Dearest sojourners,   Warmest greetings from the Center’s new home in Atlanta, GA. As outlined in my June 2023 blogpost, the Center is intentionally pausing externally-facing activities, but know that we remain as engaged and committed as ever. To honor that commitment to the pause, I share only a briefest set of reminders here.   Today is the first day of 2024. Sadly, there are many signs that the coming year(s) will be tumultuous and dangerous. Even so, this is not a time for us to cower. It is a time to get involved with ongoing struggles. To prioritize deep understandings over bu ..read more

Reproductive Justice in the time of COVID “Hey sis, rest is not a reward”: Exploring ways to advance reproductive justice through joy, rest and liberation We recently published qualitative findings from interviews we conducted as part of the COVID-19 Storytelling Project in a paper titled “A Qualitative Analysis on Sexual and Reproductive Health Needs and Issues During COVID -19 Using a Reproductive Justice Framework”[1]. The findings we published are a continuation of reproductive justice work that communities have been leading long before the pandemic. These findings have inspired me to seek ..read more

On Friday, June 16, 2023, two anchors among the student affiliates of the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice and Health received their doctorates. Their paths and interests are different, and each honored her own unique path in remaining steadfast contributors to the vision of the Center.   Dr. Taylor Rogers was the inaugural student chair of UCLA’s partnership with the annual UNC minority health conference featured in a documentary short about the work of the center’s COVID Task Force on Racism & Equity, a collaboration with Charles R. Drew University of Medicine & Sc ..read more

From the Director January 13, 2023   Happy new year and welcome to 2023! Certainly, 2022 turned out to be quite a tumultuous year socially, politically, globally, financially, climactically, and, for many people, personally; therefore, it may be tempting to want to put 2022 behind us altogether. But, like every year, 2022 also held promise at the beginning. My hope is not that we enter 2023 as an escape from the turmoil of 2022, but that we learn from 2022 in order to move through 2023 with both optimism and clear-eyed vision.   Some of you are new to the Center for the Study of Raci ..read more

From the Director:   The Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health stands in solidarity with UC students who are on strike for fairer wages. Like UC Berkeley, UCLA is located in one of the nation’s most prohibitively expensive cities in which to reside. Both the cost and availability of housing matter; even wealthy people looking for places to live in LA may have difficulty finding it. To live and work in Los Angeles requires reliable transportation, especially for people who cannot afford to live in Westwood, the neighborhood in which UCLA is located. The neighborhoods ..read more

From the Director… Monday, October 10, 2022 marks the five-year anniversary of the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health (Center), which was launched on the inaugural Indigenous People’s Day in Los Angeles, October 9, 2017. I am deeply grateful for the warriors for health justice who have been leading our antiracism work through rigorous research, innovative teaching, community engagement, outreach and education as well as generous levels of service at UCLA, in the field of public health, in our local communities and beyond. The founding core staff on graduation day, yea ..read more

Hurricane Fiona Exposes More Than Crumbling Infrastructure in Puerto Rico By: Anna-Michelle Marie McSorley, PhD, MPH Hurricane Fiona is the latest natural disaster to strike Puerto Rico, which has been a territory of the United States (U.S.) since 1898.1 While this storm has substantially and uniquely devastated the archipelago’s infrastructure, Fiona made landfall within a territory that has recently been navigating a multitude of consecutive natural disasters amidst a historically complex socio-political context; one that has been over a century in the making. This blog provides details on ..read more

Warmest greetings, everyone! Welcome to the 2022-2023 academic year. At least for now, we are meeting in person. It is wonderful to see friends and colleagues whom I've missed over the months. To all new students, welcome! Please explore opportunities to push yourselves beyond your comfort zone as you embark on this next phase of your life. It has been a long and busy summer for our COVID-19 Taskforce on Racism & Equity, which has been focusing social injustices in the COVID pandemic. There is plenty to do! We look forward to involving you in upcoming activities: journal clubs, sponsored t ..read more

Lessons Learned: Preparing Racial Unrest and Mental Health Educational Materials Jennifer Duan, B.A. (1), Kimberlye E. Dean, Ph.D. (2) (1) Massachusetts General Hospital (2) Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School   Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen a rise in targeted, racially motivated violence and open aggression towards people of marginalized groups (FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program, 2022). To illustrate, race and ethnicity-based hate incidences increased by 16% from 2019 to 2020, along with an increased rate of hate incidents in Asian Americans[i], Black Ameri ..read more

The Summer 2022 issue of Ethnicity & Disease has just been published! Included in it are two articles from the Rapid Assessment of COVID Evidence (RACE) Series. We are so delighted that Ethnicity & Disease is an open access journal. That means that anyone can read the papers published in this journal for free simply by visiting the journal’s homepage. The RACE Series shares the results of research conducted by the COVID Task Force on Racism & Equity, which is a collaboration between UCLA and the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine & Science, over the course of the pandemic ..read more