RELATIVES // Risks
Or, I Am Not Your Data: Ode to Delphrine’s Walk, PT.II
Critical Public Health (2022)
“Epidemiology:
legions of credentialed humans
without the cognitive capacity
to comprehend the difference
between being “at-risk”
and being risked.”
Abstract
Through poetry, this piece offers a critical reflection on dominant individualist, reductionist, and extractivist paradigms of epidemiology, questioning the settler-colonial and dispossessing proclivities of common research practices that control public health narrative space—especially as related to racial health inequities. Crafted as counternarrative and rooted in public health critical race praxis—specifically, principles of “disciplinary self-critique” and “voice”—this piece weaves epidemiology concepts together with critical theory, Black feminist theory, and civil rights scholarship to frame, critique, and invite discourse regarding matters of epistemic violence, data (in)justice, and (re)colonization as manifest/legible within epidemiology research—using poetry as praxis to embody Audre Lorde’s declaration that, even in public health, “poetry is not a luxury.” As such, this piece presents as a creative expression/articulation of matters more formally discussed in a companion essay, “On Epidemiology as Racial-Capitalist (Re)Colonization and Epistemic Violence.” In this capacity, the poem creatively raises critical questions regarding the epistemic and social values of epidemiology’s dominant knowledge production paradigm, which I hope will invigorate productive discourse regarding the field and who/what it (mis)represents in efforts to study and narrate racial health inequities—especially as germane to antiracism and decolonizing.
Excerpt
“oh yes,
these models
are worn.
Like the soles of my Great Aunt's shoes,
broken over stochastic terrains
from Booth to Detroit to Portland,
10 decades and 3100 miles of
weathering narratives of risks,
dangling from manuscript titles
like the limbs of Black men Iola loved –
and you think you know the curve
of her arches
because you raised
and recorded
her blood pressure?”