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Octavio Nestor Martinez, Who is Responsible for Addressing Racial Disparities and Health Equity in Older Adults?, Public Policy & Aging Report, Volume 34, Issue 1, 2024, Pages 6–8, https://doi.org/10.1093/ppar/prad030
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The United States of America is in the midst of a public health crisis, a crisis that preceded and was further fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic. That crisis is structural racism. This crisis is endemic and deeply imbedded into the very fabric of the country. It has been acknowledged, recognized, and declared a serious threat to the public health by numerous counties, city and state governments, health care organizations, and nonprofits across the nation. Our understanding that racism is a pervasive system of power that assigns value to individuals based on the way they look and/or the color of their skin has and continues to grow. It is a social construct that unjustly provides advantage to European Americans and unjustly disadvantages individuals of color, for example, African Americans, Latin Americans, and Native Americans. The advantages and disadvantages of racism are operationalized through our standards, practices, policies, and laws, resulting in structural implications distanced from interpersonal racism that fueled their creation (American Public Health Association [APHA], 2020; U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2023a). It manifests itself across the life spectrum, including the later years of our lives. According to Dr. Nancy Krieger, structural racism is “the totality of ways in which societies foster discrimination, via mutually reinforcing systems (e.g., in housing, education, employment, earnings, benefits, credit, media, health care, criminal justice, etc.) that in turn reinforce discriminatory beliefs, values, and distribution of resources” (Krieger, 2014, p. 650). The impact is massive when one considers the potential number of people that may be affected by structural racism. Just taking into consideration African Americans, Latin Americans, and Native Americans as of the 2020 US Census, the total number of individuals potentially negatively affected by structural racism is almost 107 million individuals, whereas the number of European Americans benefiting are upwards of 204 million people (Jones et al., 2021). Systemic racism is so pervasive and deeply imbedded that it often is assumed to reflect the natural order of things and affords opportunities to European Americans that are denied people of color, such as “… good jobs with benefits; safe, unpolluted neighborhoods with good schools; high-quality health care; and fair treatment by the criminal justice system (Braveman et al., 2022, p. 172).”
