The Detrimental Effects of Covid-19 On People of Color

The Detrimental Effects of Covid-19 People of Color in Chicago through the Artist’s Lens

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The Coronavirus has reshaped the world we live in.

The disastrous effects of Covid-19 will especially assume form in a culturally rich city like Chicago, which is filled with Avant Garde artists who take aesthetically radical approaches to art. This art often conveys racial inequalities, as the work of three Chicago photographers illustrates. Alanna Airitam, Endia Beal and Medina Dugger challenge African American stereotypes and create a new cultural narrative that celebrates black beauty.

Likewise, Chicago local Kerry James Marshall challenges the marginalization of African Americans through abstract works that feature unequivocally black protagonists. According to Marshall, growing up in Birmingham, Alabama in 1955 and being raised near the Black Panther headquarters in South Central Los Angeles has heavily influenced his work. A love for black folk art animates his compositions. Like Airitam, Beal and Dugger, Marshall challenges stereotypes while celebrating blackness.

Chicago artists have historically used art as a form of aesthetic therapy to convey racial inequality. Chicago has a long history of racial inequalities that have assumed form through race riots, redlining, segregation and gentrification.

If the Coronavirus has shown us one thing, it is that little has changed. The same system has kept marginalized communities in poverty. The Coronavirus seems to be the exacerbating the existing racial inequalities in the City.

Chicago is 30% black, but black Americans account for 70% of all coronavirus cases in the city and more than half of the state’s deaths.

African Americans face a higher risk of exposure to the virus, mostly on account of concentrating in urban areas and working in essential industries. Only 20% of black workers reported being eligible to work from home, compared with about 30% of their white counterparts, according to the Economic Policy Institute.