Public Health Scholars Challenge and Critique the Field on Its Anti-Racist Pedagogy

Last summer, my colleague and I felt a sense of disappointment and desire for more from our public health education. We both started our master’s in public health Fall of 2020, right after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the social uprisings of 2020 catalyzed by the racist murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd by the police. We connected over our commitment to challenging ourselves to more critically understand the intricacies of health inequities. We found ourselves frustrated with our field's approach to addressing racism in public health. For me, I felt I was not being challenged or given tools on how to meaningfully incorporate anti-racism framing into my public health endeavors. Most of the time, I felt frustrated, as were other peers who shared different or similar historically marginalized identities. For us to sit through lectures about how people like us were more prone to health issues because of the racism we endured was like, yeah, duh?

This is what I grew up seeing: my father was diagnosed with diabetes, and the rest of my family have chronic anxiety and depression. My family’s health inequities could be really pinpointed to the intersecting levels of oppression (i.e., race, class, immigration status) we face as a unit. The frustration also manifested further when I constantly found myself having to be a teacher for my white peers who did not get it. I was eager to learn more. I felt my education being stagnant and was eager to learn how to utilize my field's tools/skills to start to address these health inequities. For my colleague, he felt public health had unnecessarily siloed itself to build its legitimacy as a science. As an avid reader, he did not understand why the efforts of scholars in the humanities did not serve as frameworks or inspiration for public health education and research. To him, research on the health effects of racism undertheorized racism.

While there was what seemed like a massive push towards incorporating anti-racist pedagogy in public health curriculum, we, as well as other colleagues committed to health equity, felt that our field was acting in a place that felt performative when it came to racism through check-off lectures and positionality statements. We found ourselves desperate to critically push past the foundation questions, such as how does racism impact health, to questions such as where or how does racism operate or how do other intersecting systems of oppression, such as capitalism, compound these effects? We found ourselves taking courses outside our department into departments such as women's studies and philosophy. We learned about incredible theorists, such as Black Marxist Cedric Robinson, that had literature on literature regarding the question we kept asking. They discussed as well as other theorists, the importance of capitalism intersecting with racism. Racial capitalism is how capitalism utilizes race as a tool to continue to uphold its mission to exploit people for capital gains. Racial capitalism was operating at the forefront of the COVID-19 pandemic through the stark racial COVID-19 inequities among essential workers.

We argue as a field, we are doing a disservice to current and upcoming public health students if we do not 1) discuss racial capitalism's implications with public health and 2) learn specific tools and skills on how to utilize combat racial capitalism as public health practitioners. Community members have been using abolition as a tool for achieving health equity for several years, and we must learn from them. Abolition is the complete removal of a system in partnership with restoring resources such as housing, income, or mental health resources, to name a few. Abolition has been seen as such a politically radical method in mainstream media, and the thing is that we as a field must be radical and not be afraid to be political. Specifically, when people of color have and always will be politicized if we are committed to achieving health equity and envisioning a world in which humans are allowed to live long, healthy lives. Public health must be radical.