In Search of (Poetic) Health Justice: Public Health Development in Context of Racism’s Destruction and (Poetic) Resistance’s Creativity
Shanaé R. Burch, EdD, EdM, Ryan J. Petteway, DrPH, MPH, and LeConté J. Dill, DrPH, MPH
Chapter 24 in Racism: Science and Tools for the Public Health Professional. APHA Press (2024)
Excerpts
“Not only do we believe that public health has generally failed to “alter auras” but it has also systematically excluded the forms and expressions of knowledge most capable of doing so from their rightful place within the research and practice canon. In doing so, public health has not only foreclosed deeper engagements with creative works as germane to health, healing, and social action but it has also created the illusion that creative ways of knowing, modes of resistance, and sense-making have somehow not been integral to the social and cultural survival of those of us at the margins from day one. Thus, rather than altering ideas and dreams, public health has in many ways functioned to truncate, interrupt, and defer them—manufacturing a knowledge and practice landscape with the aura of a microwaved hot dog wrapped in a soggy regression. We believe it is beyond time to unsettle this landscape—to remind us who we really/fully are, to remember and re-member our legacies of creative resistance and/as healing, and to reassert that poetry never has been and never will be a luxury.”
“What we have before us is an opportunity to meaningfully alter the aura of public health knowledge production, expression, and curation. It is an opportunity to more thoroughly humanize discourse of health (in)equity, to remind us all that our lives—our existences—neither begin nor end in the scientific literature. To remind us that there is a fuller story to be told. That there are pasts to be recovered and futures yet to be written. One poem. One song. One play. One creative gem at a time. We invite you to cowrite the public health that we all deserve—one that future generations will recognize as worthy, as healthful, as irresistible, and as unmistakably full of radical possibility. Right here. Right now.”