To achieve racial health equity requires social justice.
To achieve health equity requires new paradigms that address structural racism’s contemporary influence on health, health inequities, and research. – Ford & Airhihenbuwa Am J Pub Health 2010
In 2010, the American Public Health Association’s flagship journal, the American Journal of Public Health, published its first article on Critical Race Theory. In that article, we, Chandra Ford & Collins Airhihenbuwa, introduced Critical Race Theory (CRT) to the Public Health community as a potentially useful resource for health equity researchers and practitioners seeking to elucidate contemporary racial phenomena, expand the vocabulary for discussing complex racial concepts, and challenge racial hierarchies.
Later that year, we presented a new model, the Public Health Critical Race praxis (PHCR), that tailors CRT to the needs of health equity researchers. PHCR guides health equity researchers and practitioners in going beyond merely documenting health inequities in order to explain and challenge the power hierarchies that undergird them.