In the United States alone, COVID-19 has claimed tens of thousands of lives. And though it is no respecter of wealth, social status, or national boundary, initial claims that “We are all in this together!” have fallen flat. Such universalizing claims have proven unable to camouflage the extreme inequality in suffering, just as history would suggest (De Waal 2020). This essay appears at a critical moment, in the throes of a public health crisis, wherein four decades of racialized fiscal austerity have proven to be fundamentally corrosive to any notion of public health and, by extension, social life (see Ahlberg et al. 2019). In response, we offer brief comments here in the form of a plea for more policy-oriented scholarship, particularly that which documents and theorizes the myriad connections between marketplace actors and racial inequality (and its intersection with other forms). We offer these comments as members of the Race in the Marketplace Research Network, which conducts and mobilizes marketplace research to that end. Given editorial limits, we restrict comments to a few topics and limit their scope to the United States, where ethnic and racial inequality are acute, particularly in health.

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市场竞争和 COVID-19

仅在美国，COVID-19 就夺去了数万人的生命。尽管它不考虑财富、社会地位或国界，但最初声称“我们都在一起！” 已经倒下。正如历史所表明的那样，这种普遍化的主张已被证明无法掩盖苦难中的极端不平等（De Waal 2020）。这篇文章出现在一个关键时刻，正处于公共卫生危机的阵痛之中，其中四个十年的种族化财政紧缩已被证明从根本上腐蚀了任何公共卫生概念，进而腐蚀了社会生活（见 Ahlberg 等人，2019 年） ）。作为回应，我们在此以请求更多政策导向奖学金的形式提供简短评论，特别是记录和理论化市场参与者与种族不平等（及其与其他形式的交叉）之间的无数联系的那些。我们作为市场研究网络竞赛的成员提供这些评论，该网络为此开展和动员市场研究。鉴于编辑限制，我们将评论限制在几个主题上，并将其范围限制在美国，那里的种族和种族不平等非常严重，尤其是在健康方面。