Toward Antiracism: Understanding Anti-Black Racism and Healing Racial Trauma

Dean David Richardson of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences will host a panel discussion titled, “Toward Antiracism: Understanding Anti-Black Racism and Healing Racial Trauma,” on November 12 at 6:30 p.m. I am honored to join two distinguished CLAS faculty members, Dr. Della V. Mosley, co-founder of Academics for Black Survival and Wellness, and Dr. David Canton, Director of the African American Studies Program at UF.

Our goal is to forefront student questions and concerns about how CLAS and the broader university can work to dismantle anti-Black racism and heal racial trauma. Please feel free to send me questions in advance and join us on November 12, if you can. Advance registration is required. The event will be recorded for those who are unable to attend.

Mayor's Book Club: White Fragility

Gainesville Mayor Lauren Poe, in partnership with the Alachua County Community Remembrance Project and the UF chapter of the NAACP, is hosting the next iteration of the Mayor’s Book Club with a focus on Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. I will join Gator NAACP Vice President Rachel Koury and Prof. Katheryn Russell-Brown of the UF Law School as a panelist for the discussion.

The event is free and open to public, with no advance registration required. Join us with your questions and perspective on October 18 at 3:00 p.m. (EDT).

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Critiquing racial essentialism in Journal of Internal Medicine

Colleagues and I have just published a letter to the editor in Journal of Internal Medicine, concerning an article that made a splash late this spring. (We wrote the letter soon after the original article appeared, but these things take time to see the light of day.) The letter points out six fallacies of racial essentialism that are all too common in medical research and practice.

Tsai, J., Cerdeña, J. P., Khazanchi, R., Lindo, E., Marcelin, J. R., Rajagopalan, A., Sandoval, R. S., Westby, A., & Gravlee, C. C. (2020). There is no “African American Physiology”: the fallacy of racial essentialism. Journal of Internal Medicine, 288(3), 368–370. doi:10.1111/joim.13153

New paper on racism, health inequities, and COVID-19 in syndemic perspective

Update (August 5, 2020): The paper is now available on Early View and will soon be open access, along with the rest of the special issue.

The American Journal of Human Biology has just accepted a new paper of mine for a forthcoming special issue on COVID-19. Here’s the title and abstract — more to come once the final version is out.

Systemic Racism, Chronic Health Inequities, and COVID-19: A Syndemic in the Making?

Clarence C. Gravlee

Racial inequities in the impact of COVID-19 present an important test case for syndemic theory. Syndemic theory holds that large-scale, political-economic inequities result in clustered epidemics that interact with each other and with noxious social conditions, resulting in a higher burden of disease and death than would be expected under models that treat a given epidemic in isolation. Emerging evidence suggests that relationships among systemic racism, cardiometabolic diseases (especially hypertension and diabetes), and COVID-19 may constitute a syndemic in the making. I propose a tentative syndemic model of COVID-19 to account for staggering racial inequities in the pandemic in the United States, where age-adjusted death rates among Black people are as much as nine times higher as for other racialized groups. The model seeks to address conceptual and methodological challenges in existing work that leave the central tenets of syndemic theory largely untested. The scale of COVID-19 inequities underscores the urgency of testing the model and adapting public health and policy responses to potential synergistic effects with long-standing racial health inequities.