Elizabeth Wrigley-Field is a sociologist and demographer at the University of Minnesota, specializing in racial inequality in mortality and historical infectious disease. This talk explores racial disparities in mortality during U.S. pandemics, using the 1918 and COVID-19 pandemics to develop general frameworks for understanding inequality in pandemic experiences — and what they reveal about inequality during ordinary, non-pandemic times. The first part of the talk considers racial disparities during the most devastating respiratory pandemic of the 20th century, the 1918 flu, and develops new hypotheses to account for the surprisingly small disparities. However, white mortality was still lower than Black mortality had been nearly every year of the 1918 pandemic. Today, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the same pattern holds: for white mortality in 2020 to reach the best-ever Black mortality levels would take 400,000 excess deaths. Using pandemic mortality offers a new perspective on the measures we do — and do not — embrace in order to combat racial inequality.

I make a new, demographically based case for reparations for racism.