--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning, I'm Duarte Giraldino. And I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This week, Duarte and I are sitting down with journalists to help us mark one year since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Today we're looking at how and why COVID-19 is hitting young Black American men so hard.
--:-- Shamita Basu: During one of the peaks of the pandemic last summer, Black people ages 35 to 44 were dying at nine times the rate of white people the same age.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: Earlier, people who were white or from more affluent communities didn't know anybody who had died from COVID. Their social media feed didn't have any kind of RIPs on it. Whereas people from Black communities, immigrant communities, lower-income communities, their social media feeds were quite often full of loss from the pandemic.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But for much of the pandemic, she was a narrative health care reporter at ProPublica. She says there's something about being black in America that makes you more likely to die from COVID-19.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: On average, black Americans are getting chronic conditions 10 years younger than their white counterparts. Their bodies are biologically aging faster than their white counterparts.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: To understand why, she points to the African-American folk tale of John Henry. It's the story of a railroad worker who took on the machine and won, literally.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: The part of the folktale that quite often gets overlooked is that once he beats the machine, he drops dead from sheer exhaustion. John Henry was a steel-driving man who died with a hammer in his hand.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: So in the story of John Henry, what did the machine represent and what did his effort represent? The machine is social inequality, lack of access to healthcare, hospitals, and community that are underfunding, undervaluing, disinvestment of resources, redlining, and segregation in the way that creates and shapes community.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: All of the fighting and the pushing back against those barriers and boundaries and that structural inequality, that's where the stress comes from.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: For a long time, it was believed the reason black men die younger and have higher rates of hypertension, obesity, and diabetes than white people was a matter of personal responsibility, eating badly, unhealthy lifestyles, and behaviors.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: This theory, however, of John Henryism challenges all that. It argues the stress of racism, of fighting to get out of poverty, that is what is literally making people sick. That it physically changes bodies.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: So your modern-day John Henry is pushing back against the constraints of society. And in that effort, in that vigilance to thrive, not just survive, but to thrive, it's the stress that that causes that really has significant consequences to people's health.
--:-- Shamita Basu: ProPublica interviewed the friends and families of dozens of Black men who died from COVID, and they found a commonality. More than once we heard people say, he was the pillar of the family, pillar of the community.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: They were the folks that people went to when they needed help, when they needed encouragement, when they needed support. Now those people are gone.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: I'm smiling and I'm on a podcast and here I am smiling when I'm thinking of Joshua Bush. Because I'm thinking of a conversation I had with his mother and his wife where they talked about how much of a superhero kind of sci-fi geek Joshua Bush was.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: And his wife often said, she would say, OK, I can't quite go that deep into the force with you. And I say that to say he's a nurse, you know, CNA, working his way to become an RN, working in nursing homes.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: And I'm also thinking about the conversations his wife and his mother had with me when they talk about the way white patients recoiled when he went to go care for them.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: What do you mean? Physically would recoil and say, I don't want that black man touching me. I don't want him helping me.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: And his mom would say he would just kind of smile and shrug his shoulders and say, well, you're missing out on all this great care.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: And I started with the story about the sci-fi fan because his family says, those patients who reacted that way didn't see what we saw. They only saw a large black man coming in them.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: They didn't see the sweet, caring, kind man who had showed this kind of predisposition for nursing and nurturing as young as kindergarten.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: There's something powerful and there's something illuminating about how, in those moments, his whole existence could be reduced to outward appearance.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: And that, to some extent, is what John Henryism is about. It's about pushing against and fighting against those constraints, and then what it does on the inside, what's happening under the skin.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: So when his patients didn't want him to touch them, it was as if they didn't see the superhero that he was.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: Joshua's wife told me her husband's stress was visible all over his body. And then the pandemic hit. And so at first, they thought he had the flu. So they're monitoring his symptoms.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: But his wife says, they woke up, I think it was a Saturday morning, and he just looked at her and he said, no, babe, I need to go to the hospital. You know, I need to go to the hospital.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: And so they go to the hospital, and that was the last time she saw her husband alive, because soon after she came home, she tests positive, and he passed away while she herself was healing from the coronavirus.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: Then there was Eugene Thompson. His story shows the cascading effect of one life lost. Eugene Thompson is a barber in Mississippi.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: And he'd been cutting hair since I want to say he was about 12. And he grew up in a town where segregation had, you know, legal segregation had ended. But it was no secret that there was kind of the dividing line in town.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: And he thought, well, if a black man can be in the White House, why can't I have a barbershop in kind of the white business district in town? And so that became his focus.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: And he did that. He gets his barber's license. Then he realizes he needs to open a school. So he's opening a school to train more barbers.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: And then he realizes, well, I need a place for my students to cut hair. So he begins to open up a second location.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: So now he's got two shops, a barber school, and he is working to not just, you know, help the folks in the community look good, but also providing career paths and opportunity and entrepreneurship for other folks in his community.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: So he was attacking the problem along the entire supply chain from a lack of skills to a lack of a place to deploy those skills, making sure people had places to cut their hair. He was doing it all.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: This was the modern-day John Henry. Modern-day John Henry.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: Then comes COVID. Eugene's mom told me, none of this was easy. Her son was running himself ragged.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: At the age of 46, Eugene was severely overweight. He'd struggled with respiratory issues, anxiety, and sleeplessness throughout his life. High blood pressure and diabetes also ran in his family.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: He died of the virus in early April. And when he is struck down by the coronavirus because no one else in his family has the proper credentials and license to keep the barber school and the barber shops open, that supply chain you just mentioned it shuts down.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: And so that the ripple effect not just for his family but for the community because they weren't able to keep that going.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: And so when people talk about the amount of loss and the loss from COVID, you know, it's loss of life, it's loss of opportunity, it's loss of support, it's loss of mentorship, it's loss of guidance for entire communities. It's really devastating.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: It really does kind of begin to overwhelm the imagination in a lot of ways. For all the modern-day John Henry's and the people who love them, what advice should they draw from my work, from this story, from this phenomenon that striving so much, dealing with the stress could make you more susceptible to COVID-19?
--:-- Akilah Johnson: You know, it's interesting. We asked the researchers who study Black men's health, kind of what should we take away from this? What do we learn from modern-day John Henryism?
--:-- Akilah Johnson: How does that influence what doctors should be doing? At a most basic level, relax, you know, find ways to relax, find ways to relieve some of the pressure, you know, from the valve.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: And that is easier said than done, but it is crucial and critical to find ways to relieve that pressure so the valve doesn't burst.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: If you beat the machine but die in the process, it's sort of not worth it. Well, the point is to beat the machine and not die in the process. That is the goal. That's what we're working towards.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Akilah Johnson, thank you so much for being on Apple News today.
--:-- Akilah Johnson: Thank you.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Duarte, listening to your conversation there with Akilah, it just makes me think about the ripple effect. You know, the way that COVID has created so much loss, not just right now, but also for the future.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Yeah, Shamita, this is what happens when you lose people who really are the pillars of a community.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find a link to Akilah's ProPublica reporting on our show notes page. Plus, some of her more recent work from The Washington Post, where she looks at how the infrastructure in some communities of color may delay vaccine distribution.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Tomorrow, we switch gears and speak with Jen Gann. Jen Gann is the features editor at New York Magazine's The Cut, And she oversaw a series called All Work, No Pay.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It looks at all the different ways that women have suffered economically and emotionally during the pandemic.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I think that work is something necessary and important to my life. But my outlook has definitely changed. I'm very tired, to be frank. I'm very tired after this year.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And while you're there, check out some of our audio stories. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
