The Art of Antiracism: Power, Poetry, and Creative Expression in the Struggle for Health Justice
Ryan J. Petteway, DrPH, MPH, Shanaé R. Burch, EdD, EdM, and LeConté J. Dill, DrPH, MPH
Chapter 22 in Racism: Science and Tools for the Public Health Professional. APHA Press (2024)
Excerpt
“We can’t transform the world out there if we don’t transform ourselves in here. And we believe that such transformation requires us to reclaim our full humanity, emotional range, and intellectual capacities by opening our learning, training, and practice spaces to the power of creative arts. The teachings and tools available to current and future students, scholars, and practitioners must be reimagined, remixed, retrofitted, or outright replaced to match the creative cadence of communities of color who have known and been knowing for generations. As we have articulated elsewhere, we believe in engaging poetry as praxis to embody Audre Lorde’s declaration that, even in public health, ‘poetry is not a luxury.’ The fight against racism out there has always been backed by beats, poets, and all manner of creative resistance, refusal, and refuge. They/we don’t need our/ more bar charts. They/we need bars. Less random sampling and more deliberately dope samples. They’re tired of our stats. Shit, we’re tired of our stats.23,24 They/we need stanzas.
Poetry, music, and other creative arts that have been foundational to meaning- making, world-building, healing, and resistance among communities of color can no longer be disregarded—and omitted entirely from public health training requirements and accreditation guidelines. We believe that to forgo the arts as core to our training and praxis is to foreclose the health futures our field so adamantly claims to desire. Those futures require more of/from us than our ability to run code and mix methods. They require us—the whole us. Not the partitioned-variance us. Not the factor-analysis-ed us. Not the grounded-theoried us. But the blurry-eyed, hand-trembling, laugh-crying, zoom-yawning, “try me” us that’s too beautiful for Jenks and too extraordinary for OLS and too sexy for DAGs and too tired for focus groups. The us that knows—that remembers—that those futures—our futures—cannot be and must not be entrusted to the whims of folk who actually need a confidence interval or an American Public Health Association resolution to alert them to the significance of what our poets and play wrights have known for centuries.”