Session Abstract
What is race? What are health disparities? How are disparities different from inequities and why does that matter? This lecture will examine the causes of racial health disparities and argue that the racial health disparities we see and that have persisted over time are, in fact, inequities. This talk will explore racism as a source of chronic stress and describe how chronic stress gets “under the skin”, and undermines physiologic functioning and facilitates host susceptibility. This includes the
complexities of social experience, the mind-body connection, and the intersection of race with other social identities, creating a unique social location where multiple axes of social disadvantage converge to determine risk exposure. The audience is encouraged to consider how the case examples described during the talk can be extrapolated to consider, more broadly, the concept of the biology of social disadvantage.
Speaker Bio
Amani Nuru-Jeter, Ph.D., M.P.H. is a Professor of Community Health Sciences and Epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health. Dr. Nuru-Jeter’s program of research consists of four inter-related areas of inquiry relevant to the study of racial health inequities: 1) racial discrimination and the psychobiology of stress, 2) the intersection of race, gender, and socioeconomic position and its role in understanding patterns of racial health inequities, 3) the measurement of racism as a social and structural determinant of health, and 4) place and health. Her broad research interest is to integrate concepts, theories and methods from epidemiology and the social and biomedical sciences to examine racial inequities in health as they exist across populations, across place and over the life-course. Dr. Nuru-Jeter has published in top scientific journals and her work has been featured in major news outlets including CNN, MSNBC, NPR, CBSNews, The New York Times, Essence Magazine, US News & World Report, and The
Atlantic. Nuru-Jeter is also Director of Evidence for Action, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funding community-led, community-engaged, and community-partnered participatory and action-oriented racial and Indigenous health equity research.