I recently had the pleasure of joining Dr. Robert Fullilove and Dr. Aletha Maybank, Chief Health Equity Officer of the American Medical Association, in conversation for AMA’s YouTube series, Prioritizing Equity. The episode, “How the Past Informs the Present in Healthcare,” was published today.
Our wide-ranging conversation centers white supremacy and structural racism as root causes of racial inequities in health. We talk about the infamous JAMA podcast, a letter Dr. Fullilove’s father wrote to JAMA in 1943, the 1970 JAMA paper that was the impetus for my work on skin color and blood pressure in Puerto Rico, the 400 Years of Inequality Project, the role of redlining and race-based residential segregation in health inequity, and recent evidence that paying reparations to descendants of people who were enslaved in the United States would have reduced the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic for everyone.
