I'm personally amused by people looking at the racial disparity in Chicago's #COVID19 mortality rates as if this place hasn't always been Mississippi in a heavy coat. Bronzeville and South Shore didn't have grocery stores for decades and somehow we're shocked at health outcomes.

As a transplant, I've always been perplexed by just how segregated Chicago is for a city that purports to be so progressive. Fact is, black Chicago and white Chicago might was well be two totally different countries, let alone parts of town. They call it a "City of Neighborhoods"

That's really just a polite way of saying, a "City Where People Know Their Place." I grew up in and went to school in the South and I never felt the kind of cultural disconnect that happens here in Chicago. It's easy to see how #COVID19 is exposing this inconvenient duality.

So, in a separate and unequal city where the foundational privilege of one side of town is inherently predicated on the deprivation of access of another side of town, all of the factors that contribute to that inequality are laid bare in this kind of outcome. Racism is deadly.