State Violence Is at the Root of Health Inequities [truthout.org]

The root causes of health disparities lie in policies and practices that distribute power and resources such as housing, education, employment and health services inequitably. For example, law enforcement agencies—including police and Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) officers—disproportionately target, surveil and perpetrate state violence against communities of color. Ample research shows that the unjust government practices associated with the enforcement of immigration policies, the war on drugs or the criminal legal system damage health and reduce life chances for entire marginalized communities, playing a key role in creating health disparities.

The paradox here is that the government and taxpayers are funding both the state violence that causes these public health problems and the public health attempts to address them. While hundreds of billions of dollarsfund unjust state violence practices, public health agencies are directing a fraction of their limited funds to the alleviation of the very health disparities caused by this state violence. In few instances is this paradox clearer than immigration enforcement. As our public health research shows, government-funded immigration enforcement is not only damaging to the individuals who are its targets, but to their families and communities as well. In this series, we highlighted the way in which home raids are likely to influence the presence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and trauma symptoms. Public health agencies will ultimately fund the interventions to address these negative health effects, such as PTSD. Given this paradox, what do we as public health researchers and practitioners do about future health equity work in the United States?

Public health programs addressing health disparities and inequities should be dedicating at least as much vision, creativity and funding to tackling root causes—including state violence—as they do to interventions that help communities cope with the resulting inequities. Many (but certainly not all) of the existing programs addressing health disparities insufficiently highlight unjust state violence as a key root cause of health disparities and thus refrain from taking the steps to address it. This means that too often “health equity”/”health disparities” work focuses downstream from the root causes like state violence.

[For more on this story by William Lopez & Paul Fleming, go to https://truthout.org/articles/...f-health-inequities/]