How Black Girls Were Disproportionately Impacted by the Pandemic

It’s a well-established fact that inequity that existed before the pandemic has only been compounded by it. It’s a frustrating reality for anyone but is especially difficult for Black women and girls. It’s impossible for anyone who has not lived as a Black woman or girl to understand that experience, but a recent New York Times report affords a snapshot of it: The article examines the pandemic hardships of three young women of color: Yanica Mejias, Azariah Baker, and Jamese Logan, each of whom were forced to grow up at a rapid pace, tasked with taking care of both their families and their respective well-beings.

For nearly 18 months, Jamese Logan has been forced to care for four children while her mother is at work following the death of her aunt in May. The 15-year-old Maryland resident revealed how difficult it was to focus on schoolwork while also juggling the needs of her household. “I’m trying to figure out a way to balance it all out,” she said.

Yanica Mejias found herself shouldering her family’s financial burdens after she, her mother, and her younger sister were forced to move into the basement of their aunt’s house. “It was kind of like we were starting from zero,” she said. Her job working at a drive-through burger joint has become a “lifeline,” and the 17-year-old from Maryland now works instead of hanging with friends or her sister. Mejias detailed that her dreams of attending the University of Miami are now entirely dependent on her family’s financial stability, to which she is a central pillar.

Azaria Baker, a 15-year-old from Chicago, throughout the pandemic has cared for her 70-year-old grandmother and 2-year-old niece on top of attending virtual school and working at a local grocery store. Her responsibilities have manifested in blurred vision and headaches, which interfere with her ability to care for her family and work. “I remember one night, I was making dinner and I was having a panic attack. I was crying, I felt like I couldn’t breathe, and my heart was racing,” Baker said. She also participated in the racial justice movements that dominated the summer of 2020. Now, Baker has returned to school, which means her commute forces her to wake up at 5 a.m. “I am also overwhelmed trying to keep up with schoolwork, go to work after, and I worry about my mom’s physical and mental health,” Baker said, adding, “The reality is that a large portion of the time, I’m not OK.”

These young women’s stories articulate the extra weight that the pandemic has heaved upon young women of color. Although COVID-19’s tendrils didn’t directly reach each of these three young women, the economic reverberations of the pandemic created a new set of ills that exacerbated their responsibilities in their homes, families, and schools, ultimately manifesting in a range of anxiety and undue burden.

There are many ways in which young people of color in particular have been disproportionately disadvantaged due to COVID-19. People of color are more likely to die of COVID-19 than their white counterparts, which in turn means proportionally more minority youth have lost a parent or a family member to the disease than their white counterparts. While the pandemic has created major educational setbacks for all school-aged children, children of color are roughly three to five months behind in their curriculums, compared to their white peers, who are roughly one to three months behind in their curriculums. Additionally, students of color were less likely to have had access to in-person learning during the pandemic, resulting in students of color being twice as likely as white students to receive no live contact with their teachers. Because women of color were more likely than their white counterparts to experience child care–related job disruptions, young women of color, including Baker, Mejias, and Logan, were forced to shoulder more caregiving responsibilities so their parents could continue working.

Scheherazade Tillet, a founder and executive director of the organization A Long Walk Home, an organization in Chicago that helps empower Black girls, articulated the unfair tribulations thrust upon girls of color during the pandemic to the Times. “Black girls were on the front lines of racial justice movements, they were essential workers and they were primary caregivers,” she said, adding, “there’s no other group that was all three of those things at once.” Azariah Baker, who has been involved in A Long Walk Home, said of her pandemic experience, “There was no time to be a child.”

The world has already recognized and treated Black girls like adults; the pandemic has only forced adulthood onto those girls sooner and with barely any room for respite.

A 2018 report corroborated this by identifying “adultification bias,” or that the frequency with which Black girls are regarded as being adults, or having adult-like qualities, strips them of their perceived status as children. The report also claims that the lack of assumed innocence of Black girls results in harsher treatment of them by school authorities and law enforcement in comparison to their white peers. In fact, over the last decade, there have been countless instances of Black girls across the country receiving increasingly harsh punishments from school officials including detentions, suspensions, arrests, physical harm, and detainment.

A National Women’s Law Center 2018 report backed up this finding, revealing that Black girls were more likely than their white counterparts to be penalized by authority figures and teachers for clothing infractions in school. Many of the girls who were surveyed also pointed out that, starting in early childhood, they felt they’d been classified as aggressive or angry and were seen as having attitude problems. These biases contribute to the different standards to which Black girls are held and the outsized disciplinary measures with which they must cope.

The disturbing and pervasive truth is that Black girls haven’t been afforded childhood during the pandemic, but that had also been true well before COVID-19. They have long been forced to mature in a way that catapults them through adolescence and straight into adulthood. Black girls are given neither the grace nor the benefit of the doubt that is often afforded to white adolescents. This pandemic has only further stripped them of their ability to remain children, only compounding their sped-up “adultification” process. While it is important to acknowledge the heavy toll that Black women and girls have had to face during the throes of the pandemic, it is equally important to acknowledge and confront the biases that routinely plague their existence in general.