In this timely volume of The ANNALS, “The COVID-19 Shock to Our Deep Inequities: How to Mitigate the Impact,” special editors Carol Graham, Michal Grinstein-Weiss, and Edward Lawlor bring together scholars to discuss, with empirical data, “how and where the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated pre-existing inequalities.” The pandemic produced a “stress test,” as Lawlor calls it, on the American public, resulting in historic deaths and despair, economic impacts, and political and social unrest.
The authors in this issue discuss, for example, the rural-urban economic and employment impacts of the pandemic, the toll the pandemic took on the already-broken nursing home system in the United States, and how banks “doubled down” on their use of racial capitalism during the pandemic. The pandemic, and its impacts, “has raised the stakes for a focused and more productive research and policy agenda on racial disparities, equity, structural and institutional racism, and resulting new approaches to public policy.” This volume provides a starting point to such a research and policy agenda.
