Caregiving Challenge:

Caregiving and Communities of Color

The pandemic has been extraordinarily hard on the 50+ million family caregivers in the United States. Millions have been forced from the workforce (an estimated three million women have left the workforce during COVID because of caregiving responsibilities), with many caregivers facing increased financial strain and many reporting mental health and interpersonal challenges. These challenges are widespread and are being felt in every community in the country but are being felt most acutely in communities of color and among women of color in particular. According to a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 18% of Black women report caring for someone who needed special assistance prior to the pandemic, significantly higher than the 12% of White women who report the same. Eighteen percent of Hispanic women say they have had to take on additional caregiving responsibilities since the pandemic started. And 9% of Hispanic women say they have had to take time off work because they were caring for a family member quarantining from or sick with COVID-19.

The challenges of caregiving and communities of color will be the topic of a new Longevity Project virtual event, to be held on June 3 at 2:00 PM ET, which you can register in advance for here. The event coincides with the ongoing efforts of the Biden Administration and Congress to grapple with a range of caregiving and social equity issues. The new Administration has been direct in declaring its intention to take on both the caregiving crisis and the problems of structural racism, and those challenges meet around the extra burdens that communities of color face around caregiving.

Even before the pandemic, the burden of caregiving has fallen unequally on communities of color. Of the estimated 34.2 million adults who have been caregivers for a family member aged 50 or older, Hispanics, African Americans, and Asian Americans are providing care at a higher rate than their White counterparts. While all caregivers certainly face challenges, often considerable ones, caregivers of color report with greater frequency financial hardships caused by loss of income and poor health exacerbated by the pressures of caregiving.

Becoming a caregiver for a family member can impact financial and employment status regardless of racial demographics. But Black and Hispanic caregivers report experiencing significantly more financial strain and are more likely to be unemployed or to alter their career path plans by retiring early or quitting than White and Asian American caregivers. This can lead to situations where Black and Hispanic caregivers are more likely to report their financial status as poor than their White and Asian American counterparts. Additionally, White caregivers are most likely to tell their employers about their caregiving responsibilities, while Black caregivers are the least likely. Hispanic caregivers are by significant margins skeptical or unsure of the support that they can expect to get from their employers.

A major issue in the American medical system is the discrepancy in care amongst racial demographics. People of color are less likely to receive “quality care” from physicians, something that translates to caregivers as well. Caregivers of color are much more likely to report feeling dismissed by their care recipient’s medical providers, which can lead to feelings of invisibility by the medical community as well as fear that their loved one is not receiving the best medical treatment available. BIPOC caregivers themselves are also more likely to experience poor physical health than White caregivers.

In some ways, communities of color may offer a caregiving roadmap for the rest of society. Caregivers of color are much more likely than White caregivers to view their role as a natural and expected part of life, and the greater prevalence of multigenerational housing and shared caregiving responsibilities may explain why some communities, such as the Latino community, have longer life expectancies than what other statistical indicators might suggest. But that model only works if families – especially families that operate on the edge of economic solvency – are not financially crippled by caregiving and caregivers are not functionally decoupled from the workforce. How best to do this, and how to best support the significant caregiving challenges in communities of color, is a critical question for society, one that we will take on on June 3.