Announcements

 

Announcement: MTPCCR Is Accepting Applications

Are you interested in learning how to apply to a doctoral program and how to succeed in it? Apply to our Summer 2022 UCLA Minority Training Program in Cancer Control Research (MTPCCR). It is BIPOC-led, BIPOC-centered & culturally-rooted. MTPCCR aims to increase ethnic diversity in the field of cancer disparities research by encouraging minority master’s students and master’s level health professionals in public health and social/behavioral sciences to pursue a doctoral degree and a career in research. Deadline to apply is February 18, 2022!


Job Announcement: GSR Evaluator

The Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health seeks a graduate student researcher (GSR) Evaluator to conduct a process evaluation. This position will begin immediately and continue through July 31, 2022, with a possibility of extension beyond that date. This work is part of a project to build a web-based set of COVID prevention and intervention tools, including a COVID equity dashboard, and to train selected pilot communities in using the tools. The purpose of the evaluation is the extent to which the implemented project aligns with the conceptual model, and it will identify any gaps and issues to address to strengthen the intervention and improve its likelihood of achieving a greater impact. Specific responsibilities and qualifications are outlined here.


Job Announcement: GSR Programmer/Analyst

The Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health seeks a graduate student researcher (GSR) Programmer/Analyst to begin immediately. This position calls for expertise in programming, statistical modeling and prediction in big data research. The primary responsibilities include programming the system to compute and predict associations to be visualized on a data dashboard. Specific responsibilities and qualifications are outlined here.


Job Announcement: Web Application Developer

The Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health seeks a graduate student researcher or other Web Application Developer to begin immediately. This position calls for expertise in the development, maintenance and translation of web-based applications . The primary responsibilities  will be to assist with linking data sources to a novel dashboard and conduct continuous quality improvement. Specific responsibilities and qualifications are outlined below.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Key responsibilities include, but are not limited to working with a dashboard developer to:

●      Assist with the installation data dashboard software

●      Assist with data linkage

●      Provide details on how to read the required data for each data source

●      Provide details on what KPIs are expected on each Dashboard and the overall Dashboard requirements

●      Perform UAT with vendor guidance and provide feedback to the vendor

●      Perform the installation steps, while the vendor provides guidance developer/team with access to perform the steps.

QUALIFICATIONS

Eligibility

To be eligible, candidates must :

●      Have at least a degree in a relevant field  (e.g., information science)

●      Have at least one year of relevant experience

●      Meet all department and UCLA eligibility for hire during the COVID-19 pandemic

●      Be available to start immediately

The ideal candidate will also:

●      Communicate effectively with diverse members of an interdisciplinary team

●      Be a reliable employee

●      Be comfortable working independently and seeking guidance or assistance as needed

●      Have good organizational skills

To apply, send the following items in a single email to RacismHealthAdmin@ph.ucla.edu. The review of applications will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled. Pay will be commensurate with experience.

  1. A letter of application explaining how you meet the criteria listed in this announcement

  2. An updated curriculum vita or resume

  3. The names and contact information for two references

  4. Links to sample work previously completed

The University of California is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, protected veteran status or other protected categories covered by the UC Nondiscrimination and Affirmative Action Policy.


 
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STATEMENT ON POLICING AND THE PANDEMIC

Press Conference Statement [1]

COVID-19 Task Force on Racism & Equity

June 3, 2020 

“White Supremacy has taught him that all people of color are threats irrespective of their behavior. Capitalism has taught him that at all costs, his property can and must be protected. Patriarchy has taught him that his masculinity has to be proved by the willingness to conquer fear through aggression.”

bell hooks

bell hooks, a Black scholar/feminist/activist stated these words two decades ago. In 2020, with our Black families targeted specifically, and people of color more broadly, we continue to live, relive, and over-live these words.

We, public health scholars, teachers, and practitioners, come together today after a weekend of nationwide mobilizing, protest and uprising against state-sanctioned violence and the system’s racial disregard of life. 

As public health professionals, focusing on issues of equity, we are facing two interrelated crises right now: policing and the pandemic. In mid-March, when the task force came together, we recognized that the national deployment of military was always a possibility as was the chance for the state, and its benefactors, to use the pandemic as an opportunity to expand its power. Specifically, we became concerned with the rhetoric and implementation of contact tracing, as there was always a justified fear that this public health tool could be weaponized against already structurally vulnerable and targeted communities. Guided by our field’s obligation to prevent harm and promote health, we were both concerned with protecting people from getting the virus and from the collateral consequences we expected communities of color and other socially disadvantaged communities would disproportionately face. 

To counteract this, we as a health community, worked hard to have our presence be more relevant and influential than that of law enforcement. With the most recent brutal murder of George Floyd (added to the other more recent murders of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery), we wonder if this was ever possible given how the state’s sanctioned violence against Black people is the foundation we attempt to build our public health system on. Racialized risk of dying, constant police surveillance, and economic devastation were matches in a tinderbox. Today, we not only see increases in COVID-related death among communities of color, but also helicopters, tanks, riot gear, tear gas, rubber bullets, and real bullets. In this context, we hear law enforcement throughout the country implying that such a thing as public health policing exists, justifying the expansion of their local budgets, and referencing contact tracing, a public health tool that they believe can be used to fight crime, or more accurately, to fight dissent.

While the appropriation of this tool is happening before our eyes, if you are Black, Brown, Native living in this country, your likelihood of death, hospitalization, or infection in general, and because of SARS-Cov-2 more specifically, is greater than others due to structural racism. People detained in jails, prisons, and detention camps, unhoused, living in nursing homes and on reservations, and working in factories and farms have been the ones most impacted as their health is structured by their overexposure to hazards, stress, and racism and their underexposure to clean water, rest, care, and dignity. A biomedical fix will not address this problem, as it is not obesity, diabetes, and hypertension that are to blame for this disparity. It is not even the virus.

Rather, it is White Supremacy, a racial system of dominance, expansionism, and law and order. It is the most significant public health problem throughout the history of this country. In fact, it legitimized and facilitated the founding of the U.S. Today, in this current crisis, our focus is on the system of policing and the continued role it plays in structuring disparities from the neighborhood to the individual level and from the individual through the neighborhood.  In 2018, the American Public Health Association, in a statement titled, “Addressing Law Enforcement Violence as a Public Health Issue,” reviewed established evidence connecting policing to increased death, disability from injury, and psychological harm such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, and stress. Bringing together the published literature, it demonstrated that policing in the United States is the institutionalization of death and disability for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities. Policing in this country is a system whose genealogical roots connect to slave patrols on the plantation and US expansion into domestic and global lands. It functions in service of racial capitalism and maintains the “frontier” once it has been conquered. Since its inception, policing has served to confine communities and police the freedoms of one group to expand the freedoms and protect the property, interests, and life of the white supremacist state. 

More specifically, policing is deeply embedded within White Supremacy’s larger carcerality as a carceral system that institutionalizes and normalizes violence and the theft and exploitation of humans and land. It operates on the level of the civilization and it has always needed structural violence to maintain control. As an ideology and practice, it believes state-sanctioned violence (incarceration, detention, securitization, and war) in all its forms are needed for it to thrive. It is made up of structures (prisons, jails, juvenile halls, and detention centers), people (police, guards, and soldiers), and technologies (fees, drones, electronic monitoring devices, and databases). Modern policing is rooted in this structure and connected to other forms of structural violence. Seeing the national guard outside of police stations in downtown Los Angeles, the thin line between policing and militarism is revealed. Is the military here to restore law and order? Are they here to support an extension of themselves, the police?

Domestic policing and global militarism have converged in our streets indicating that they may never have been separate. Policing and the pandemic teach us that structural violence is what has allowed for structural racism to continue. As such, neither the current context nor historical evidence support the expansion of any policing/law enforcement/military budget, anywhere. For any country or city to be prepared for any disaster, it needs to invest in building up community strength and power between and during emergencies. It is quite brutal to increase an epidemiological driver of harm at the expense of all other essential services needed for healthy social functioning. And, no matter how many ways they attempt to re-brand themselves, police officers are not social workers, mental health providers, or community health workers. Policing, just like racism, is structural, much more nuanced and penetrating than the interpersonal, and not knowing the American histories of anti-black racism and policing in this country has resulted in a fractured solidarity that has us focused on micro-level interactions at the cost of systems change. The failure to let go of policing in this country—as a source of protection for anyone—is a failure to understand how policing is upheld by racial logics of safety and threat that structure permanent vulnerability for Black people and all racialized groups. The national guard in the streets for “order” is made possible because we fail to see how injustices to some leave none of us safe and how policing is counter to our public health mission.

In the latest budget proposed by the Los Angeles Mayor, over half of the entire budget (54%) is allocated to law enforcement, this includes an increase in 7% to cover bonuses, salary increases, and educational incentives. An increase in funds to law enforcement during a pandemic makes priorities even more clear. As Pete White of Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN) said in a recent press conference demanding a revision to the Los Angeles Mayor’s budget, “Our community workers don’t have guns.” They have guns, because this isn’t about life; this is about power, its acquisition and maintenance. These budgets structure the very racism which then pre-exposes communities to increase hardship, hazards, and risk as opposed to structuring access to care, support, and vital resources, and they structure the violence that is needed to maintain this inequality.

Los Angeles provides a concrete example of how policing is used to manage the unrest and fallout that comes from decades of social and economic disinvestment—the racialized neoliberal structured abandonment. It has been previous budgets that have contributed to disproportionate susceptibility to infection, hospitalization, disability, death, and financial collapse and poverty for communities of color, the working poor, and unhoused during this pandemic. Policing and the pandemic teach us that all budgets across all institutions that disinvest from police and instead invest in housing, transportation, education, and employment are what are needed. Providing health resources during a pandemic are what are needed, not closing them. Removing guns from the streets are what is needed, not adding them.  

Reflecting on the situation across the country right now as it unfolds, we turn to Dr. Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist whose expertise includes structural violence and racial struggles for liberation, for a final lesson on policing and the pandemic. In “Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry, and Politics,” Nigel Gibson quotes an article written by Frantz Fanon and Slimane Asselah, which states, “It is precisely when the agitated are not rejected, excluded, isolated, or confined that we can endeavor to understand them”. Until American society can commit to full racial justice and the abolishment of structural violence, people will continue to protest, disrupt, and demand. Towards this end, the charges we give to ourselves and the health professional community below are necessary first steps to stop and reverse the injustices that sit at the intersection of racism and violence. They require us as a health professional community to strategize, organize, and mobilize in sync with community visions of self-determination.

 

We charge ourselves and our colleagues to do four things:

1.     Self-Monitor how we research in the community. A true commitment to health equity and anti-racism work employs tools and skills to undo the legacies of racial capitalism, setter-colonialism, and imperial efforts. When we fail to consider the ways in which our work can be co-opted, we too are complicit in state uses of violence to counteract the petitions socially marginalized communities make for a better world.

2.     Track the nation’s alignment with global principles. Specifically, we must not continue to violate the abilities of diverse communities to self-determine. We will be monitoring these three things in particular:

1.     The extent to which the nation and certain regions are forcing particular communities to go to work, knowing that doing so places them at higher risk of infection and death;

2.     How the nation is responding to people’s resistance to legacy and ongoing structural racism and structural violence through policing;

3.     How the nation is taking advantage of the pandemic to expand its law enforcement powers and the surveillance state. 

3.     Organize to hold governing bodies accountable. Institutions such as the American Public Health Association (APHA) must be held accountable to formally stand against the growing dependence on carceral (incarceration, detention, law enforcement and/or military) solutions to public health and social problems. We also urge such bodies to advocate and support other, specifically community health-centered tools, instead. 

4.     Act in alignment with actions that develop and strengthen community power for the purposes of self-determination. We believe this is an essential component to facilitating racial justice. For Los Angeles County, please see the resources below on visions and plans in alignment with this charge:

  • Black Lives Matter LA has been advocating for a People’s Budget that redistributes funds from the police to universal aid, public transit, housing, healthcare, and education. They are also advocating for the removal of District Attorney Jackie Lacey who has not prosecuted one police officer for any of the over 600 killings since 2012. They get us to see the connections between police brutality, anti-black racism, and city budgets. They also organize actions and updates on how to get involved now. Go here to follow their work: https://blmla.org/

  • Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN) has been organizing in downtown Los Angeles in Skid Row, the epicenter of policing. Unhoused persons are disproportionately Black, have the lowest life-expectancies in Los Angeles County, and are the most likely to be arrested. Go here to connect with their many programs that build community power: https://cangress.org/

  • Youth Justice Coalition (YJC) and the STOP Police Violence Coalition, a network of families who have lost loved ones from police violence, have been working on important legislations to address policing. In 2018, they organized to pass SB 1421 which advocated for public release of records and, in 2019, AB 392 which advocated against the use of force. For 2021, they are mobilizing to introduce legislation for police decertification. Please go here to learn more about their actions and to connect: linktr.ee/youthjusticela

  • Stop LAPD Spying has been following and analyzing the ways that the National Security Police State uses opportunities such as the pandemic to expand its power at the cost of community power. Their series, “Power Not Paranoia,” discusses surveillance, gender, sexuality, racism, public health, and the pandemic. https://stoplapdspying.org/action/webinars/

  • Alternatives to Incarceration Workgroup has given us a blue-print out of criminalization and into a legitimate community health system. These alternatives are the roadmap. They have racial equity benchmarks to make sure that the most marginalized groups get to benefit form this new vision. Go here to read the full report: https://lacalternatives.org/

  

In support,

COVID-19 Task Force on Racism & Equity

Collins O. Airhihenbuwa
Professor, Heath Policy and Behavioral Sciences
Global Research Against Noncommunicable Diseases (GRAND)
School of Public Health
Georgia State University

Randall Akee
Associate Professor, Public Policy and American Indian Studies
Luskin School of Public Affairs
University of California, Los Angeles

Bita Amani
Associate Professor, Department of Urban Public Health
Charles R. Drew University School of Medicine and Science
Faculty Affiliate, Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health at UCLA
Co-Chair, COVID-19 Task Force on Racism & Equity* 

Sharrelle Barber
Assistant Research Professor, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics 
Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health
Founding Director and Coordinator of the Poor People's Campaign Health Justice Advisory Committee 

Chandra L. Ford
Associate Professor, Department of Community Health Sciences
Founding Director, Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health
Fielding School of Public Health
University of California at Los Angeles
Co-Chair, COVID-19 Task Force on Racism & Equity*

Gilbert Gee
Professor, Department of Community Health Sciences
Fielding School of Public Health
University of California, Los Angeles 

Keon Gilbert
Associate Professor
College for Public Health and Social Justice
Saint Louis University
Co-Director of the Institute for Healing Justice and Equity 

Derek Griffith
Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, Health and Society
Vanderbilt University
Founder and Director of the Center for Research on Men’s Health 

Camara Phyllis Jones
2019-2020 Evelyn Green Davis Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University
Past President, American Public Health Association
Adjunct Professor, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University
Senior Fellow and Adjunct Associate Professor, Morehouse School of Medicine

Nancy Krieger
Professor, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Monica R. McLemore
Associate Professor
School of Nursing
University of California, San Francisco

Michelle Morse
Assistant Professor
Harvard Medical School and Co-Founder, EqualHealth

Linda Rae Murray
Steering Committee Member
Collaborative for Health Equity - Cook County
Past President, American Public Health Association 

Jaime C. Slaughter-Acey
Assistant Professor, Division of Epidemiology and Community Health
University of Minnesota School of Public Health
Founder, Black Epi Matters 

Angie Denisse Otiniano Verissimo
Associate Professor, Department of Health Science
Co-Chair, CSUSB Women of Color in Academia
California State University, San Bernardino

*Signed on behalf of the COVID-19 Task Force on Racism & Equity, a partnership between the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health and Charles R. Drew School of Medicine and Science.


[1]This is the official version of the shorter statement read during a press conference held on Monday, June 1, 2020.


ANNOUNCING terence keel as associate director for critical theory

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Terence Keel, PhD, is an author and professor interested in transformative pedagogy and social justice. He is a trained historian of science and scholar of religion who earned a PhD from Harvard University. Keel has written widely about the history of racism and its connections to science, religion, law, and public health. Keel's first book Divine Variations, published by Stanford University Press, draws out the connections between Christian intellectual history and the modern scientific study of human bio-diversity in Europe and America.

Keel has come to UCLA as an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, and the Department of African American Studies. He previously taught at UC Santa Barbara where he served a Vice Chair to the Department of History and was the first Black Studies Professor to receive the Harold J. Plous Award- the highest honor given to a junior faculty member in recognition for his scholarship and teaching. Dr. Keel is also a senior advisor to the Goldin Institute: a Chicago based non-profit organization that advocates globally for grassroots leadership, conflict resolution, poverty alleviation and environmental sustainability.


It is with great sadness that the Center Announces the passing of our affiliate, Dr. William “Billy” Cunningham

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UCLA faculty, students and staff in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research in the UCLA School of Medicine and UCLA Fielding School of Public Health are mourning the loss of William “Billy” Cunningham, who was a professor of Medicine and Public Health. Billy died Thursday, January 3, 2020, in Los Angeles. He was 60 years old.

A fierce advocate for improving the health of underrepresented communities, Billy was a national leader in studies designed to improve outcomes along the HIV care continuum. After receiving his bachelor’s degree at Brown University in 1982 and graduating from the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine in 1987, he came to UCLA to complete his internal medicine residency training. He was then selected into the 1991 cohort of the UCLA Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar Program and completed a masters in public health from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health before joining our faculty in both the Schools of Medicine and Public Health.

Billy had incredible passion and energy and was a national leader in addressing racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities among vulnerable populations living with, or at-risk of, HIV. Most recently he was working to improve HIV care for HIV+ men and transgender women released from Los Angeles County Jail. “Billy was a true friend, colleague, teacher, clinician, and researcher and will be deeply missed by so many of us” said Carol Mangione, Chief of the UCLA Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research.

As Director of the UCLA Clinical Translational Science Institute TL1 Summer Fellowship Program, Co-Director of the Investigator Development Core for the NIA-funded Resource Centers for Minority Aging Research, Director of the Training Core for the NIMHD-funded Project Export, and as Associate Director of the UCLA Robert Wood Johnson/National Clinical Scholars Program at UCLA, Billy was instrumental in the mentoring of hundreds of trainees, most of whom were from under-represented minority groups aspiring to enter the medical and/or public health professions. “He will be remembered as an amazing scholar, and an incredibly popular teacher” said Dean Kelsey Martin.

Billy also taught graduate-level courses on racial disparities and health, health services organization, and outcomes and effectiveness research. “This is a great loss for his family, his community, and our department,” said Alan Fogelman, Department Chair and Professor of Medicine. “He was a beloved colleague and a true example of clinical scientist and teacher.”  

Despite numerous health setbacks over the past year, he continued to be there for his family and to remain passionately engaged in his research which always focused on how to improve care for some of the most vulnerable among us. At the time of his demise, he was a principal investigator for 3 research grants and authored numerous peer-reviewed publications in 2019. Billy is survived by his wife, Sharon and their two young sons, Emery and Kendi.

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UCLA will hold a public memorial service Saturday, January 18, 2020 from 10:00 am to noon at the Luskin Conference Center followed by lunch from noon to 2:00 pm on the Terrace to honor Billy and his profound contributions to our division and the field of HIV care, prevention, and health equity.  RSVP is requested.

The family requests that in lieu of flowers donations be made to one of Billy’s research partners, the Center for Health Justice, a non-profit organization dedicated to serving individuals with a history of incarceration by providing health education and supportive services.

Any remembrances of Billy can be sent to the family at: c/o Dr. Carol Mangione, 1100 Glendon Ave., Suite 900, Los Angeles, CA 90024.


Congratulations to the Seed Grant Winners!


Anna K. Hing, MPH
UCLA Doctoral Candidate, Department of Community Health Sciences
”The influence of voter suppression, an understudied form of structural racism, on health inequities”

Courtney Thomas Tobin, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Community Health Sciences
“Dimensions of Segregation, Neighborhood Context, and Depressive Symptoms among Black Americans”

Paris (AJ) Adkins-Jackson, PhD, MPH
Racial Health Equity Postdoctoral Scholar
Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health
“How SES determines your self-care: A differential item analysis”

Jeremy Levenson
UCLA Doctoral Candidate, Department of Anthropology
"How racism shapes the punishment of mental illness in LA county”


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Racism: Science and Tools for the Public Health Professional

The Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice, & Health is excited to announce the release of Racism: Science and Tools for the Public Health Professional, our edited volume published by APHA Press. The volume is a plain language reference tool that frontline public health professionals can use to address racism as they carry out their ongoing work. Dr. Chandra L. Ford is the volume’s lead editor. Co-editors include Dr. Derek Griffith of Vanderbilt University, Dr. Marino Bruce of Vanderbilt University and Dr. Keon Gilbert of Saint Louis University.


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Introducing our New Postdoctoral Scholar: Paris B. Adkins-Jackson, PhD, MPH

The Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health is pleased to announce the first scholar in the inaugural cohort of its newly established postdoctoral fellowship program. Dr. Adkins-Jackson earned a doctor of philosophy (PhD) in Psychometrics from Morgan State University and a Master’s in Public Health (MPH) in Biostatistics and Epidemiology from Claremont Graduate University. Dr. Adkins-Jackson is a community-based, multidisciplinary researcher whose work seeks to improve quality of life in under-resourced communities. At the Center, Dr. Adkins-Jackson plans to develop and validate a new measure of racism for use in empirical studies attempting to quantify relationships between racism, health and healthcare disparities.


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Ethnicity & Disease Special Issue on critical race theory and public health

The Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice, & Health is pleased to announce the release of its first major project: Special issue of the journal Ethnicity and Disease focused on how public health researchers can address racism. The journal supplement includes a collection of papers based on critical race theory, a concept developed more than three decades ago by legal scholars that illuminates the subtle ways racism matters in any situation.


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Social Science & Medicine Special Issue on the role of Racism in Health Disparities 

Social Science & Medicine recently published a special issue dedicated to understanding the role of racism in health disparities. With an interdisciplinary approach, the special issue addresses immigration policy, gun violence,  workplace racism, segregation , prison healthcare, the concept of whiteness, and other pertinent racism-related predictors. 


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American Journal of Law & Medicine Special Issue on Critical Race Theory

This American Journal of Law & Medicine special issue explores how Critical Race Theory can transform the study of health inequalities across the health sciences.