From the Director
June 10, 2022
The academic year at UCLA comes to a close today. I feel a deep sense of gratitude to everyone who has helped in some way to advance the mission of the Center during the pandemic. Our mission is to promote health equity through rigorous research, innovative teaching, and community engagement. The last few years have been devastating on multiple fronts for so many people. We offer prayers and condolences while we continue to target the root causes of health inequities.
Alongside the difficulties of this period there have been many notable accomplishments. Below are just a few of the Center’s activities of this academic year:
The brilliant distinguished quarterly lectures delivered by Dr. Monica McLemore and Dr. Ugo Edu
A COVID justice panel with community partners Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) and Youth Justice Coalition (YJC) organized by the COVID Task Force on Racism & Equity (Chair, Bita Amani)
A national workshop on racial healing organized by Kia Skrine Jeffers, Associate Director for the Arts, on behalf of the American Public Health Association’s Public Health Nurses caucus
Monthly journal club and book club meetings (see ACC book club below)
Co-sponsorship of the 2022 Thinking Gender Conference, which focused on Transgender Studies at the Intersections this year
Co-sponsorship of the UCLA Thurgood Marshall Lecture delivered by the honorable Keith Ellison
Please check out our current projects, which include:
Project REFOCUS - through which we are developing a novel set of technology-based interventions to promote pandemic equity. This project, which is funded by the CDC Foundation and CDC, is a collaboration between the Center and Howard University (Monica L. Ponder, co-lead).
COVID Storytelling Project – A two-part study that involves the rapid collection and analysis of social media (e.g., Twitter) and focus group data regarding injustices occurring over the course of the pandemic.
The RACE Series – A special collection of articles published open access (i.e., freely available to the public) in the journal Ethnicity & Disease. The series is supported with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The papers in the collection report key research findings as they are produced (i.e., hot off the press) from research conducted over the course of the pandemic. Much of this research is ongoing. You can learn more about both Project REFOCUS and the COVID Storytelling Project from papers published in this series.
As shared in 2020 in opening remarks at the book launch for Racism: Science & Tools for the Public Health Professional (American Public Health Association [APHA] Press, 2019), I believe our graduate students represent the vanguard of the field and I predicted they would lead the field of public health in advancing health equity work that engages Critical Race Theory (CRT), sustains participation in community-engaged social justice efforts and develops novel methods for conceptualizing and investigate the myriad of ways racialized oppressions harm health. I feel even more confident making that assertion today. Those who are graduating this year will arrive at their new appointments in many ways already prepared to lead the field in this area. They follow our inaugural cohort of postdoctoral fellows, Dr. Paris Adkins-Jackson, now at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and Dr. Mienah Sharif, now at the University of Washington which recently launched ARCH: the Antiracism & Community Health Center, as well as Anna Hing (now at the recently launched Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity at the University of Minnesota), John Pamplin (Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health), and Brittney Butler (Harvard FXB Center Health & Human Rights Fellow).
Rebekah Israel Cross and Natalie Bradford were the Center’s founding student affiliates and two of its core staff members. They each contributed a section to Racism, and Rebekah published the first (and perhaps still the only) student perspective on advancing CRT-based approaches in public health. Having successfully defended innovative, policy-relevant dissertations, they will now head off to postdoctoral fellowships at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health and University of Texas at San Antonio College for Health, Community and Policy, respectively. What were they studying? Here are their dissertation titles:
Gentrification, Residential Mobility, and Preterm Birth among Black Women: A Mixed Methods Study of Racial Resegregation in Northern California by Rebekah Israel Cross
This Ain’t Yo Laboratory: Centering Home to Examine the Relationship Between Racial Residential Segregation, Medical Underservice, and Community Health Center Expansion Nationally and Locally by Natalie J. Bradford
Congratulations Dr. Israel Cross and Dr. Bradford! We are inspired by you and excited for the next phase in your journey.
Other student affiliates who have completed dissertations and are moving forward include Anna-Michelle McSorley, who first approached the Center about how to study anti-colonialism within public health . After several thoughtful conversations, she came up with the idea of the Anti-Colonialism Collective (ACC). This book club has become a vital source of connection for center affiliates and for people not otherwise connected to it. We thank the donors who appreciated the topics being covered and Anna-Michelle’s anti-hierarchical approach to facilitating the book club. Having successfully defended her dissertation, Dr. McSorley will join the Center for Anti-racism, Social Justice, & Public Health that is in development at New York University.
Millicent Robinson and Adrian Bacong served as chair and co-chair (with Ale Cabral), respectively of our annual Minority Health Conference in prior years, and Millicent also served as center coordinator during the stormy early months of the COVID pandemic. Her role then was critical and invaluable given how destabilizing, uncertain and exhausting that period was for everyone. They, too, have successfully defended their dissertations and accepted postdoctoral appointments at Stanford University (Dr. Bacong) and the University of North Carolina (Dr. Robinson). Thank you and congratulations to each of you! And, congratulations to all graduating students!
Celebrating our Partners
If you appreciate our work, we urge you to support our partners who are leading critical social justice work often with limited resources. Five of our key partners include:
Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) - https://baji.org/
Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders - https://www.blackcoalitionfightingbackserialmurders.net/
Healthy African American Families - https://www.haafii.org/
Stop LA Police Department (LAPD) Spying - https://stoplapdspying.org/
Youth Justice Coalition - https://youthjusticela.org/
I thank the many others of you who continue to support our work through donations of time, information or resources. There are many to name, so allow me to highlight just two examples of the kind of support for which we are grateful.
The 2022 Minority Health Conference, which as always was in partnership with the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, featured archival video and audio recordings of health equity champions and elders from the personal archives of Dr. Victor J. Schoenbach. This digital media project would not have been possible without the generous support and assistance of Dr. Schoenbach.
So that people could participate in the ACC book club meetings even if they could not afford the books, forward-thinking donors reached out and made donations so that the center could make the books available to participants for free.
Expressing Gratitude
I am deeply grateful for the dedicated staff, graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, executive board members, faculty and staff on whom the center relies. Thank you for your commitment, vision and enthusiasm. Thank you for your insights. Thank you for your service.
I thank the leadership of the center, including Bita Amani, under whose leadership the COVID Task Force on Racism & Equity, which is a collaboration between Charles R. Drew University (CDU) has been tirelessly engaged in research, community organizing and information sharing with community partners. You can learn about some of this work in a short video about it here. I also thank E. Minelle David, who has been an extraordinary Center Coordinator. Her commitment to health equity is palpable. I appreciate her attention to detail and all the ways she quietly holds so much together on behalf of the Center in order to advance our mission. Thank you, Minelle! You are seen and loved. :)
Finally, the work of the center would not be possible without the material support we receive from people like you. Thank you to our volunteers. Thank you to our donors. Your donations primarily support the education and training of our students and postdoctoral scholars. They also cover some of the activities with partners—both community partners and academic partners—that research grants typically do not support (e.g., co-sponsored talks). Thank you to those of you who participate in our activities. A special thanks to the very supportive staffs of the UCLA Department of Community Health Sciences—especially Melba Tolbert, Jamie Raiss and Kathy Yi—and the Fielding School of Public Health’s office of the dean. We appreciate being able to draw on your expertise. We also celebrate executive board member, Gilbert C. Gee, on becoming the next chair of the department.
Sadly, remarks from 2020 resonate still. So, I close with those remarks here.
The circumstances of the present—the hostile political climate, the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, and the persistence of “state-sanctioned and extra-legal” killings of black, indigenous and other people of color—have made this an extraordinarily difficult time. I am particularly concerned about its impact on our students.
The students involved with this center are phenomenal. Their brilliant analyses connect dots intellectually across disciplines, theories, and methods. These students are bold, courageous, introspective and creative. They insist a better world is possible, and they work toward manifesting it. They are generous with one another and with me, modeling what it is they wish to see in the world. They are the next generation of leaders. Faculty, are we doing all we can to help them become their very best?
To my students, you inspire me, and you touch the lives of many others. This is an extraordinarily difficult time, especially for those of us who come from the margins of society. Today you are nearing the finish line of another academic year. It may not feel like much of a victory, but it is. Each day that you get up and choose to keep moving forward is a victory. It is a victory not only for you, but also for everyone who loves you and for those who draw inspiration from you. As much as I admire you for your strength, please remember that you are also human. You deserve the compassion you so generously share with others. You need to rest. You need to laugh and to have fun. You need a break from peers who exclude you and faculty who underestimate or overlook you, while at the same time “picking your brain” on matters of diversity. You need trustworthy friends who will challenge you when it is appropriate to do so. You need your families even if you also need space from your families. Finally, you need to know that faculty and senior scholars stand with you. We are sharing this journey with you. We see you. We appreciate you. We celebrate you.
With humility and gratitude,
Chandra L. Ford
