COVID-19 and 1995's heat wave affect the same communities due to structural racism

by Suzanne Hanney

In the middle of the 1995 Chicago heat wave, Chicago Sun-Times reporter Maudlyne Iherijika got a call from her editor to drop everything and head over to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. Refrigerated trucks were being used as an overflow morgue.

As temperatures hit 106 for three days beginning July 13 – with humidity making it feel like 126 degrees – 739 people died.

“Many had been found decomposing in their homes because nobody bothered to check on them,” Iherijika said as the host of a recent three-day online conference about the 25th anniversary of the heat wave in the context of COVID-19, climate change, and the death of George Floyd.

“They had no families, they were poor and in communities where they felt unsafe so the windows were nailed shut. And we had forgotten them. It was the most heartrending thing for me as a young African American reporter in her 20s to write this story. [The picture of] trucks being pulled up to the back of a building filled with bodies of people who looked like me will stay with me forever.”

The “Summer of Extremes: Racism, Health Inequity and Heat” conference featured Chicago journalists, community leaders, author Eric Klinenberg, and documentary director/producer Judith Helfand. Klinenberg is the author of “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago,” which saw the deaths as structural racism: society’s failure due to poverty and disinvested neighborhoods, lack of health care and food options. Helfand’s 2018 “Cooked: Survival by ZIP Code,” looked at climate change and predicted another crisis unless society did something to change systemic racism.

That crisis was COVID-19, whose impact map shows the same people affected as in the heat wave of 25 years ago.

“The map looks the same if you look at homicides, cancer, diabetes; you can’t be healthy by yourself. You are healthy because of the whole environment around you,” said Linda Rae Murray, MD, MPH, chief for the Chicago Department of Health under Mayor Harold Washington, former chief medical officer of the Cook County Health System and former American Public Health Association president.

Even considering co-morbidities such as high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity, Dr. Murray said 100 White vegans would outlive 100 Black vegans, because of environment. North Shore smokers would outlive those on the COVID map. The reason is that more Whites are able to work from home and fewer of them have highrisk jobs such as bus driver or health care worker.

“I’m so glad in the past few weeks almost all Americans are using the term ‘structural racism,’” said Dr. Murray, who compared the concept to bad soil that produces unhealthy plants. It is a concept that says some people are better and deserve more resources, that others deserve less and it “creates the situation we had in 1995 with the heat wave and with COVID-19.”

What’s needed?

Something akin to the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II, said Anton Seals, Grow Greater Englewood executive director. “This is a system that needs to be broken apart. No more shellacking, piecemealing our way out of it, no more halfstepping mumbo jumbo.”

One-off solutions won’t work, agreed Cook County Commissioner Dennis Deer, who suggested up to $100 million invested in neighborhoods over 10 years. Deer, whose second district stretches between Division and 75th Streets, Laramie Avenue and King Drive, sponsored an ordinance that resulted in the county’s first, recently hired Chief Equity Officer, whose duties will include monitoring minority access to public contracts.

We have survived the last few months by physically distancing ourselves, but if we want a better city, we need mutual aid for older, solitary neighbors, Klinenberg said. “Everything is on the line this summer. What’s terrifying and exciting is the climate change movement, the Black Lives Matter Movement…in a few months we might see a white supremacist re-elected but we could also go in the opposite direction and there would be the most extraordinary changes.”