https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9312-5192
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Notes
1. This series of lines a deliberate evoking of discourse of ‘risk’ and ‘vulnerability’ in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in the U.S. in 2005 – see for example, the dozens of public health publications regarding health impacts of Katrina that used the words ‘vulnerable communities’ in the titles but not naming the structures/actors that produced/incubated the vulnerability. Also, a critique of related discourses of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘risk’ in the context of COVID-19, e.g. via frames of ‘pre-existing conditions’ and the creation/use of things like the ‘Pandemic Vulnerability Index’ without naming the structural factors that drive underlying population health inequities.
2. Booth, AL. Birthplace of my Great Aunt T. About 20 miles from Montgomery, AL, end site of 1965 voting rights march from Selma on 25 March 1965. Rest in power 4/27/2020. This piece was written shortly thereafter in meditation on my family’s Booth roots, and the literal and symbolic distance we have come from and via b/Booth.
3. Referring to the literal physiological embodiment of chronic stress due to racism, e.g. via processes of allostatic load and weathering.
4. In reference to the works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, specifically, The Red Record (1895); See: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14977/14977-h/14977-h.htm.
5. In reference to, among other things, the U.S. Office of Minority Health’s repeated emphasis on individual behaviors like physical activity (i.e. getting enough steps) as the way to address racial health inequities. This emphasis ignores historic and present contexts of structural racism (& intersectionality therein) – the fundamental cause of these racial inequities.
6. The letter ‘n’ is used to represent the individual people in public health research studies. So a study with 1,000 people would have a total ‘N = 1,000,’ made up of 1,000 individual ‘n’s.’ This is public health’s ‘n-word.’
7. Referring to methylation, an epigenetic process of the physiological embodiment of social and environmental stressors, including racism.
8. In reference to/in conversation with the work/words of James Baldwin, as captured in the 2016 documentary film by Raoul Peck, ‘I Am Not Your Negro’; See: https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/i-am-not-your-negro/.
9. Here, referring to/drawing from bell hooks’ notion of ‘homeplace,’ as a ‘site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization, where one could resist … where all black people could strive to be subjects, not objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts … where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world’ (2015, p. 42). See: hooks, bell. (2015). Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Routledge.
10. Generally, referring to structural racism as legible within matters of underrepresentation in various domains of academic public health knowledge production, e.g. underrepresentation in tenure-track university positions, composition of editorial boards and peer-reviewer pools. Also, a reference to the ways in which histories of scientific racism have undoubtedly shaped how scholars have been trained to view – and thus research – racialized ‘others’ through a pathologizing lens of innate risk/vulnerability, e.g. biologization of ‘race’, misuse of ‘race’ in quantitative analyses.
11. In reference to/in conversation with James Baldwin’s analysis in his essay, ‘Notes for a Hypothetical Novel.’ In specific reference to the quote: ‘I don’t believe any longer that we can afford to say that it is entirely out of our hand. We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over’ (p. 154); See: Baldwin, J (1992). Nobody Knows My Name. Vintage, Reissue Edition: New York.
12. In reference to Antonio Gramsci’s writings on hegemony, knowledge, power, and (counter)narrative.
13. In reference to bell hooks’ work/writings. A particular passage of influence: ‘ … that space in the margin that is a site of creativity and power, that inclusive space where we recover ourselves, where we move in solidarity to erase the category colonized/colonizer. Marginality as site of resistance. Enter that space. Let us meet there’ (p. 152). See: hooks, bell. (2015). Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Routledge.
14. In reference to a line from Nikki Giovanni’s piece, ‘Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)’; see: https://poets.org/poem/ego-tripping-there-may-be-reason-why.
15. In reference to the discourse of ‘flattening the curve’ of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. – a discourse that not only presumed/framed things as if there was a single curve, but that conveniently failed to engage the manner in which structural inequality, e.g. structural racism, forms the basis of all such curves in the U.S. And as such, there is no ‘flattening’ of anything without engaging in some level of ‘bending.’ Also, a simultaneous reference to the particular impact that epidemiological research related to weight and obesity has had on normalizing body shaming and fat stigma in discourse/representations of women of color.
16. In reference to a Martin Luther King Jr. quote (in paraphrasing Theodore Parker), ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.’ King included this quote in the ‘How Long, Not Long’ speech he gave in Montgomery, AL on March 25th, 1965 at the completion of the voting rights march from Selma (see: https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/dr-martin-luther-king-jr-long-not-long-speech-text/). This reference is thus a revisiting of my family’s/my Great Aunt’s roots in Booth, AL, with obvious implications and consequence for the voting booth (and thus, health equity and policy).