What Juneteenth reminds us for ME and Long COVID communities

Juneteenth is a moment to celebrate freedom and reckon honestly with who that freedom has and has not reached. For the ME and Long COVID community, that reckoning is personal.

The intersections are real and documented.

Black Americans experience disability at significantly higher rates than the general population. According to the U.S. Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation, 31.8% of Black non-Hispanic adults report having a disability-related health condition, well above the national average. The CDC estimates roughly 25% of Black Americans live with disabilities, compared to 16% of white Americans and 17% of Hispanic Americans.

Black Americans are also significantly more likely to develop Long COVID than white Americans. Yet they are less likely to receive a formal diagnosis or appropriate follow-up care. The same medical disbelief and diagnostic delays that have plagued the ME/CFS community for decades fall harder on patients of color, compounding an already inequitable system.

Disability and race compound in every system.

Black people with disabilities do not just face one barrier, they navigate overlapping systems of racism and ableism simultaneously. Black students with disabilities are suspended or expelled at disproportionate rates. Black adults with disabilities are more likely to be incarcerated or subjected to police violence. They are the same problem, showing up across every institution.

Medicaid is not a safety net that catches everyone equally.

34% of Medicaid enrollees report having a disability but did not enroll through a formal disability pathway, leaving them vulnerable when work requirements take effect. Black and brown disabled people face both the administrative burden of proving disability and the structural barriers that make that process harder to navigate. For people with ME and Long COVID, whose conditions are frequently invisible and poorly understood, those barriers are even steeper.

People with ME and Long COVID know what it means to be dismissed, disbelieved, and left out of the systems meant to protect them. We must ensure that our fight for recognition does not replicate those same exclusions.

On Juneteenth, we are reminded that the intersectionality must be ever-present.