Washington University’s Brown School of Public Health hosted Trinidad Jackson, Ph.D., to speak about systemic racism through the lens of public health as a part of the Public Health Speaker Series on March 19. Over 100 students, faculty, and community members attended the talk, either in person or virtually. 

The event was titled “The Ultimate Entanglement: Your Life, the Public’s Health, and Sweet Addictions to Violence,” and it was held as a part of WashU’s strategic plan, Here and Next. Here and Next is a collection of WashU initiatives with the goal of “generating transformative solutions to our deepest societal challenges.”

Jackson currently works as the Assistant Dean for Culture and Liberation and as a professor at the University of Louisville. He also holds a senior advisor position at the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services. Jackson is originally from University City in St. Louis, Mo., and he had several family members in the audience for his talk.

Jackson spoke about the different public responses to tragedies affecting Black versus white communities, racial biases that affect law enforcement, and the roles that institutions like the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) play in violence-related public health crises.

He referenced and criticized the WHO’s definition of violence throughout his talk, focusing on their claim that violence is “the intentional use of physical force or power.” 

“The ‘intentional’ use of physical force part — that’s problematic because it discounts structural and cultural violence,” Jackson said. “We’re not attending to those things, we’re not disrupting, we’re not dismantling things that are actually the knobs of the faucet that allows the violence to run like water.”

Jackson said that structural and cultural issues are the root causes of violence but are often overlooked. He said that we often see the field of public health through a standard biomedical model, focusing on issues like disease, injury, and disability on an individual level. 

He added that a large part of a public health professional’s job is to ask questions about how factors like identity affect these issues.

“These are critical questions that we must have, not just as public health professionals, but also as mere humans,” Jackson said. “We have social inequities that are determined by the identities that have been imposed on us through social construction.” 

Jackson said that it is a public health issue that systemic racism relegates Black people to environments that increase their exposure to violence, including violence in the form of racially motivated police brutality. 

He brought up the unrest in Ferguson in 2014 after Michael Brown’s murder as a recent, local example. 

Despite having just been hired for his job at the University of Louisville at the time of the Ferguson unrest, Jackson returned to St. Louis to collect audio and visual evidence of people’s experiences. 

“I went to engage with and stand in solidarity with my community as a disruptor,” Jackson said. “I knew that many of the narratives that we saw projected on the news and social media were not accurate, and so my responsibility and responsiveness as a researcher told me that I needed to be on the ground capturing real-time narratives.”

Upon returning to Louisville, Ky., Jackson worked with municipal governing bodies to help the city learn from the issues St. Louis was experiencing.

“We began facilitating listening sessions using the imagery and the narrative that was captured from St. Louis community members to provoke conversation, critical reflection, and dialogue in Louisville, especially in our most structurally marginalized communities,” Jackson said. 

At these listening sessions, community members discussed racism, oppression, violence, incarceration, loss, trauma, system reliance, and more. 

Rida Qureshi, a senior in the Brown School’s 3-2 Master of Public Health (MPH) program, who attended the event, said that hearing about Jackson’s work caused her to reflect on the pushback that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and critical race theory received in St. Louis in 2020.

“It really makes you realize how much of a bubble we’re in. We know we’re in Missouri, a conservative state, but when we’re at WashU, you never really think [DEI] is going to be pushed back against because it’s a university that’s very accepting and pushing forward for the most part,” Qureshi said. 

Second-year Master of Social Work (MSW) and MPH graduate student, Sarolyn Fox, said that hearing about Jackson’s experiences felt like a call to action.

“I hope the WashU community is able to actually wake up and to not be so tight under the higher-ups and their rulings,” Fox said. “WashU is very driven by funds, so whatever the funders say, that’s how things go. And you have to stray away from that if you want to actually get things done and live our purpose and truth.”

Jackson said that from his experiences during the Ferguson unrest and elsewhere, the best strategy to create change is to do so within the institutions which one is involved with.

“It’s not a matter of dissociating ourselves with such institutions but [determining] how we literally disrupt what needs to be disrupted in order to transform those very spaces,” he said.