Housing
This historical policy, which denied home loans to people in predominantly Black neighborhoods, created long-term racial disparities in wealth and health outcomes.
What is redlining?
This federal program provides health insurance to people aged 65 and older, and to some younger people with disabilities.
What is Medicare?
This term refers to the unearned advantages that white people receive in societies structured by racial inequity. In public health, this might show up in whose health issues are prioritized, whose research gets funded, or which “norms” are considered standard in healthcare.
What is white privilege?
Coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, this framework analyzes how overlapping systems of oppression (such as race, gender, and class), compound inequities in health and social outcomes.
What is intersectionality?
This concept explains how social and economic inequality “gets under the skin,” altering physiology through chronic stress and biological wear and tear.
What is allostatic load?
People experiencing this form of housing instability face higher rates of chronic disease, mental illness, and premature mortality.
What is homelessness (or being unhoused)?
This U.S. act, passed in 2010, aimed to expand healthcare coverage, reduce costs, and eliminate barriers due to pre-existing conditions.
What is the Affordable Care Act (ACA)?
This term was coined by Tervalon and Murray-García in 1998, it’s about maintaining a lifelong commitment to self-reflection and self-critique.
What is cultural humility?
This landmark study, often cited as an example of unethical medical research, exploited Black men with syphilis in the name of “science” for over 40 years.
What is the Tuskegee Syphilis Study?
Public health as a field actually emerged to address these class-based inequalities: sanitation, clean water, and housing reforms were all rooted in recognizing that the poor were dying because of social conditions, not _____
What are moral failings?
Research shows that stable, affordable housing acts as this type of public health intervention; reducing ER visits, improving medication adherence, and enhancing mental health.
What is a preventive (or upstream) intervention?
This term describes preventable differences in disease burden, injury, violence, or access to healthcare that are closely linked with social, economic, and environmental disadvantage.
What are health disparities?
This term refers to people connected through shared values, experiences, or goals (for instance, the recovery community or LGBTQ+ health advocates
What is an interest-based community?
After the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision restricting race-conscious admissions, researchers warned that the ruling may worsen this key social determinant of health by reducing access to higher education for marginalized racial groups.
What is economic opportunity?
This term describes how socioeconomic advantages accumulate across generations: such as wealth, education, and neighborhood stability; and is a key explanation for why health inequities persist even when individual behaviors change.
What is intergenerational (or cumulative) advantage?
This term refers to when healthy food appears accessible because stores are nearby... but prices are too high for local residents to actually afford them.
What is a food mirage?
This joint federal and state program provides health coverage for low-income individuals, yet eligibility, benefits, and provider reimbursement rates vary widely across states, contributing to persistent healthcare inequities.
What is Medicaid?
This term means being aware of how your words, assumptions, and behaviors might affect people from different backgrounds.
What is cultural sensitivity?
This concept describes a clinician’s ability to recognize and respond to the ways that structural forces, such as racism, housing policy, and immigration law; affect patient health, expanding beyond individual-level “cultural competency.”
What is structural competency?
This concept describes how multiple systems like housing, education, and labor markets interact to constrain upward socioeconomic mobility and produce patterned health inequities across racial and class lines.
What is structural constraint (or structural stratification)?
This housing-related policy approach focuses on ensuring residents have consistent, affordable, and safe housing as a foundation for all other health and social outcomes.
What is Housing First?
Under the Affordable Care Act, states were given the option to expand this program to cover adults earning up to 138% of the federal poverty level, but political resistance in many states has created a “coverage gap” for millions.
What is Medicaid expansion?
This term involves the unconscious attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions.
What is implicit bias?
This concept, developed by public health scholar Dr. Dorothy Roberts, critiques how medicine and genetics continue to reproduce racial categories as biological realities instead of dismantling them as social constructs.
What is race-based medicine?
This 1930s set of programs expanded social safety nets like Social Security and public housing, boosting national health, but its benefits were uneven, often excluding Black and immigrant workers.
What is the New Deal?