Achieving Health Equity: Tools for Naming Racism and Moving to Action (Online)

**Register on Howard County Library's website here!

Camara Phyllis Jones, MD, MPH, PhD is a family physician, epidemiologist, and Past President of the American Public Health Association whose work focuses on naming, measuring, and addressing the impacts of racism on the health and well-being of the nation and the world.

Achieving health equity requires 1) valuing all individuals and populations equally, 2) recognizing and rectifying historical injustices, and 3) providing resources according to need.

Racism is a huge roadblock to achieving health equity in the United States, yet many people are in staunch denial of its continued existence and profoundly negative impacts on the health and well-being of the nation.  And even those who acknowledge that racism exists sometimes feel ill-equipped to say the word “racism” out loud or take action to address it.

In this live webinar, Dr. Jones will share tools for understanding and acting on four key messages:

• Racism exists
• Racism is a system
• Racism saps the strength of the whole society
• We can act to dismantle racism

She will share four of her allegories on “race” and racism that illuminate topics that are otherwise difficult for many Americans to understand or discuss.  She will also provide definitions, frameworks, and other tools to equip participants to engage in a National Campaign Against Racism with three tasks:  1) name racism, 2) ask “How is racism operating here?”, and 3) organize and strategize to act.

An opportunity for Q&A follows the presentation. 

**Register on Howard County Library's website here!

ABOUT DR. JONES

Camara Phyllis Jones, MD, MPH, PhD is a family physician, epidemiologist, and Past President of the American Public Health Association whose work focuses on naming, measuring, and addressing the impacts of racism on the health and well-being of our nation and the world.

Dr. Jones is currently a Presidential Visiting Fellow at the Yale School of Medicine in the Department of Internal Medicine and the Office of Health Equity Research; will serve as the 2021-2022 UCSF Presidential Chair at the University of California San Francisco; and was the 2019-2020 Evelyn Green Davis Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

She taught six years as an Assistant Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health (1994 to 2000), served fourteen years as a Medical Officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2000 to 2014), and is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Morehouse School of Medicine.

Dr. Jones’ allegories on "race" and racism illuminate topics that are otherwise difficult for many Americans to understand or discuss. Recognizing that racism saps the strength of the whole society through the waste of human resources, she aims to mobilize and engage all Americans in a sustained National Campaign Against Racism.

This event is sponsored by the Horizon Foundation.