Dr. Camara Jones was teaching a one-week intensive course at the University of Global Health Equity in Kigali, Rwanda when Dr. Will Ross was finalizing plans for her to present the 2019 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture presented by the Washington University School of Medicine Office of Diversity Programs. So she approved Ross’ proposed title for her lecture – “Racism and Health: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?” – without being in a position to give the matter her complete attention.
She knows the answer to the question posed in the title: inequality – and, more particularly, racism – is definitely both making people sick and infecting our culture. As one of the world’s leading epidemiologists (she is a former research director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and past president of the American Public Health Association), she can do the data.
But, for some time, she has been moving from data to action, from questions to solutions. That is why the real title of the talk that she will give in St. Louis is “Tools for a National Campaign Against Racism.”
“We need the tools to name racism, we need to continually ask how is racism operating here, and we need the tools to organize and strategize to act,” Dr. Jones told The American.
To provide these tools, she relies less on data than narrative. She is developing her own tool box of “allegories” to help people see racism at work and to name it. These allegories, some of which she will share with her St. Louis audience, are helpful because race is a nebulous concept and people have many barriers against talking plainly about racism.
“We have these persistent disparities in health, wealth, housing – all of these outcomes – by so-called race, but what is this thing called race? Race is not a measure for genes at all – we’ve now mapped the human genome, and that’s not it. The variable of race in some ways measures social class, but it’s only a rough proxy for social class,” she said.
“Race maps the social interpretations of people in a race-conscious society. It’s the same race identified by police officers, judges, teachers, taxi drivers, that same race that is marked off on health and housing statistics, that same race that has an impact on our individual health and well-being and the health and well-being of the nation.”
Though she works in academia (as a senior fellow at the Satcher Health Leadership Institute and Cardiovascular Research Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine), this national campaign she is trying to spark is not merely academic. She considers it a matter of our nation’s public health and even survival.
While she was teaching in Rwanda, she was taken on a tour of a genocide memorial dedicated to the public memory of the mass slaughter of 1 million Tutsi in 1994. The exhibits left nothing to the imagination. There was no escaping the fact and evidence (crushed human skulls, vast collections of human bones) of brutal mass slaughter based on ideas of ethnic difference.
“As we left, a Rwandan colleague asked me did I cry, and I said no, I didn’t,” she said. “I was terrified. It was clear to me that we in the U.S. are not just two or three years near that path. We are on that path. All it took in Rwanda was a spark. All it would take here is a spark.”
Dr. Camera Jones will speak 4 p.m. Monday, January 21 at the Eric P. Newman Education Center, 320 S. Euclid Ave. Validated parking is available at the North Euclid Parking Garage. To RSVP or for more information, call 314-362-6843 or email eriggs@wustl.edu.
