L ayal Liverpool has a PhD in virology and immunology, and has worked as a reporter for New Scientist and Nature . In her new book Systemic: How Racism is Making Us Ill , she unearths the shocking facts about health threats to people of colour. What was the impetu s for the book? The idea came about in 2021.
A year earlier, Covid had hit and I had just moved from medical research to working as a science journalist. My editor asked the question, is the coronavirus racist? We were seeing racial and ethnic health gaps when it comes to Covid. So in the UK, for example, people belonging to Black and Asian ethnic groups were experiencing worse outcomes.
So I started investigating and it opened up a whole box of things. What I realised is that racism really is a public health crisis. We see across the board, from infectious diseases to cardiovascular disease, cancer and mental health conditions, that people belonging to marginalised racial and ethnic groups tend to experience worse outcomes.
I mean definitely that’s a bad thing, but it was also empowering to realise, because when we recognise it’s racism that is contributing to those disparities, we realise we can do something about it – which for me was really motivating. What’s the message or impression you’d like to leave with people once they’ve read the book? I would love for people to think about racism in the same way they think about other things that are widely accepted to be harmful for our health – such as s.
