Health Equity in the African-American Community

Health equity is assurance of the conditions for optimal health for all people. Achieving health equity requires valuing all individuals and populations equally, recognizing and rectifying historical injustices, and providing resources according to need. Racism is a system of structuring opportunity and assigning value based on the social interpretation of how one looks (which we call “race”), that unfairly disadvantages some individuals and communities, unfairly advantages other individuals and communities, and saps the strength of the whole society through the waste of human resources. The question “How do other people usually classify you in this country?” measures socially assigned race, the substrate on which racism operates on a daily basis. The routine collection of socially assigned race can provide insight into the impacts of racism on the health and well-being of the nation. The International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) is an international anti-racism treaty that was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1965. The United States signed ICERD in 1966 and ratified it in 1994, and the State Department submits periodic reports to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) on our progress in complying with the provisions of the treaty. The Concluding Observations that the United States received from the CERD in 2008 provides a blueprint for action on racial profiling, residential segregation, disproportionate incarceration, differential access to health care, and the achievement gap in education, all of which must be addressed to achieve health equity.