Why it matters

Why does DEI matter?

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is important to the personal and professional needs of all humans. Creating inclusive working and learning environments helps foster new ideas, mutual respect and fulfills individual’s needs to reach their full potential. 

Take a look at the various themes we have collected to understand why diversity, equity, and inclusion matters. 

 

“Equity work is fundamentally quality work. A question that I recommend organizations ask themselves is how are you ensuring that your organization understands the population being served — and are you reflecting the population being served? Value-based care is not just about the metrics. It's not just about the structure. It's also about intention — what are you trying to achieve and how are you trying to achieve it?”   --
Tosan Boyo, M.P.H., senior vice president of hospital operations at California-based John Muir Health

What is unconscious bias?

 

What is racism?

What is Institutional Racism?

Defined as differential access to society's goods, services, and opportunities by race. Institutionalized racism is normative, sometimes legalized, and often manifests as inherited disadvantage. It is structural, having been codified in our institutions of custom, practice, and law, so there need not be an identifiable perpetrator.

What is personally mediated racism?

Defined as prejudice and discrimination, where prejudice means differential assumptions about the abilities, motives, and intentions of others according to their race, and discrimination means differential actions toward others according to their race.

What is internalized racism?

Defined as acceptance by members of the stigmatized races of negative messages about their own abilities and intrinsic worth.

 

Racism has a cost for everyone

Racism makes our economy worse -- and not just in ways that harm people of color, says public policy expert Heather C. McGhee. From her research and travels across the US, McGhee shares startling insights into how racism fuels bad policy making and drains our economic potential -- and offers a crucial rethink on what we can do to create a more prosperous nation for all. "Our fates are linked," she says. "It costs us so much to remain divided."

Confronting Racism in Pediatric Care

Check out Benjamin Danielson's article published in Health Affairs (doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2022.01157) for his public call to pediatricians to address racism in pediatric care.

The Impact of Racism on Child and Adolescent Health

The American Academy of Pediatrics is committed to addressing the factors that affect child and adolescent health with a focus on issues that may leave some children more vulnerable than others. Racism is a social determinant of health that has a profound impact on the health status of children, adolescents, emerging adults, and their families. Although progress has been made toward racial equality and equity, the evidence to support the continued negative impact of racism on health and well-being through implicit and explicit biases, institutional structures, and interpersonal relationships is clear. The objective of this policy statement is to provide an evidence-based document focused on the role of racism in child and adolescent development and health outcomes. By acknowledging the role of racism in child and adolescent health, pediatricians and other pediatric health professionals will be able to proactively engage in strategies to optimize clinical care, workforce development, professional education, systems engagement, and research in a manner designed to reduce the health effects of structural, personally mediated, and internalized racism and improve the health and well-being of all children, adolescents, emerging adults, and their families. (Read the full statement in the AAP's publication Pediatrics)

How Racism Makes Us Sick

Why does race matter so profoundly for health? David R. Williams developed a scale to measure the impact of discrimination on well-being, going beyond traditional measures like income and education to reveal how factors like implicit bias, residential segregation and negative stereotypes create and sustain inequality. In this eye-opening talk, Williams presents evidence for how racism is producing a rigged system -- and offers hopeful examples of programs across the US that are working to dismantle discrimination.

 

Racism, Privilege, and Intersectionality

Racism and the Law

  • We can't recover from this history until we deal with it | Bryan Stevenson - Harvard Law School
  • Two Distant Strangers | This short film examines the deaths of Black Americans during encounters with police through the eyes of a character trapped in a time loop that keeps ending in his death (Wikipedia)
  • 13th | This documentary explores the intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States, it is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1965, which abolished slavery throughout the United States and ended involuntary servitude except as a punishment for conviction of a crime. (Wikipedia)