By Gloria Grady, BA
APHA perhaps brought more confusion this year than I was expecting. My main goal was to scope out possible doctorate programs and to attend the sessions of interesting researchers at various schools. While I accomplished these goals, something about my APHA experience felt a bit discouraging. I was only able to find a handful of sessions directly related to my interests, and of those, many were given by sociologists and not individuals daily immersed in the public health field. We talk so much about ‘social determinants’ in public health yet it still seems that we are working around them—not facing them head on. Since my interest lies in addressing key social determinants like racism, sexism, and income inequality directly, I often feel like a public health oddball. I too often hear fellow public health-ers say racism is inevitable. That unjust policies are too hard to change. If we continue to believe these things, then we make them true.
It’s about time for us to stop this self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s time for undoing racism to not be an afterthought, but something we really try to accomplish. We know that racism affects health. We have the body of evidence for that. The next step is believing we can address it. If a public health perspective can be used to address violence, why not racism? Why not sexism, homophobia, income inequality, and other social structures that are at the basis of some many health issues? I’m tired of feeling like public health is not the right place for me. I know deep down that it is—but we can’t be afraid to address the upstream causes of health inequity.
Gloria Grady is a second-year MPH candidate and MCHLT Scholar, concentrating in Maternal and Child Health. She plans to graduate May 2015. Her interests include the effects of racism on health and how to address racism as a public health issue.
