“Illmatic Consequences” book chapter drop!
Beyond hyped to have a chapter included in this new fire collection from UWP, “Illmatic Consequence: The Clapback to Opponents of Critical Race Theory.” Copies available here. Summary of my chapter below.
Chapter 11
ANTIBODIES//Shots: Engaging Public Health Critical Race Praxis to Counter Epistemic Violence in Discourse of Dual Pandemics
Public health has been front and center over the last two years as dual pandemics of COVID-19 and racialized police violence have dominated public discourse of safety and well-being in the U.S.. Unfortunately, much of the narrative around causes and solutions to these crises have presented as ahistoric, decontextualized, and robustly colorblind (e.g. “we’re all in this together”). Public health—both academic and practice-based—has (re)exposed itself as fundamentally ill-prepared to respond to the illmatic consequences of structural racism both as observed in COVID-19 racial health inequities, and as revealed through the institutional silence of major health organizations on the matter of racialized police violence. Here, through combination of brief essay and poem, I engage public health critical race praxis (PHCRP) to interrogate matters of misrepresentation and institutional silence surrounding COVID-19 and racialized police violence. Specifically, I engage PHCRP principles of disciplinary self-critique and voice to expose and counter the epistemic violence that public health has repeatedly subjected Black Americans to in times of crises—rendering legible the manner in which present discourse of “returning to normal” is, in fact, a return to the invisibilization of the endemicity of structural racism. Crafted as counternarrative and in the counterstorytelling tradition of CRT, the poem—ANTIBODIES//Shots—weaves together a sampling of 28 tracks as a listening trail for readers to (re)encounter 40+ years of lyrical protest and resistance, rearticulating COVID-19 discourse of viral “antibodies” and “shots” as embodied/manifest within racialized police violence—i.e. the other anti-(Black)bodies and shots that claim 1/1000 of us.
