Hunger and Health: The Devastating Impact of Structural Racism
COVID-19 has had a disproportionate effect on low-income, communities of color, but conversations about racial disparities mask the real public health emergency – racism. Poor access to healthcare and bias in clinical settings, underfunded educational and health institutions, housing segregation, chronic stress, and lack of access to clean water, air, and nutritious food all converge to shape the health of children and families of color. Last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics published a policy statement that named racism as a key social determinant of health, noting that “failure to address racism will continue to undermine health equity for all children, adolescents, emerging adults, and their families.” This session will delve deeper into the connection between health and structural racism, and the inequities of our health and food systems that compound negative health outcomes. We’ll also hear dire
“In the years in Paris, I had never been homesick for anything American,” James Baldwin wrote in his 1972 book of essays,
No Name in the Street. “But,” he added just a page or two later, “I had missed my brothers and my sisters … I missed Harlem Sunday mornings and fried chicken and biscuits.”
I’m thinking about these lines as I bite into a piece of fried chicken the thinly breaded skin crispy, the inside juicy enough that I need to wipe my lips while sitting in front of Gumbo Yaya. The tiny restaurant’s red facade bursts through the otherwise grayish nook it occupies at the northeastern edge of Paris’s 10th Arrondissement, just streets away from the French Communist Party’s curving, concrete, Oscar Niemeyer-designed headquarters.