[Newsone] Van Jones has a message about Black health amid the coronavirus pandemic, and already Black scholars and social media users are slamming him for his analysis.Jones gave his thoughts in a CNN op-ed, where he essentially said that both the government and Black people must “take more responsibility” for the health disparities in the Black community. Jones made his comments after various reports have shown that COVID-19 is disproportionately killing Black people. Jones explained, “Diseases like hypertension, diabetes, asthma and obesity make the virus far more deadly. And African American communities have those illnesses in numbers that are way out of proportion.” Jones then laid out why Black people are more likely to have these underlying health conditions, saying Black people tend to work challenging jobs that “pay less and offer worse health insurance. That’s a recipe for bad health right there.”
He added: “Doctors have been shown to give us shoddier services, even when we have health insurance. Additionally, we tend to live in neighborhoods where the stores sell less healthy food; fast food joints and liquor stores provide too many meals in urban America.”
Although Jones had a point about the “systemic racism on full display right now in our health care and economic systems,” it was his “Black people need to take more responsibility for our individual health choices” that set people off.
With this point, Jones said, “The science makes clear that our lifestyle choices — around sleep, nutrition, stress, and more — directly affect our ability to strengthen our immune system. And at a time when the virus is doing disproportionate damage to our communities, we need to ask: what can we do as individuals to get ourselves and our loved ones out of harm’s way?”