Jensen Speaker Series presents, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota, “The Deaths America Treats as Normal”

This talk explores racial disparities in mortality during U.S. pandemics, using the 1918 and COVID-19 pandemics to develop general frameworks for understanding inequality in pandemic experiences—and what they reveal about inequality during ordinary, non-pandemic times. The first part of the talk considers racial disparities during the most devastating respiratory pandemic of the 20thcentury, the 1918 flu; shows that those disparities were surprisingly small; and develops new hypotheses, grounded in social immunology, to account for this anomaly. The second part of the talk pivots from 1918 to 2020-21. During the 1918 pandemic, U.S. white mortality was still lower than U.S. Black mortality had been nearly every year. Today, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the same pattern holds: white mortality during the COVID pandemic has likely still been lower than Black mortality has ever been. Using pandemic mortality as a measuring stick for racial disparities offers a new perspective on the measures we do —and do not —embrace in order to combat racial inequality. I use demographic mortality models to make a new, demographically based case for reparations for racism.

Zoom  https://duke.zoom.us/j/92372433043