Racial violence is a public health crisis.
Several organizations, including the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Public Health Association (APHA), have recognized that police violence has devastating health consequences; the AMA has “denounced racism as an urgent threat to public health, pledging action to confront systemic racism, racial injustice and police brutality.”
Both organizations’ policy statements indicate that medicine and public health must work to dismantle racism not only at a societal level but also within the health professions.
In other words, we can choose to continue practices that perpetuate structural racism, or we can dismantle them and rebuild more just systems of care.
The question then becomes: What tools and models do medicine and public health have at their disposal to accomplish the latter goal?
Share this article
If the emphasis of medicine is to “first, do no harm,” then we must contend with medicine’s history of systemic racism and redefine how we understand health and safety.
Drawing on decades of abolitionist work, including policy visions by the organizers of #8toAbolition, abolition medicine calls for deconstructing and divesting from practices within health care that perpetuate systemic racism and criminalize the lives of marginalized people and for reinvesting in life-affirming systems that address structural harm.
