Social unrest has spread across America and beyond in reaction to the police killing of an unarmed African American man, George Floyd, by a Minneapolis police officer. It has brought even more attention to the racial inequality and economic bifurcation in the US — and the ways in which they are inexorably linked — which the Covid-19 pandemic had already laid bare.

Just as people of colour have disproportionately been victims of the virus, they also have been subject to higher levels of incarceration and police brutality. The roots of the problem are deep and old. An invisible line runs from the original sin of slavery in the US, to the racial segregation of the Jim Crow south, to the gerrymandering or redrawing of voting maps that has supported the systemic economic oppression of African Americans. As a result, relative to whites, they have suffered higher levels of poverty and unemployment, as well as poorer education levels and health outcomes, for decades.

In the post-second-world-war era, African American unemployment levels have typically been double the levels of those of white Americans. Some progress in closing the gap was made in the past 10 years thanks to nearly full employment preceding the outbreak of Covid-19 — companies have trouble discriminating when they really need workers. Yet there is a persistent divide between the fortunes of white Americans and those of colour.