Racism as a Public Health Crisis

Claire Decoteau, University of Illinois at Chicago
Cal Garrett, Wake Forest University
Tirza Ochrach-Konradi, University of Illinois at Chicago

Since 2019, a growing number of local governments in the United States have made declarations that racism is a public health crisis. These resolutions proliferated in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the police murder of George Floyd. While these resolutions recognize the conjunctural nature of racism in the US, they often do little to enact administrative or policy change. This paper asks: what does the invocation of crisis accomplish in this case? Comparing the cases of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Chicago, Illinois, this paper argues that there are four broad trends. First racism is often defined so broadly that enacting actionable policy changes within municipalities becomes impossible. Second, data collected on racial disparities is made to stand in for policy efforts made to redress the effects of racism. Third, state actors devolve responsibility for remedying racial disparities to community groups, thereby avoiding broad policy shifts. Fourth, when programs do result from these declarations, they “hot spot” certain racial groups or areas of the city, thereby ontologizing racial difference. As a result, while racism is medicalized through these declarations, there is uneven and intermittent applications of health-related responses to racial stratification and its effects.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 108. Stratified Medicalization: Studies in Biomedicine and Inequality