In recent years, North Dakota’s Black population has grown rapidly; Black residents accounted for roughly 0.6 percent of the North Dakota population before 2010, but by 2018, they made up nearly 3 percent. Much of this growth can be attributed to immigration from Africa, spurred by refugees seeking asylum from countries such as Somalia, South Sudan and Liberia. African immigrant communities have coalesced in major metropolitan centers such as Bismarck, Grand Forks and Fargo-Moorhead, with community organizations such as the Afro American Development Association stepping in to provide services that are often lacking from the state government.
At the same time, the CRDT data from the COVID Tracing Project show that the rate of COVID cases (per 100,000) for Black people in North Dakota is almost twice as high as for white people, even exceeding other vulnerable categories such as Native Americans. Although the data do not provide a breakdown between COVID’s impacts on African Americans and recent African immigrants to North Dakota, several underlying conditions could contribute to disparate impacts from COVID-19 on both groups.
African Americans in North Dakota are disproportionately likely to be low-income and have pre-existing health problems. Immigrant communities, meanwhile, are heavily represented in North Dakota’s healthcare industry, particularly in long-term care facilities that are also extremely vulnerable to COVID; language barriers and a lack of access to the internet can also make some communities difficult to reach with warnings about the virus, while large multigenerational homes can quickly spread the disease.
This story will explore this disparity and its impacts on Black and African American communities in North Dakota. By speaking to the North Dakota chapter of the NAACP, I will explore how the growing African American community has been hit by COVID, including speaking to a member of the community who actually experienced the disease. I will also focus on the Afro American Development Association in Fargo, which has worked with the city government to develop a program to help African immigrants with quarantining and has translated important COVID-19 related information into their relevant languages.
Finally, I will round out my reporting by speaking to public health employees and contact tracers from the North Dakota Department of Health, who can explain some of the demographic breakdown that they’ve seen as well as what actions are being taken on the state level to combat this disparity. This story will fill a crucial gap in information about North Dakota’s Black population and the specific difficulties that COVID poses to immigrant communities.