them from the care they deserve.

One reason for this is the forced sterilization of communities of color. Over 60,000 women – and some men – were sterilized without their consent across the U.S. between the 1930s and the 1970s (Huffington Post). These people were disproportionately Mexican, and many were Japanese. Similarly, in the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of Native American women were sterilized without consent (NYTimes). In Puerto Rico, nearly one-third of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age were sterilized, the world’s highest rate (University of Wisconsin-Madison). In the U.S., this violence were justified by a Supreme Court decision that actively sought to "breed out" traits that were considered undesirable (NPR). It’s fitting to believe that the medical system may be biased as a result.

In 1932, 600 men were invited to participate in a research study with the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) to find a cure for syphilis. Participants were offered free medical care for their participation – and many participants, sharecroppers who had never had the chance to receive medical care before, signed up eagerly. Throughout their lifetime, men were monitored regularly by health officials and were assured they were being treated. But in reality, they were part of a sick experiment: the PHS was only watching to track the disease’s full progression untreated. The men were told they had “bad blood” but not that they had syphilis. They were only given placebos, like aspirin and mineral supplements, despite the fact that penicillin was widely available as a recommended treatment in 1947 (History). Researchers provided no effective care as the men “died, went blind or insane or experienced other severe health problems” until an outraged researcher leaked the story to the press in 1972, which prompted the study to be shut down. By that time, 28 participants had died from the disease. One hundred more passed away from related complications, at least 40 spouses had been diagnosed with it, and the disease had been passed to 19 children at birth (History).

This study alone is noted as creating deep distrust between Black patients that remember the story from their lifetime. Tuskegee Study alone is responsible for “over a third of the life expectancy gap between older black men and white men in 1980” (The Atlantic).

There’s also a significant percentage of our aging population of color that live in spaces where COVID-19 is rampant. Of the 1.5 million adults currently in state and federal prisons, 12% are over the age of 55, and the majority are people of color, which means that these pre-existing health conditions and distrust of the medical system are facing tight, unsanitary living conditions on top of everything else (JSTOR). But these numbers are rising; our aging. According to a 2012 report from the ACLU, the number of elderly prisoners is expected to double by 2030, calling for a more critical look at protecting our aging population from future pandemics behind bars (JSTOR).

We must invest in protecting the senior communities around us today. And, we need to create more policies and practices that foster a more equitable tomorrow. The U.S. is getting older; by 2035, there’s expected to be more people over the age of 65 than children under the age of 18 (Census). If we can’t count some of the historical biases and disparities that prevent some of us from being well now, there’s no guarantee we can support all of us later. 

key takeaways

  • Aging communities of color are more likely to die from COVID-19 than white communities.

  • Weathering, or the accumulation of “fight and flight” response of the body because of racism and discrimination, leads to adverse health outcomes for people of color – particularly aging populations.

  • A series of acts of medical violence throughout history have created a deep distrust of the healthcare system in older communities of color.

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