Coping with Racism: a Perspective of COVID-19 Church Closures on the Mental Health of African Americans
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PERSPECTIVE ARTICLE
Coping with Racism: a Perspective of COVID-19 Church Closures on the Mental Health of African Americans Flavia DeSouza 1 & Carmen Black Parker 1 Reverend Maria Myers Black 4
&
E. Vanessa Spearman-McCarthy 2 & Gina Newsome Duncan 3 &
Received: 6 August 2020 / Revised: 11 September 2020 / Accepted: 28 September 2020 # W. Montague Cobb-NMA Health Institute 2020
Abstract Academic medical literature and news outlets extensively document how older individuals in communities of color, especially African American communities, are dying disproportionately of COVID-19 due to ongoing societal, racial, and healthcare disparities. Fear of death and suffering are acutely elevated in Black communities; yet, African Americans have been facing, coping with, and overcoming American societal racism and subsequent detriments to our mental health for centuries. Predominately African American churches (hereafter referred to as the “Black Church”) have always served a historical, cultural, contextual, and scientifically validated role in the mental health well-being of African American communities coping with American racism. Nonetheless, buildings of worship closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-March 2020. This article is a first-hand perspective of five Black internists/psychiatrists who are deeply involved in both academic medicine and leadership positions within the Black Church. It will explore how the physical closure of Black Churches during this period of increased mental stress, as caused by healthcare inequities revealed by the COVID-19 epidemic, is likely to be uniquely taxing to the mental health of African Americans, particularly older African Americans, who must cope with American racism without physical access to the Black Church for the first time in history. Keywords COVID-19 . Church . Religion . African American . Black . Racism
I, Reverend Dr. Maria Black, write today as an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, an older African American woman, and a board-certified internist with nearly 40 years of experience in general and academic medicine in Georgia. I write alongside my daughter, Dr. Carmen Black Parker; my lifelong friend and AME Church member, Dr. E. Vanessa Spearman-McCarthy; and my friends, Drs. Gina Duncan and Flavia DeSouza. We all
* Carmen Black Parker [email protected] 1
Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA
2
Department of Psychiatry and Health Behavior, Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University, Augusta, GA, USA
3
Eastover Psychological and Psychiatric Group, P.A, Charlotte, NC, USA
4
African Methodist Episcopal Church, Augusta, GA, USA
identify as Christian Black women and are all practicing internists and/or psychiatrists. We have been struck by the breadth of the racial disparities that African Americans, especially older African Americans, face during this COVID-19 pandemic in the USA. COVID-19 does not discriminate by race or ethnicity. However, older individuals in communities
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