Landscapes of inequities, structural racism, and disease during the COVID-19 pandemic: Experiences of immigrant and racialized populations in Canada

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected immigrant and racialized communities globally and revealed another public health crisis - structural racism. While structural racism is known to foster discrimination via mutually reinforcing systems, the unevenness of COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths across societies has precipitated attention to the impacts of structural racism. Research highlights the inequitable burden of COVID-19 among immigrant and racialized groups; however, little is known about the synergistic impacts of structural racism and COVID-19 on the health and wellbeing of these groups. Fewer studies examine how structural racism and COVID-19 intersect within neighbourhoods to co-produce landscapes of disease exposure and management. This article examines the pathways through which structural racism shapes access, use, and control of environmental resources among immigrant and racialized individuals in the neighbourhoods of the Peel Region and how they converged to shape health and disease dynamics during the height of Canada's COVID-19 pandemic. Findings from in-depth interviews reveal that mutually reinforcing inequitable systems created environments for COVID-19 to reinscribe disparities in access, use, and control of key resources needed to manage health and disease, and created new forms of disparities and landscapes of inequality for immigrants and racialized individuals. We close with a discussion on the impacts for policy and practice.

Keywords: COVID-19; Immigrant and racialized populations; Landscapes of inequality; Peel Region; Political ecology; Structural racism.