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Moving to institutional equity : a tool to address racial equity for public health practitioners
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June 2017
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[PDF-1.44 MB]
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Description:Over the years, the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors (NACDD) Health Equity Council (HEC) has addressed many difficult issues in our ongoing effort to achieve health equity. We have tried to move systematically through the widely acknowledged “social determinants of health” by highlighting them one at a time. This gives our membership the ability to recognize opportunities to view some of their current work through a health equity lens and apply the lens where they hadn’t before. In turn, we have given workshops, created literature or tools and hosted webinars to address various aspects of the social determinants including cultural competency, neighborhood segregation, access to healthy foods and food deserts, and high school drop-out rates. We believe the time is right to have one of the most difficult conversations about the most insidious barrier to equity in the social determinants; institutional racism. This is an extremely difficult and uncomfortable discussion. We know institutional racism exists and we know that it contributes to health disparities and health inequities in our country. Because it is such an uncomfortable conversation and we are not sure where to start or stop—we delay. Over the years the HEC has asked its membership how they think the issue might be best addressed. The prevailing response is that we know institutional racism exists, but the question remains how do we identify it in our work and how do we constructively change each (and all) of the separate expressions of it to create a new reality called institutional racial equity.
In response to these challenges, the Institutional Equity Committee, a subgroup of the HEC, has created a tool to help identify biased practices and policies. These do not reflect individual fault or bad intent; rather, they reflect practice and comfort of a systemic status quo. The intent of this tool is to shed light and NOT blame or shame. In order to fully understand how entrenched institutional racism is in our society, we have to know some of the dark truths in U.S. history. We must acknowledge the many points in history when foundations were laid that helped create and continue to perpetuate institutional racism. Once we understand the historical context we become better equipped to recognize opportunities to move toward institutional racial equity.
This publication was supported by the Grant or Cooperative Agreement Number 5NU58DP006128-02-00, funded by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Department of Health and Human Services.
health_equity_june_2017.pdf
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Pages in Document:20 numbered pates
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