I recently sat down, virtually, with Lynn Louise Wonders, LPC of Wonders Counseling to discuss the racial health disparities making the news during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lynn had seen my post about this topic on Instagram and invited me to share more on her YouTube channel. We talked about understanding racial health disparities through a social justice lens, the underlying principles of minority stress theory, factors that have been shown to improve mental health for marginalized people, and how to learn more through my upcoming supervision and consultation group.. I hope that you’ll check out the video and let me know what you think in the comments. Thanks to Lynn for inviting me to share with her community of therapists about ways to challenge social injustice during (and beyond!) the pandemic.
The pandemic, minority stress theory, & racial health disparities
I am sad, angry and scared about the news that Black people have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. I am not at all surprised by it. Black people and those who are in solidarity with Black communities are not surprised by this development. I’m certain that many predicted it.
When I train about trauma and oppression, I include a discussion of minority stress theory. Minority stress theory studies how social stressors, including those associated with discrimination and “microaggressions,” become chronic stress and negatively impact the mental and physical health of marginalized people. Over time the accumulated stress of oppression, and the constant adaptation required to manage that stress, can make you physically sick and lead to many of the underlying medical conditions that increase the severity of COVID-19. (We’ll be learning about and discussing minority stress theory in my upcoming supervision and consultation group, Trauma, Oppression, and the Therapeutic Relationship.)
If we don’t understand minority stress or take seriously the role that systemic factors play in our physical health, we run the risk of reinforcing the most grotesque tenets of anti-Black racism and white supremacy. The idea that Black people are genetically inferior to white people underlies so many of the realities of racism and anti-Black sentiment in this country‘s history and current reality. This belief is not simply that Black people “deserve” less than white people based on some arbitrary metric, but that there is something inherently deficient about Black bodies.
This pandemic has exposed so much about what’s not working in our systems: our healthcare systems, our economic systems, the systems that govern our connections to family and community. The realities of racial health disparities in our country have not been a secret and did not come into existence when white people “discovered” them. They did not start with this pandemic and the destruction they cause will not end with it. How can we use this moment to ensure that these realities are not forgotten when this current crisis has passed?