Report | November 2021
Ruqaiijah Yearby, Sidney D. Watson, Charysse Gibson, Crystal N. Lewis, Nicole Strombom, Katherine Stamatakis, & Keon L. Gilbert
Institute for Healing Justice & Equity | Saint Louis University Center for Health Law Studies
Asian, Black, Indigenous, and Latino Americans die earlier, have higher infant mortality rates, and suffer more chronic conditions and disability than most white Americans. These health inequities are due in part to systemic racism and the social determinants of health (SDOH). Systemic racism is a complex array of social structures, government policies, institutional practices, and interpersonal interactions used by the dominant racial group to create a hierarchy that disadvantages racial and ethnic minority groups. The SDOH are social factors outside an individual’s control that limit an individual’s ability to attain their full health potential. Systemic racism disadvantages racial and ethnic minority groups in numerous ways, including creating inequities in the SDOH. For example, inequities in COVID-19 infections and deaths have been associated with racial and ethnic minority groups’ lack of equitable access to health care, paid sick leave, and clean water as a result of systemic racism. Systemic racism is hard to dismantle because it is so deeply ingrained in the actions, processes, and policies of governmental entities. To address these challenges, a group of 107 pioneering jurisdictions (cities, towns, villages, governmental agencies, and counties) has been working with national groups, such as the Governmental Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE) and PolicyLink, to address systemic racism and the SDOH. These groups have provided jurisdictions with racial equity tools that can be used to normalize conversations about race, operationalize new behaviors and policies, and organize to achieve racial equity. Until now, no one has cataloged jurisdictions working with racial equity tools created by national organizations. In this report, we begin filling this gap by identifying jurisdictions working specifically with GARE and PolicyLink and discussing how these jurisdictions are addressing systemic racism and the SDOH in their communities.
Ruqaiijah Yearby, JD, MPH, is the Judge Clifford Scott Green Professor at Temple University Beasley School of Law. She is also Co-founder of the Institute for Healing Justice & Equity and one of the Co-Founders of the Collaborative for Anti-Racism & Equity. She earned her B.S. in Honors Biology from the University of Michigan, M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. She started her career as an Assistant Regional Counsel for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Professor Yearby’s scholarship focuses on law, justice, and medical research. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Bioethics, American Journal of Public Health, Emory Law Journal, Health Affairs, JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Oxford Journal of Law and the Biosciences. She is a member of the editorial board for the American Journal of Bioethics and the Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics. She previously served as a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee to assess the use of the social constructs of race and ethnicity in biomedical research and a member of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections.
