Covid-19 erased a decade of progress on the Black-white life expectancy gap.

Evidence

This essential feature of American life, the way our unreconciled past continues to affect our present, has been made starkly apparent in the two years since we first published the 1619 Project. During that time, the nation witnessed the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others, highlighting the long legacy of state violence against Black Americans. When the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, Black people suffered disproportionately severe health outcomes, mirroring an enduring legacy of racially driven medical and health disparities: in 2020, Covid-19 slashed the life expectancy of Black men by three years and eliminated ten years of progress toward narrowing the life-expectancy gap between Black and white Americans. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 57

Categorization

• CANDY: A concrete, startling statistic — Covid cut Black men’s life expectancy by three years and wiped out ten years of gap-narrowing progress — usable in casual conversation.