Our history is filled with policies, from zoning codes to lending rules, specifically established to promote and maintain segregation.
Evidence for Action: Innovative Research to Advance Racial Equity: This initiative prioritizes research to evaluate specific interventions (e.g., policies, programs, practices) that have the potential to counteract the harms of structural and systemic racism and improve health, well-being, and equity outcomes. Learn more and apply.
Structural racism and its associated injustices have created barriers for people of color since the beginnings of our nation. These barriers include unequal access to policies and practices that help individuals thrive, such as affordable health insurance, jobs that pay livable wages, and paid family leave. We see the effects of these structural barriers in all of our systems and structures, from unequal medical care to discrimination in housing, employment, education, the justice system—and beyond.
Research shows that this history of individual and structural racism spanning generations denies opportunity to people of color and robs them of their physical and mental health. The life expectancy of people of color is often a decade or more shorter than their White neighbors just a few blocks away. They face a higher risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity, and mental illness. And babies born to Black women are more than twice as likely to die in the first year of life as babies born to White women.
In connection with past and current Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) programs aimed at reducing health inequities and advancing health equity, this collection includes research findings and perspectives on the connections between race, racism and health.
To reach a Culture of Health, we must be honest about the fact that too many people in the United States start behind, and stay behind, because they don’t have the same opportunities as others. If we don’t acknowledge and address structural racism, we simply can’t make progress toward health equity in America.
