Professor Chandra Ford
Professor Chandra Ford is Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice and Health and Associate Professor of Community Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. She is lead editor (with Derek Griffith, Marino Bruce and Keon Gilbert) of Racism: Science & Tools for the Public Health Professional (American Public Health Association Press, 2019).
She earned her doctorate in Health Behavior with secondary training in Epidemiology from the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina. She has served as president of the Society for the Analysis of African American Public Health Issues, and has been involved with the Black Radical Congress and the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders.
Interventions to mitigate, resist, or undo structural racism
"Interventions to mitigate, resist, or undo structural racism
Structural racism has been defined as the totality of ways that societies foster racial discrimination through mutually reinforcing systems and sectors of society. Because this term encompasses consideration of cultural norms and practices, racism within institutions, and racism across sectors and institutions, it is often difficult to know how and where to intervene. In this presentation, I describe three types of interventions that are necessary in the movement to eliminate structural racism. While the ultimate goal is to eliminate structural racism and its effects on and across systems and sectors, we have to find ways to help people manage unhealthy and stressful contexts and build capacity within communities from a strengths-based approach in the meantime.
- Professor Derek Griffith
Racialization and Health in the early 21st Century
Though the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared racism a public health problem, it has not provided researchers and health equity advocates with concrete guidance on how to address it. The nature and impact of racism change over time; therefore, any such guidance must reflect the ways racism operates in the early 21st century. In the US, (1) overt forms of racism (e.g., neo-Nazis) co-exist with and are enabled by less perceptible structural forms of racism; (2) domestic and global demographic shifts are underway and are linked to historical injustices; (3) the meaning, content and structure of racial and ethnic categories are changing; and, at the same time, (4) robust bodies of knowledge on racialization are expanding. This presentation draws on Public Health Critical Race Praxis, which is rooted in Critical Race Theory, to discuss the health implications of racism in the early 21st century.
- Chandra Ford"
