Hayes urges action after CDC calls racism a health threat
Connecticut’s first Black congresswoman will urge her colleagues next week to dismantle race-based barriers to well-being after the nation’s preeminent scientific organization declared racism a serious threat to public health.
“People may have different ideas about what racism is or what effects racism has, but the science and the data is showing us that there are persistent equity gaps in the delivery of health care in poor and minority communities,” U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes said on Friday, before a series of votes on the House floor. “So regardless of people’s perceptions or interpretations about racism, we need to act.”
The federal Centers for Disease and Prevention is the latest and most prominent body to declare that racism is hazardous to peo
ple’s health. The CDC joins the American Medical Association and some 170 state and municipal entities. In Connecticut’s state legislature, lawmakers are debating a bill that would declare racism a public health crisis and establish a “Commission on Racial Equity in Public Health.”
Hayes, a rising star in the Democratic Party, plans to re-introduce a lengthy 12-page resolution next week calling for the House to declare racism a public health crisis. The Hayes declaration calls for a nationwide strategy to dismantle systemic racism, to advance reforms, and to “promote efforts to address the social determinants of health.”
Hayes introduced the same resolution last July, as civil unrest and protests over the public slaying of George Floyd in Minnesota reached a peak. The resolution was not voted upon.
“Black people in the United States are three times more likely to be killed by police than white people in the United States, and police violence is the sixth leading cause of death for young Black men,” reads Hayes’ resolution, citing a 2019 study. “[Black woman are] four times more likely than white women to suffer severe maternal morbidity or die of pregnancy-related complications.”
The CDC in its April 9 statement on racism and health agreed, calling structural and interpersonal racism “a fundamental cause of health inequities, health disparities and disease.” The impact, the CDC said, is “severe, far-reaching, and unacceptable.”
“The data show that racial and ethnic minority groups, throughout the United States, experience higher rates of illness and death across a wide range of health conditions, including diabetes, hypertension, obesity, asthma, and heart disease, when compared to their white counterparts,” the CDC statement says. “The COVID-19 pandemic, and its disproportionate impact among racial and ethnic minority populations is another stark example of these enduring health disparities.”
Hayes says all Americans suffer the effects of racism because when one part of a body is afflicted, the whole body feels pain.
“We all lose with racism — the entire collective community loses,” Hayes said on Friday. “We are at a moment of reckoning in America.”
As a result, the CDC statement says, “we must confront the systems and policies that have resulted in the generational injustice that has given rise to racial and ethnic health inequities.”
Hayes likes the sound of the word, confront.
“It’s an action word, and I think that was intentional,” she said. “I don’t want just lip service. I want action.”
Racism and health
Hayes knows from her own story growing up poor in Waterbury’s toughest housing project and dropping out of high school when she got pregnant that the socioeconomic effects of racism and health are linked.
Last week, the CDC stated that science also understands the link.
“A growing body of research shows that centuries of racism in this country has had a profound and negative impact on communities of color… affecting where one lives, learns, works, worships and plays, and creating inequities in access to a range of social and economic benefits — such as housing, education, wealth, and employment,” the CDC statement says. “These conditions — often referred to as social determinants of health — are key drivers of health inequities within communities of color, placing those within these populations at greater risk for poor health outcomes.”
Hayes said her own experience as a Waterbury high school teacher showed her that substandard housing put her students at higher risk of asthma and absenteeism.
Making health care equitable means breaking barriers that racism creates, said Hayes. That was the strategy behind $11 million in federal grants Hayes secured last week for community health centers in Danbury, Waterbury and two other locations in west-central Connecticut. The money targeted “hard-to-reach communities.”
Making health care equitable also means understanding the effect of racism on mental and emotional well-being, Hayes said.
Hayes, who rose to prominence as the national Teacher of the Year in 2016, said it is not only overt acts of racism that are traumatic, but habitual exposure to everyday discrimination, which is a fact of Black life.
Her resolution makes the case that “the daily experience of racism is associated with stress, depression, and anxiety, and may cause physiological reactivity or contribute to chronic health conditions.”
As a result, her resolution says, Washington needs to “enact immediate and effective cross governmental efforts to address the root causes of institutional racism and their downstream impacts.” The CDC agrees.
“Racism — both interpersonal and structural — negatively affects the mental and physical health of millions of people, preventing them from attaining their highest level of health, and consequently, affecting the health of our nation,” the CDC statement says.
Hayes, who went public with her pain and frustration in October after racists Zoom-bombed her videoconference meeting with constituents in Newtown, said the CDC’s statement was encouraging and promising.
“It’s an important first step,” Hayes said. “It’s a huge step for the CDC.”