Race in the Marketplace and COVID-19

In the United States alone, COVID-19 has claimed tens of thousands of lives. And though it is no respecter of wealth, social status, or national boundary, initial claims that “We are all in this together!” have fallen flat. Such universalizing claims have proven unable to camouflage the extreme inequality in suffering, just as history would suggest (De Waal 2020).

This essay appears at a critical moment, in the throes of a public health crisis, wherein four decades of racialized fiscal austerity have proven to be fundamentally corrosive to any notion of public health and, by extension, social life (see Ahlberg et al. 2019). In response, we offer brief comments here in the form of a plea for more policy-oriented scholarship, particularly that which documents and theorizes the myriad connections between marketplace actors and racial inequality (and its intersection with other forms). We offer these comments as members of the Race in the Marketplace Research Network, which conducts and mobilizes marketplace research to that end. Given editorial limits, we restrict comments to a few topics and limit their scope to the United States, where ethnic and racial inequality are acute, particularly in health.