Pitch: One of the things that popped out to me while I looked at the data for West Virginia is how much of it is missing. West Virginia has been reporting COVID cases and deaths for races such as White, Black, Other, Multi-racial. They had reported on Native Hawaiians and American Indians/Alaskan Natives in between but stopped doing so. According do them, this is due to little or no data in those categories. Instead, they have grouped different races into one category called the “Other”.
According to the US Census Bureau, in 2019, WV had 93.1% White population, 3.7% Black, 0.2% American India/Alaskan Native, 0.8% Asian, 0% NHPI, 1.8% multi-racial and 2.4% other races. While the state itself seems to be predominantly white, discounting or aggregating races is an erasure of identity. I want to explore how doing this could have repercussions for the minority groups that are sidelined in the process. I also want to follow the data and see what options patients are given when reporting their race in hospital documents. I also want to ask West Virginia’s health department whether the decision to aggregate races was taken after consulting people from those races or not and why that decision was taken in the first place.
For this, I want to reach out to Abigail Echo-Hawk, director of Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI) and the chief research officer for the Seattle Indian Health Board, who has been working for the data on indigenous community and fighting to correct racial misclassification. I recently came across her interview for science mag, where she said, “I see being eliminated in the data as an ongoing part of the continuing genocide of American Indians and Alaska Natives. If you eliminate us in the data, we no longer exist.”
For this I would like to talk to:
- West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources
- Asian American Advancing Justice
- A NHPI, AIAN and Asian from the state