As a student of public health here at UNC, I’ve sat through some difficult lectures, both intellectually and otherwise. But when it comes to the topic of racial disparities in public health, my time as a mixed-race brown woman of color listening to professors and students alike at Gillings School of Global Public Health has yielded cringeworthy moments.
It tends to go like this: The professor will be talking about some health issue, say obesity, and the professor (sometimes) proceeds to address racial disparities of this disease — the idea that some racial groups are affected by it more than others. The professor will then inevitably phrase such disparities like this: “Whether or not you are obese is influenced by a number of factors, including race,” or “being Black or Hispanic makes you more likely to be obese.”
Too often in the field of public health we talk about racial and ethnic disparities in ways that perpetuate racist stereotypes. Too often, those at the front of the classrooms in UNC’s school of public health refuse to recognize the role of systemic racism in health outcomes, instead choosing to simply focus on the fact that certain diseases, such as obesity, are more prevalent in people who are most marginalized and disenfranchised.
They fail to acknowledge that the very concept of race is a construct generated by the same whitened science that is deeply connected to the origins of fields such as western medicine and public health.
To attribute such health disparities to this scientifically produced category of race, then, is ludicrous. Such statements imply that negative health outcomes have some component inherent to race — it approaches the idea that race is tied to biology, and that somehow there are generalizable traits that are biologically inherent to particular races.
This is the kind of mentality that leads to physicians giving Black kids less pain medication in the emergency room than white kids. By using this kind of language in class, we are furthering the justification leading to assumptions that particular races are inferior, in health status and otherwise. This is a dangerous assumption; we know such assumptions have lead to eugenics, testing drugs on Black and brown women in prison and on.
So to Gillings, and to all those in the field of public health, while you can and must recognize that certain racial groups in this country are vulnerable to particular diseases and health outcomes, you must also recognize that when you speak about Black and brown people, and the plethora of health issues affecting us, you must also address that all of these issues are racialized.
The effects of systematic racism cannot be isolated when looking at our vulnerabilities to certain diseases. We must address these questions: Why are we so timid to address racism as a likely cause of health disparities in this country? How can we attempt to bridge health disparities without acknowledging the systems that actively oppress people of color in this country, and prevent us from achieving optimal health?
