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In this commentary, we provide our ground-level observations of how the novel COVID-19 pandemic has exposed weaknesses in our federal system to respond to local communities, particularly African Americans and Latina/os who live and work in the St. Louis region. It is based on a virtual town hall hosted by the Community Innovation and Action Center (CIAC) at the University of Missouri, St. Louis on April 18, 2020. Based on these initial public discussions, we use St. Louis as a lens for arguing that that government’s attenuated impact is not due to a natural disaster itself, but the inevitable result of race-based policies that had worked against African Americans over generations. The real failure involves our federalist system’s lack of a commitment to racial equity - when race no longer is used to predict life outcomes, and outcomes for all groups are improved - when designing the federal plan to respond to COVID-19 in local communities.
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Grigsby et al. (2020) studied this question.