Moving Beyond Racism as a Public Health Crisis Declarations: Steps You Can Take Right Now
Taneisha Fair, The Center for Community Solutions
At the beginning of this series, we discussed how declarations alone are not enough to ameliorate the unending public health crisis—racism.
Our blog series has covered various topics to show how multifaceted this issue is, and why it is imperative that institutions and governments take collective, actionable next steps to end it. Systemic racism is embedded in healthcare, much like all larger systems and has led to negative impacts in Black maternal and infant health and for Black health care workers. Racism has created disparities leading to the criminalization of multi-system youth, has led to the racialized murders of Black and Brown citizens at the hands of police and in supermarkets, as well as gun violence against them. There are even sundown towns still in existence today in the United States and in the State of Ohio.
Racism has created disparities leading to the criminalization of multi-system youth, has led to the racialized murders of Black and Brown citizens at the hands of police and in supermarkets, as well as gun violence against them.
Many local efforts to declare racism as a public health crisis have been made by government entities, towns, cities, and nonprofits across Ohio, but now there is a need to take action. This blog post is the first of three blog posts examining what can be done to make substantive changes after the declarations and to move beyond performative measures.