When I was invited to submit a paper for this issue of Phylon, I immediately knew that my topic would be “Confronting Institutionalized Racism.” That is because I have become convinced that it is only by naming racism, asking the question “How is racism operating here?” and then mobilizing with others to actually confront the system and dismantle it that we can have any significant or lasting impacts on the pervasive “racial” health disparities that have plagued this country for centuries. However, it has taken me a long time to actually write this piece because each time I started, I had so much to say that I didn’t know where to start or end, or what my tack should be. Should it be a presentation of a scientific roadmap for addressing the impacts of racism on the health and well-being of the nation’s children? Or a review of the domains of racism that should be covered in any measures that we develop or use? Or an outline of strategies we might employ in launching local efforts to combat institutionalized racism in our cities?
In the end, I decided on this format, a conversation centered on/in what I consider to be some of the emergent questions facing us today as we seek to understand and intervene on the impacts of racism on the health and well-being of this nation. Some of these questions are: Why discuss racism at all when talking about health? What is racism? What is “race”? Is there something about the environment that we have previously not named that we can usefully describe as the racial climate, and if so, how do we measure it and what is it doing? If we want to confront institutionalized racism, what does that really mean and how do we get started?
So sit back in your office chair or your airplane seat or your bed, and wander with me as I raise and seek to answer some of these questions. After all, it is only in the raising of important questions and the naming of the un-nameable that we will be able to focus our tremendous personal and intellectual resources on a system so powerful and pervasive that the majority of Americans are still in denial about its very existence. (author introduction)