Racisms in a global health context

Racism has existed in different forms throughout place and history, affecting the health of minoritised people around the world.  Although multiple research studies have shown racism to be an important determinant of health, the extent of the problem globally is still underestimated. With a rising number of populist and divisive regimes across the world, the importance of a coordinated focus is needed. Yet, most of our understanding of racism and its health effects is rooted in Western frameworks from the colonial and post-colonial powers of European origin that fail to capture the nuances of racism in other regions, where unique historical, political, ethnic, religious, or caste-based dynamics shape hierarchies.

This conceptual limitation is partly due to an inadequate evidence base, but also due to the dominant conceptualisations of racism being based on North American and western European framings, emanating from a limited view of modern history. This perspective comes in part from the dominance in the health literature of high-income countries, particularly the USA. But examples of racism are numerous and include discrimination based on caste and untouchability in India, Apartheid in South Africa, restrictive laws for south Asian and African migrants in the Gulf states, discrimination towards the Chinese in Malaysia, and local and global forms of coloniality. To move beyond this narrow framework, we propose critically rethinking the term racism by applying the term racisms in global health.

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