Impact racism has on health gets outlined for lawmakers

Asthma uptick, dangerous encounters with police cited

School children suffering from asthma because of air pollution in Hartford.

Young Black men routinely stopped by police.

Health care out of reach.

The daily consequences of racial bias — and the reasons why many support declaring racism a public health crisis in Connecticut — were clearly outlined for state lawmakers Friday. Many voiced support for a new bill that would declare racism a statewide public health crisis and work to ameliorate racial disparities.

Tyler Napper of Hartford recounted growing up in the North End, where relatives were frequently profiled by police officers and corner stores took the place of supermarkets.

“I know by firsthand experience and lived experience what this racism and oppression has done to my people and to many other people of color,” Napper said.

Linda Demikat of Hartford, who worked for 35 years as a public school teacher and administrator in towns and cities across Connecticut, recalled seeing many Black students who had asthma or other respiratory problems “exacerbated by living in polluted and densely popu

lated urban environments.”

“The unchecked, systemic racism experienced by Connecticut’s minority communities is unacceptable,” Demikat said in written testimony. “Racism is indeed a health crisis, an indictment of the neglect and tacit acceptance of our political leaders and many of our citizens.”

The statistics line up with their accounts.

In 2018, Connecticut ranked as the fifth-healthiest state in the country but 43rd in health disparities, Thomas Buckley, a professor at the UConn School of Pharmacy, wrote in written testimony in support of the bill. Black residents in the state are five times more likely than white residents to visit the emergency department for asthma. Compared to babies born to white women, babies born to Black women are three times more likely to die and Hispanic babies are two times more likely to die.

In wake of the George Floyd killing and the protests that followed, nearly two dozen cities and towns across Connecticut passed resolutions declaring racism a public health crisis. The new bill would take that effort a step further.

“We’re seeking to create a plan to eliminate health disparities and incorporate health equity into specific policies, programs, as well as government decision-making processes related to disparities,” said state Rep. Brandon McGee, D-Hartford, one of the main proponents of the legislation.

If passed, the measure would create a statewide commission to address racial disparities in education, housing, health care, the criminal justice system and other areas in Connecticut. The commission would seek to achieve a minimum 70% reduction in disparity in a slew of sectors, from kindergarten readiness to health insurance coverage rates and lead poisoning rates.

Supporters of the bill say that declaring racism a public health crisis acknowledges the ways in which systemic racism can lead to adverse health outcomes for people of color, including as a result of racial bias in health care and lack of access to healthy food and housing in areas free from pollution.

“Racism continues to be an intergenerational plague, experienced at multiple touch points over the course of the life for Black and brown people,” AJ Johnson, pastor of the Urban Hope Refuge Church in Hartford, said during the hearing. “From birth, socioeconomic determinants based on race predict shorter life expectancies and poorer quality of life for Black and brown people.”

For Dwayne David Paul, existing as a Black man in Connecticut means living in “proximity to death.”

The son of working-class Black immigrants from the West Indies, Paul studied theology at Yale Divinity School before eventually becoming the director of the Collaborative Center for Justice, a Hartford-based social justice organization.

“None of the meritocratic boxes I was ticking along the way were statistically likely to provide me with a longer life,” he said Friday before the General Assembly Appropriations Committee. “As a Black man, regardless of my socioeconomic status, I am more or less statistically likely to die earlier than my former classmates.”

Dr. Susan Levine, a general internist at UConn Health, attested to seeing the “disproportionate health inequities faced by individuals forced to navigate a system that does not offer an equal footing.”

In a single morning, she recounted seeing four patients of color who were “directly impacted by systemic racism.” One patient had a rash that Levine could not identify because her standard dermatologic textbook did not offer any confirmatory pictures in the patient’s skin color. Another patient could not make his appointment because he lived in an area where medical transportation could not pick him up.

“The 4 patients of my typical morning illustrate the pervasiveness of our structural racism,” Levine wrote. “To truly impact the driving forces behind these health care disparities requires that we see employment, housing, food security and education and their fundamental impacts on health care.”

Rep. Anthony Nolan, D-New London, vice chair of the Appropriations Committee, emphasized that the bill did not represent a “war on white people.”

“It’s far from that. This is a war on racism,” he said.