Health Equity in the Face of Change: Tools for a National Campaign Against Racism

Overview:

This is a 90-minute recording of a live webinar.

This webinar will inspire participants to strategize to act on three dimensions of health intervention, three levels of racism, and three principles for achieving health equity.

Dr. Camara Jones presents a Cliff Analogy for understanding three dimensions of health intervention: providing health services, addressing the social determinants of health (including poverty and neighborhood conditions), and addressing the social determinants of equity (including racism and other systems of structured inequity). She then turns her focus to a discussion of racism as a social determinant of equity and a root cause of”racial/ethnic differences in health outcomes. She defines racism as”a system of structuring opportunity and assigning value based on the social interpretation of how one looks (which is what we call ‘race’), that unfairly disadvantages some individuals and communities, unfairly advantages other individuals and communities, and saps the strength of the whole society through the waste of human resources.” She identifies three levels of racism (institutionalized, personally-mediated, and internalized) and illustrates these three levels with her Gardener’s Tale allegory. She then generalizes her discussion of racism to encompass other systems of structured inequity.

Dr. Jones defines health equity as “assurance of the conditions for optimal health for all people, identifies three principles for achieving health equity, and gives examples of how those principles can be operationalized. She closes with two additional allegories to equip attendees to name racism and other systems of structured inequity, ask “How is racism operating here?, and organize and strategize to act.