Michael Schmid ‘21
Production Editor
The Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law hosted its biannual symposium on January 30 and 31, titled “Healing Hate: A Public Health Perspective on Civil Rights in America.” [1] The two-day event, split between the Law School and the Medical School, focused on the link between civil rights and public health. In the spirit of the interdisciplinary nature of the journal itself, the symposium brought together scholars and experts from a variety of backgrounds, including law, medicine, public health, and social science. Panelists addressed a range of issues, including adverse environmental effects on minority neighborhoods, the traumatic effects of racialized policing, and the effects of gun violence on mental health.
The symposium began with a welcome from Dean Risa Goluboff and was followed by an introduction by Professor Dayna Matthew ’87. Professor Matthew, whose work focuses on racial disparities in health care, remarked that she hoped to bring back the energy of the civil rights era. In particular, she wished to revive the movement’s interdisciplinary approach to tackling the social justice issues of the time. Building on that theme of continuity with our past, Professor Matthew posited that what happened in Charlottesville in 2017 with the Unite the Right rally was not new. Rather, the events of that weekend indicated that the hate, which was sometimes thought to be a relic of the past, is being carried forward.
The keynote speaker for the symposium was Angela Harris, a law professor at the University of California Davis School of Law and prominent speaker and author on legal issues involving issues of power and identities. Harris, who talked about a “new paradigm of medical civil rights,” stated that all forms of subordination, including health disparities, must be uprooted. When thinking about racism, Harris said, many people—including the Supreme Court—tend to think only of conscious bias; however, racism often includes unconscious bias. Addressing the social determinants of health, Harris outlined areas of racial disparity in healthcare, both in access to services as well as quality of health services. She remarked, “your ZIP code determines your health more than your genetic code.”
Following Professor Harris’s keynote speech was a keynote response. This panel, titled “The Health Justice Movement,” featured Professor Kim Forde-Mazrui, Sarah De Guia, CEO of ChangeLabSolutions, Alexander Tsesis, professor at Loyola University School of Law, and Sidney Watson and Ruqaiijah Yearby, both professors at Saint Louis University School of Law. De Guia addressed the use of legal tools to advance public health and noted that she has begun to recognize the crucial role of subordination in public health issues. Tsesis talked about the dehumanizing aspect of hatred and posited that even unconscious bias could be considered conscious given that most adults should be aware of the role and effects of bias in society. Continuing the discussion on humanization, Yearby, advocating “humanizing equity,” emphasized bringing the human element into these discussions to make them less abstract. Yearby spoke about the distinction between “equality” and “equity,” stating “equality is about sameness. Equity is about fairness.”
Two panels on Thursday addressed the social determinants of health. The first looked at housing, neighborhoods, and the environment; the second focused on education, immigration, LGBTQ+, and religious group identities. In the first panel, Vernice Miller-Travis, Executive Vice-President of the Metropolitan Group, recounted her work in the 1980s researching the relationship between the racial composition of neighborhoods and the location of hazardous waste sites. Miller-Travis explained that her research and that of others have documented that adverse environmental effects are clustered in neighborhoods in which large numbers of racial minorities live. “If you’re trying to find the dump,” Miller-Travis remarked, “find out where the black people live.” Miller-Travis ended her segment by urging those in attendance to recognize the effects of local land use and zoning laws that allow for the dismantling of communities of color. In addition to the “erasure” of the Vinegar Hill neighborhood here in Charlottesville, Miller-Travis also noted how the construction of I-95 through Richmond divided and disrupted black communities.[2] Marianne Engelman-Lado, a professor at Yale and Vermont Law Schools, spoke about her work with community-focused environmental justice. Engelman-Lado echoed the correlation between communities of color and environmentally harmful sites such as landfills.
Shifting from environmental determinants of health to those based on neighborhood, the next panelist examined the traumatic effects of racialized policing. Jeffrey Fagan, a law professor at Columbia, was the lead expert in the civil rights trial challenging the New York City stop-and-frisk policy. Noting the racial disparities in who was stopped under the policy, Fagan stated that, in one year, 80% of young, black males in the city were stopped in a single year under stop-and-frisk. Fagan criticized then-mayor Michael Bloomberg, currently a candidate in the Democratic presidential primary, for not apologizing for the policy. Fagan discussed the detrimental mental health effects of racialized police encounters, including increased rates of anxiety, PTSD, and decreased performance in school. Despite these adverse effects on those who have been subjected to police encounters, Fagan said there is no evidence that stop-and-frisk and similar “New Policing” policies have contributed to community safety. Fagan notes that research shows that stops based on a more stringent “probable cause” standard, rather than the permissive “reasonable suspicion” standard under Terry, contribute more to public safety. With these New Policing policies, Fagan says, “We are mortgaging the future . . . of these kids. We are mortgaging their mental health.”
The symposium continued on Friday at the Medical School, led by a keynote address from Vivian Pinn, Director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health. Morning panels addressed issues such as the mental health effects of gun violence and disparities in the rates of maternal and infant mortality. Before the symposium closed with a “call to action” from Professor Matthew, the symposium struck a forward-looking note with a workshop that looked into how to advance civil rights as a health determinant in the health care system.
VJSPL Editor-in-Chief Megan Mers ’20 extends her gratitude to everyone who helped make the event possible. “Putting together the symposium was truly an enormous team effort. The whole event was made possible through the help of Professor Matthew and all of our organizational co-sponsors.” Mers said that she and others on the journal are “really hopeful this event catalyzed important conversations around civil rights and health, both from a legal perspective and a policy perspective.”
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ms3ru@virginia.edu
[1] Thank you to Ronald Pantalena ’20 and Megan McKinley ’21 for their contributions to this article.
[2] I grew up near Syracuse, New York where a similar issue is dominating public debate. Interstate-81 was constructed through the heart of downtown Syracuse, fracturing black communities by bifurcating the city with a massive interstate. Now that I-81 needs significant repairs, many local activists are pushing for I-81 to be lowered and integrated into the community (known locally as the “community grid” option). These advocates for the community grid have highlighted the harm done to these communities of color by the construction of the highway. For those interested in further reading: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/syracuse-slums/416892/.