While there is growing recognition of the importance of structural racism in instantiating population health inequities, and also that historical racist violence and control shaped the social institutions and practices that today institutionalize racism, there are significant limitations in both the measurement of historical racism as theoretically important exposures, and broad gaps in the understanding of the mechanisms through which racist histories impact contemporary population health outcomes and inequities. We aim to improve understanding of the ways that historical racism shapes contemporary population health outcomes and disparities by refining the spatial measurement of historical forms of racist violence and control, and by clarifying the pathways through which these historical exposures impact contemporary population health. More specifically, the goals of the pilot are:
Aim 1: (A) To provide postdoctoral training in population health research, and (B) facilitate the linkage of spatial data on historical racist violence to spatial data on contemporary health outcomes and disparities, to (C) derive historically and theoretically motivated data tools connecting historical racism to the contemporary spatial and racial distribution of population health outcomes.
Aim 2: To determine the specific pathways through which historical racist violence and control impacts contemporary health disparities and identify spatial variation in the salient pathways and the magnitude of effects.
Prior work has identified both that histories of racialization and racist violence in the US vary regionally and by racial and ethnic composition, and that there is significant place-based heterogeneity in the size of the continuing impacts of these histories. This pilot will aggregate historical data on sundown towns and redlining, and contemporary CDC and census data to clarify the pathways through which historical racist violence continues to shape contemporary spatial and racial health disparities. We will analyze whether these place-specific histories shaped the development of neighborhoods and local economies in ways that differentially expose residents to the proximal determinants of health (e.g., vectors for COVID-19 transmission, air pollution, and vulnerability to state violence).