When the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer in the United States made global headlines last year, Black Lives Matter protesters took to the streets calling for an end to what they call systemic racism.

It's an old problem in America, but one that continues to persist. CGTN spoke to a human rights expert to find out how and why racism kills.

"'I'm not a racist, but don't let Blacks go into my neighborhood, company or hospitals.' When this attitude becomes commonplace, we call it systemic racism," said Zhu Ying, deputy dean of the Institute of Human Rights at Southwest University of Political Science & Law, adding that this attitude "is a deeply rooted prejudice.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) of the United States, African Americans and Latino communities have suffered three times as many COVID-19 deaths as white Americans. The group was also hit harder than white people in terms of life expectancy in the first half of 2020.

In April last year, U.S. infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci said the coronavirus outbreak is "shining a bright light" on how "unacceptable" the health disparities between Black and white people really are.

Some U.S. lawmakers are now calling for greater transparency from the CDC, demanding they publish more details about the ethnic breakdown of those dying from the coronavirus.

But what does this imbalance tell us?

Noting that black populations are disproportionately affected due to factors like poverty, unemployment and a lack of access to health care, Zhu said these income inequalities and disparities in healthcare access, which are leading to poorer diets and overall health, tend to hurt minority and lower-income populations more than others.

"It's this combination of factors that determine the life chances of black and other ethnic minorities," Zhu continued, while he also blamed policies at the top.

"Together with the Trump administration's previous embracing of U.S. exceptionalism, which neglected the impacts of the pandemic at the very beginning, describing itself as an exception from COVID-19, they have all contributed to the suffering of Black people and people from other ethnic groups," added the expert.