COVID-19 and Racial Inequities: Unpacking the Anti-Black Response

This episode is a recording of a conversation between Michael Dawson, Rhea Boyd, Aresha Martinez-Cardoso, and Brandi Summers during an event titled "COVID-19 and Racial Inequities: Unpacking the Anti-Black Response," on June 25, 2020.

Rhea Boyd, MD, MPH, FAAP works clinically at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and teaches nationally on the relationship between structural racism, inequity and health, and has a decade of experience advancing community-based advocacy. She leads efforts to characterize and address the child and public health impacts of harmful policing practices and policies. She serves as the Chief Medical Officer of San Diego 211, working with navigators to address social needs of San Diegans impacted by chronic illness and poverty. And she is the Director of Equity and Justice for The California Children's Trust, an initiative to advance mental health access to children and youth across California.

Aresha Martinez-Cardoso, PhD is a public health researcher and Provost's Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago. Her research integrates theoretical perspectives from the social sciences with epidemiological methods in public health to examine how social inequality in the US shapes population health, with a particular focus on the health of racial/ethnic groups and immigrants. The majority of her work focuses on how race, migration, and class intersect to shape the the health of US-born and immigrant Latinxs across the life-course.

Brandi Summers, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies (GMS) at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines urban cultural landscapes and the political and economic dynamics by which race and space are reimagined and reordered. She is also the author of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City, which explores how aesthetics and race converge to locate or map blackness in Washington, D.C.

Suggested Links & Readings:

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Berwick, Don. “The Moral Determinants of Health.” JAMA. Published online June 12, 2020. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.11129

Laster Pirtle, Whitney N. “Racial Capitalism: A Fundamental Cause of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic Inequities in the United States.” Health Education & Behavior, (April 2020). doi:10.1177/1090198120922942.

Sewell, Abigail A., Kevin A. Jefferson, Hedwig Lee. “Living under surveillance: Gender, psychological distress, and stop-question-and-frisk policing in New York City.” Social Science & Medicine, Volume 159, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.04.024.