In this commentary, we provide our ground-level observations of how the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19 or COVID) has exposed weaknesses in our federal system to respond to local communities, particularly Black and Latina/os who live and work in the St. Louis region. Our perspectives come from a virtual town hall hosted by the Community Innovation and Action Center (CIAC) at the University of Missouri, St. Louis on April 18, 2020. Based on these initial public discussions, we use St. Louis as a lens for arguing that government’s attenuated impact is not due to a natural disaster itself, but the inevitable result of race-based policies that had worked against Black peoples over generations. The real failure involves our federalist system’s lack of a commitment to racial equity—when race no longer is used to predict life outcomes, and outcomes for all groups are improved—when designing the federal plan to respond to COVID-19 in local communities.

中文翻译：

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美国联邦制中对种族平等的抵制及其对支离破碎地区的影响

在这篇评论中，我们提供了关于新型冠状病毒疾病（COVID-19 或 COVID）如何暴露我们联邦系统中的弱点以应对当地社区，特别是在圣路易斯生活和工作的黑人和拉丁裔/os . 路易斯地区。我们的观点来自于 2020 年 4 月 18 日由圣路易斯密苏里大学社区创新与行动中心 (CIAC) 主办的虚拟市政厅。根据这些最初的公开讨论，我们使用圣路易斯作为镜头认为政府减弱的影响不是由于自然灾害本身，而是基于种族的政策几代以来对黑人不利的必然结果。真正的失败在于我们的联邦制缺乏对种族平等的承诺——当种族不再被用来预测生活结果时，