What is Public Health Liberation?
What is Public Health Liberation?
Public Health Liberation is not antiracism. It is also not critical race theory, critical public health, or public health praxis, which are part of the antiracism tradition. PHL recognizes the urgent need for addressing racism and the essential role of those approaches and philosophies. These traditions can most accurately be understood as a complement to liberation. However, PHL differs in several ways. We are most concerned with change affecting the material and social conditions of populations in real-time through actions within and outside of public health. We are disheartened by the pace of change in reducing health disparities and demand efforts at all levels of accountability to accelerate health equity, particularly regarding at-risk socioeconomic and racial/ethnic groups.
Antiracism primarily directs our attention to the systems and people upholding those systems that reproduce health inequity, but often this discourse marginalizes the need to cultivate the agency, knowledge, and resources of vulnerable populations. In the current Black Lives Matter Movement, antiracism training has become errant with too much antagonism of the “other,” which is sowing the seeds of deep resentment and backlash across the country. Liberation is less concerned about otherness and the un-doing of racism assuming a dominant model of distributive power, as much as we are concerned about cultivating fertile ground within communities to pursue practices of liberation that reflect their social and economic reality.
In practice, PHL informs our communities of a worldview that challenges the so-called theories and untruths that they have often been led to believe about the sources of their suffering. This means that liberation provides communities with a paradigm for understanding issues, points of leverage for addressing those issues, and the sociocultural work of strengthening communities. It is not performative. It does not treat communities as a means to an end, as with much of public health research. Public Health Liberation is dependent on intimate social embeddedness within communities.
In its fullest realization, Public Health Liberation looks dissimilar to the current field of public health. It does not rely on funding, although funding is desperately needed. It is not academic- or hospital-based. It is neither driven by a “research question” nor adheres to cyclical or linear models of public health intervention. Public Health Liberation is agile, incisive, and adaptive - willing to speak truth to power and make systems materially accountable. Vulnerable communities deserve to know and have help with getting the health resources that they need to thrive - health through any means necessary. PHL eschews the "academic speak" form of communication that makes information inaccessible to the general public. PHL practitioners are skilled in multiple fields, including public health research and advocacy, communication, community relations and leadership, policy analysis, legislative writing, filing legal pro se complaints, legal research and writing, research within real-world constraints, public testimony, political engagement, non-profit development, as well as other skills.
Many institutions have asked Public Health Liberation to provide them with resources. This misaligns with our mission and vision. Universities and colleges are not our audience. Others have asked Public Health Liberation to support liberation science. Although citizen science is an important tool of liberation, Public Health Liberation is primarily concerned with efficient pathways to health equity through mechanisms of community-centric liberation aimed at real-world challenges across wide-ranging domains of social, economic, and political life.
