“Practitioners require culturally responsive crisis communications models in order for the equity-focused crisis mitigation efforts they undertake to succeed.”
—Monica L. Ponder, Howard University
What Happens When the Crisis Seemingly Never Ends?
Perspectives in Health Communication
Journal Article Apr-21-2022 3-min read
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Report Publish Date: April 21, 2022
This journal article uses the majority Black city of Albany, Ga., as a case study to help describe how Black Americans’ ongoing experiences of crisis required a different kind of health communication than what health officials and researchers typically used during the COVID-19 pandemic. The article belongs to the Rapid Assessment of COVID Evidence, or RACE series, from the UCLA-Charles R. Drew University COVID-19 Task Force.
Primary Takeaways
“As the fumbled roll-out of the U.S. COVID response suggests, an alternative to the dominant ideologies of health communications research and practice are necessary to respond effectively to the pandemic,” the author writes.
Overview and Objectives
The author of this article discusses the insufficiency of health and crisis communication as currently practiced. She uses the example of Albany, Ga., a Black-majority city with a long history of civil rights activism and dealing with racial power dynamics, where four COVID-19 surges overwhelmed and wearied residents between 2020 and 2022.
Hypothesis or Approach
The author discusses the Crisis Emergency Risk Communication Lifecycle framework, or CERC, commonly used to predict how crises develop. This approach she says, does not account for historical trauma, everyday racism, ongoing health inequities, and the actions institutions must take to safeguard communities. She proposes use of the Critical Health Communications Praxis, or CHCP, to create “Culturally sensitive, decolonized, and non-paternalistic frameworks for public health crisis communication.”
How This Influences Change
Using more culturally responsive frameworks to communicate during public health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic could save lives and provide much-needed support for overwhelmed communities.
Research: Go Deeper
In the early onset of COVID-19, in the United States, the virus “hit like a bomb” in the southern city of Albany, Georgia after many residents attended the funeral of a retired janitor. Known as “the Good Life City,” Albany is home to early American civil rights movement work and symbolic of the community safe havens formerly enslaved African Americans created for themselves. According to the census, 77% of Albany’s 70,643 residents identify as Black or African American; only 19.7% identify as non-Hispanic White. In his prolific 1903 publication The Souls of Black Folk, sociologist W.E.B. DuBois labels Albany, Georgia, the “heart of the Black Belt” and laments “[h]ow curious a land is this, how full of untold story, of tragedy and laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic past, and big with future promise! This is the Black Belt of Georgia.”
Since its initial designation as an early COVID-19 hotspot, Albany (and the Southern region of Georgia) experienced at least four surges during the pandemic, occurring in October 2020, January 2021, September 2021, and January 2022. The multiple surges exacerbated an already overwhelmed health system and it wearied Albany residents. Overlaying this local experience are statewide blockages of federally recommended prevention measures, insidious statewide racial power dynamics and ongoing national tensions of racial unrest, intimidation and violence targeting Black people.
In the current US COVID-19 pandemic, Albany, Georgia serves as a case study, illuminating the challenges present in the contemporary practice of health and crisis communication. Though the most immediate concern remains mitigating COVID-19 and related inequities, the efforts are unlikely to succeed over the long-term in eliminating inequities unless they acknowledge and address the underlying social crises with which the community has already been contending. But, how exactly does one develop effective public health messaging that balances the urgent actions necessary to remain safe (e.g., mask wearing, vaccination, social distancing) with the cultural sensitivity needed to honor the lived experiences of Black people (e.g., grief, long-term implications from COVID-19, anger, fatigue, distrust in the health care system)?
Ethn Dis, April 21, 2022. doi: 10.18865/ed.32.2.165
Research Team
This study and report was conducted and created by the following:
- Ponder ML
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