Racial Capitalism and COVID-19

The paper interrogates why COVID-19 produced starkly unequal health outcomes across racial and ethnic groups and argues that attributing these disparities primarily to race is insufficient. Drawing on scholarship on vulnerability (e.g., Butler) and Marxist perspectives, the author frames the pandemic’s uneven harms as products of pre-existing, racialized social structures embedded in neoliberal capitalism. The purpose is to situate COVID-19 racial disparities within the broader economic organization of society, showing that group-specific vulnerabilities are structured by socio-economic position and labor market roles. The paper aims to reframe discourse that treats race as intrinsic cause by emphasizing how race operates within and through neoliberal capitalism to produce racial capitalism, thereby shaping comorbidities, exposure, and access to care. The article outlines its plan to review critical accounting literature linking race and capitalism, critique a U.S. policy response grounded in surface-level statistics, advance a racial capitalism analysis, and conclude with implications.

The review situates race within broader economic frameworks via critical accounting scholarship. Two strands are highlighted: (1) Accounting as a racialized profession—work by Annisette and others shows how professionalization reproduced colonial hierarchies and excluded racialized groups (e.g., in Trinidad and Tobago; New Zealand), aligning with capitalistic motives to preserve exploitative relations. (2) Accounting for the racialized subject—historical analyses of slavery demonstrate how accounting practices enabled commodification of enslaved people, reducing subjectivity to quantifiable economic output and facilitating trade and control. Together, these literatures illustrate that race is socially constructed and mobilized to reinforce economic paradigms, supporting the argument that contemporary racial disparities (including COVID-19 outcomes) must be analyzed in relation to neoliberal capitalism.

Conceptual and critical analysis based on secondary sources. The article synthesizes media reports, public health statistics (e.g., CDC), policy proposals (e.g., the COVID-19 Racial and Ethnic Disparities Task Force Act), and scholarly literature from critical accounting, sociology, and legal studies. It employs racial capitalism as the interpretive framework (e.g., Robinson; Leong) to contextualize pandemic disparities within neoliberal economic structures. No original empirical data were collected, as noted in the article’s data availability statement.

• Widely circulated statistics showed racial disparities in COVID-19 outcomes, including: Latinos and African-Americans were about three times as likely to be infected as whites (Oppel et al., 2020); African-Americans were 2.1 times more likely than whites to die from the virus (CDC, 2020); in Chicago, mortality among African-Americans was 73 per 100,000 vs 22 per 100,000 among whites; local data in places like Fairfax County and Kent County also showed disproportionate infections and impacts among Latino and Black residents. - A policy response—the COVID-19 Racial and Ethnic Disparities Task Force Act—sought to address racial disparities by convening experts and reporting disaggregated data, but the author argues this approach treats symptoms and neglects underlying economic structures. - Common explanations (higher comorbidities; inability to physically distance due to living and working conditions) are necessary but incomplete because they do not account for why racialized minorities disproportionately have comorbidities and are concentrated in low-paid, frontline work. - Racial capitalism—racism as constitutive of capitalism—better explains pandemic disparities by highlighting how neoliberal capitalism organizes labor markets, social protections, and wealth, producing stratification that elevates exposure and vulnerability for racialized groups. - The persistence of a stark racial wealth gap (e.g., average wealth roughly USD 171,000 for white families vs USD 17,150 for Black families, ~10:1) exemplifies systemic, generational inequality consistent with racial capitalism and helps explain differential pandemic risks and outcomes.

By reframing COVID-19 racial disparities through racial capitalism, the paper addresses the central question of causation: race-based differences in outcomes are not primarily about intrinsic racial factors but about how neoliberal capitalism structures risk, health, and work along racial lines. This perspective clarifies why racialized communities bear greater comorbidity burdens and frontline exposure—outcomes of labor market segmentation, weakened social protection, and spatial and economic stratification. Consequently, race-focused but economy-agnostic policies risk superficial remediation; meaningful redress requires confronting neoliberal policy regimes (e.g., deregulation, privatization, erosion of labor power) that produce racialized vulnerability. The argument’s significance lies in redirecting scholarship and policy from surface-level metrics toward structural determinants embedded in racial capitalism, enabling more effective strategies to reduce health inequities.

The paper concludes that while COVID-19 unequivocally harmed certain racialized groups more than whites in the United States, explanations that attribute disparities to race alone are incomplete. Treating the observed disparities as primarily racial, without interrogating neoliberal capitalism’s role in producing racialized vulnerability, leads to policy measures that address symptoms rather than causes. The author urges analyzing pandemic statistics through the lens of racial capitalism to identify structural interventions—targeting labor markets, social protections, and wealth inequality—that can more effectively mitigate health disparities revealed by COVID-19.

The article is a conceptual critique based on secondary sources and contains no original empirical data. Its examples are largely U.S.-focused and often draw on early-pandemic statistics and media reports, which may reflect temporal and contextual limitations. The paper does not test hypotheses empirically, which may limit generalizability and causal inference.