There is no more consequential outcome of privilege than (health and) life itself. The privilege of being on the living end of racism.
Racism is one of the fastest-spreading and most fatal cancers humanity has ever known.
Ibram X. Kendi
Ibram X Kendi in his new book How To Be An Antiracist defines racism as the “marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.” Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups experience inequality such as access to economic or educational opportunities, housing, health care etc. Racist policies are any measures that produce and sustain such racial disparities and racial ideas are the beliefs that nurture the policies which say that one racial group is inferior or superior to another group.
Racism intersects also with other social hierarchies based on body shape, ethnicity, culture, class, gender, sexuality etc. So, when we use any social category to value one characteristic more than another, or when we use a form of diversity or difference and assign it to a group, and make them inferior, we endorse a racist idea.
Racism is not limited to the systemic oppression and deprivation of people of color. Racism is the use of body traits, group characteristics, nationalities, behaviors and choices to qualify a specific group and then judge them as inferior or superior. And racism goes further to solidify special interests, through social and cultural practices and policies, to the group that is deemed superior. Currently a poor, transgender Black woman might well be at the bottom of all cultural hierarchies and suffer the highest amount of deprivation and lost life years; her average life expectancy in the U.S. being 35 years.
Racism is the biggest and most important public health issue of our times.
Ibram X. Kendi. How To Be An Antiracist. New York: One World, 2019.