Report Publish Date: January 20, 2022
This journal article introduces a series of articles published during the COVID-19 pandemic to present ongoing research findings from the COVID Task Force on Racism & Equity.
The Rapid Assessment of COVID Evidence, or RACE series, was a collaboration between the University of California, Los Angeles, and Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science during the pandemic. It produced research in collaboration with communities, aiming to address the inequities of the pandemic as they were happening.
The authors wanted to quickly produce peer-reviewed findings that could be useful “for ongoing social justice efforts during the pandemic and beyond.”
The authors are influenced by Public Health Critical Race Praxis, or PHCRP.
“We have been focusing on supporting our partners as they struggled to provide for their constituents, even when doing so provides no immediate benefits to us as researchers (e.g., no opportunity exists to publish a paper about the endeavor),” they write. “We value science; however, we reject the false notion of scientists as inherently ‘objective’ observers. Instead, we see ourselves as committed partners in the struggle for equity and whose contributions are based on science and the privilege that comes with our status as academic researchers.”
“Research investigating pandemic inequities must be critically informed by the knowledge of pre-pandemic histories or it will risk rendering invisible the causal pathways leading to the current inequities.”
—Chandra L. Ford and Bita Amani, COVID Task Force on Racism & Equity
“The RACE series will demonstrate that an abiding commitment to advocacy and social justice can inform health equity research,” the authors write.
The RACE Series is an open-access special collection of articles to be published in Ethnicity & Disease beginning with the next issue of the journal (April 2022) and will span the 2022 volume. Each issue will contain two to four articles from the series. The topics examined in the series include but are not limited to: incarceration, detention and policing; reproductive justice and birthing experiences during the pandemic; the role of health departments in framing messaging about vaccine equity and racism on Twitter; the perceptions and experiences of Asians, LGBTQ populations and others in Southern California and the nation.
The RACE Series will be unified across issues by a focus on the implications for policy, research, and service delivery and its provision of evidence to support action (e.g., policy change) at the local, state, or national levels. For example, one national analysis of social media data assesses the role of county and state health departments in framing vaccine hesitancy messaging on social media. In addition to the empirical findings to be shared through the series, we are hopeful that the theory and methods may inform how future studies conceptualize and measure racism and related exposures.
The series will launch with a set of articles that describes the methods of the two anchor projects, identifies challenges and best practices for monitoring US racial/ethnic inequities in COVID-19 based on an environmental scan of COVID-19 databases, and recommends strategies for monitoring COVID inequities ethically. It will conclude a year later with an epilogue, written by an associate editor of Ethnicity & Disease, reflecting on the RACE Series and contributions of these research efforts. Dissemination efforts will also include concurrent strategies that reach beyond the readership of scientific journals to the communities we serve. We will complement the RACE series with companion blogs, editorials, social media posts, infographics, and live-recorded events that feature our community partners. These partners represent many different public and private sectors including non-profit and community-based organizations.
Ethn Dis., January 20, 2022. doi:10.18865/
ed.32.1.69
This study and report was conducted and created by the following people.
Rapid Assessment of COVID Evidence (RACE) Series: The purpose of the RACE Series is to disseminate results from studies conducted by the UCLA-CDU COVID-19 Task Force on Racism & Equity. The article featured on this page, as well as the three below, are part of the series.
Journal article uses a majority Black city as case study to describe how Black Americans’ ongoing experiences of crisis required different health communication.
Journal article introduces two papers published in the Rapid Assessment of COVID Evidence, or RACE series.
Journal article uses a majority Black city as case study to describe how Black Americans’ ongoing experiences of crisis required different health communication.
