Toward a critical race approach to public health research and practice

Racism has been defined as, “the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Following this definition, eradicating racism is part and parcel to achieving the objectives of public health. Critical Race Theory (CRT), which originated in legal studies, offers the field of public health useful tools for antiracism research and practice. Antiracism connotes the actions taken by individuals, groups and communities to “move through the barriers of racism and pave the way toward a thriving and socially just world”. Standard public health theories and methods do not explicitly challenge the complex ways that structural racism influences both population health and the processes by which we produce knowledge about health. To promote antiracism approaches to public health research and practice, we developed the Public Health Critical Race (PHCR) framework. This social justice-oriented praxis facilitates the use of rigorous, race conscious, anti-racism methodologies to: (1) conduct research on racism and health; (2) explain specific ways that racism influences the production of knowledge about public health; and, (3) develop strategies for challenging the power hierarchies that undergird racial inequities. The purpose of this paper is to introduce Critical Race Theory and the Public Health Critical Race framework. We provide an overview of each, explain how the PHCR praxis can improve efforts to understand and address health inequities and conclude with recommendations and cautions regarding the potential widespread use of the praxis within the field of public health.