I came up with the idea for this piece while on staff at Slate in May 2020. Most news reports were about how unhealthy Black people were, and that being the cause of the way the virus was devastating our communities. I knew the reasons were much more systemic than that, and I wanted to write about what could actually be done about it. I started reporting in late April. The piece ran less than a month later.
How I built it
Sourcing. I put out a Twitter call for Black people who'd had a difficult experience with COVID. I was flooded with responses. Among the candidates who came to me, I made two specific editorial choices: Maria, a healthcare worker in metro Detroit who was both a patient and a provider within the medical system, and Sophia, a certified nursing assistant in rural Alabama. The selection was the first structural decision in the piece.
Structure. I opened with Maria because the runaround she got from medical providers— she was symptomatic, dismissed, tested incorrectly, and sent back to work before finally testing positive weeks later—was the experience a lot of readers were having. I was in a fiction workshop at the time, and I pulled craft from it. I wanted the opening to read more like a scene than a standard news lede. I write nonfiction that sounds like fiction. The reader who'd lived Maria's experience needed to feel seen. The reader who hadn't needed to be pulled inside it.
The medical apartheid section in the middle was constructed to show that pandemic disparities the piece was reporting on were not new conditions; they were the latest expression of 400 years of medical mistreatment of Black Americans. Without the historical pivot, the policy argument in the second half would read as a response to a crisis. With it, the policy argument reads as a response to structural oppression.
I closed with Sophia. The quote at the end of her section spoke not only to her resilience but also to that of a community that has always endured. I wrote toward it.
My editor didn't restructure the piece. The bones arrived on his desk the way they ran.
The argument. The piece makes a structural policy argument with four planks: reduce exposure, expand testing and contact tracing, get reliable information into Black communities, and build a coordinated response to preexisting inequities. That framework is a standard public health intervention sequence that I took and applied as the editorial spine.
That's what I mean when I say I creative directed this piece. The reporting decisions, the structural decisions, the historical pivot, the policy frame, the way it looked on the page—every layer was a deliberate authorial choice.
Recognition and Impact
The piece went viral. It was among the first pandemic pieces to argue that the disparities Black Americans were experiencing were not inevitable—and that there were specific, nameable interventions that could change the outcome.
Ed Yong selected it for The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021. He'd read the piece when it first ran, reached out, and brought me onto panels to discuss it before later choosing it for the anthology. The recognition was, at the time, the second biggest of my career, second only to my reporting that halted a highway expansion into a Black neighborhood in Florida.
Artifact 003: The cover of the Best American