Sen. Sherrod Brown on Wednesday introduced a resolution that would declare racism a public health emergency, saying that doing so would help the Senate continue the debate on how to deal with structural racism.

“Some want to treat the coronavirus and racial justice as separate issues, but they’re intimately connected,” Brown told reporters on Wednesday. “We know who proportionally is dying of the coronavirus. It’s the same people who are discriminated against and targeted while simply going about their lives, driving, jogging down a neighborhood street, playing in a park, sleeping in their beds. The pandemic has been the great revealer. It’s exposed what black Ohioans already knew -- that racism threatens their health, their safety and their lives every day.”

Brown’s resolution says that “since the Nation’s founding, the United States has had a longstanding history and legacy of racism, mistreatment, and discrimination against African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and other people of color,” and says its “health care system and other economic and social structures remain fraught with racism and racial, ethnic, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), and class biases that lead to health inequity and health disparities.”

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