Antiracist Praxis in Public Health: A Call for Ethical Reflections
Faith E. Fletcher, Wendy Jiang, Alicia L. Best
Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed myriad social, economic, and health inequities that disproportionately burden populations that have been made medically or socially vulnerable. Inspired by state and local governments that declared racism a public health crisis or emergency, the Anti-Racism in Public Health Act of 2020 reflects a shifting paradigm in which racism is considered a social determinant of health. Indeed, health inequities fundamentally rooted in structural racism have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, which calls for the integration of antiracist praxis to promote ethical public health research processes. This commentary describes ways in which antiracist praxis-which emphasizes empowerment of traditionally marginalized populations-offers strategies to explicitly address power imbalance, stigmatization, and other consequences of structural racism in public health research.