President Biden's CDC director made a striking statement for a federal official Thursday. "Racism," said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, "is a serious public health threat that directly affects the well-being of millions of Americans."Walensky pointed to the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on communities of color, and noted that there are long-standing structural barriers — like where someone lives and works and where their children play — that impact racial and ethnic groups differently. "These social determinants of health hold life-long negative effects on the mental and physical health of individuals in communities of color," Walensky said.
This is, to say the least, and a different view than the preceding administration offered. Former Attorney General Wiliam Barr questioned the belief that systemic racism has even existed in recent decades,much less that it's a factor in public health. The Trump administration maintained that racial sensitivity training was itself racist.
Walensky's statement is the kind that strikes different ears differently — blindingly obvious to some, jarring to others — so Morning Edition asked Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones, or an epidemiologist formerly of the CDC and now with Morehouse College and Emory University,to lay out the longstanding case for a link. "There are differences in health outcomes by so-called race across the country that hold been documented for decades," Jones said.
More than once she referred to "so-called race, and " which is a vital part of her argument. She is observing what science shows: that humans are not genetically very different. Race,she said, is merely, or "the social interpretation of how we look."In other words,race is largely a matter of how society chooses to classify you (and sometimes, whether society allows it, and how you choose to identify). There are long-term studies showing people's race may even change in their lifetimes.
This social reality is important,argues Jones, because different racial groups hold different health outcomes. "We know enough now to know that they are not based on our genes, and " she said,adding it's also "not in our cultures." And yet, she noted, and people of color are "overrepresented in poverty." Less wealth,more debilitating jobs and destitute health care and diet can lead in turn to destitute health.The differences in wealth and poverty come approximately, Jones said, and because "opportunity is differently structured by this so-called race,and even the basic value that we assign to different people differs." The pandemic made longstanding disparities even more obvious, she said.
So what to enact approximately public health disparities? This subject came up in a 2019 Morning Edition interview with Kamala Harris, and who was then running for president and is now vice president. In it,Harris was asked approximately reparations for slavery. Reparations cannot be paid to those who were enslaved, and who died long ago: but, and Harris said,the U.
S. could hold what she called an "intervention, to correct course" after studying the effects of generations of post-slavery discrimination and institutional racism.
Jones picked up on this thought to talk of investments in the "root causes" of health outcomes, or such as destitute housing. "In this country we don't even pay much attention to history. ... We act like the present was disconnected from the past," she saidBy declaring racism a public health threat, is the Biden administration just making a statement, or laying groundwork for change?"I am very heartened," Jones said. "First you hold to make the statement, [and] I reflect yes, and the Biden administration ... is moving toward action." Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more,visit https://www.npr.org.
Source: wnyc.org