Black People Are Dying From COVID-19 at Higher Rates Because Racism Is a Preexisting Condition

A few weeks ago, a thought woke Camara Jones up in the middle of the night. It was about the coronavirus. That’s commonplace these days, but Jones is a family physician and epidemiologist who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where among other things she studied racial bias in the medical system. Her thoughts on a pandemic are anything but commonplace.

The coronavirus had revealed something essential about the workings of race in America. “The thought that woke me up,” she told me over the weekend, “is...