This article was originally published on the blog for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. It is the final in a five-part series titled “Black Life in Two Pandemics: Histories of Violence”.
Structural racism is inextricably intertwined with the political and legal systems in the United States, a legacy that predates the country’s founding, through the genocide of Indigenous populations and the kidnapping and selling of millions of Africans into slavery.
Preeminent public health scholar and former president of the American Public Health Association Camara Jones defines structural 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.”
This system directly and indirectly impacts public health and the wellbeing of populations and results in stark racial differences across various health outcomes. It underscores that deep racial health inequities are not a result of the dispelled theory of biological “race,” but are driven by structural racism—the policies, practices and norms that create and uphold racial superiority and inferiority.
