Public Health’s Approach to Systemic Racism: a Systematic Literature Review
Abstract
Objectives Recently, public health has acknowledged racism as a social determinant of health. Much evidence exists on the impact of individual-level racism and discrimination, with little to no examination of racism from the standpoint of systems and structures. The purpose of this systematic literature review is to analyze the extent to which public health currently addresses systemic racism in the published literature. Methods Utilizing the PRISMA guidelines, this review examines three widely used databases to examine published literature covering the topic as well as implications for future research and practice. Results A total of 85 articles were included in the review analysis after meeting study criteria. Conclusions Across numerous articles, the terms racism and systemic racism are largely absent. A critical need exists for an examination of the historical impact of systemic racism on the social determinants of health and health of marginalized populations.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Structural racism extends beyond interpersonal discrimination towards individuals from minoritized backgrounds and is embedded into the policies, practices, and systems of U.S. institutions.
“However, structural racism extends beyond interpersonal discrimination towards individuals from minoritized backgrounds, but is rather embedded into the policies, practices, and systems of U.S. institutions [38,39].”
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Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Measuring structural racism: a guide for epidemiologists and other health researchers
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- Authors
- Castle, B., Wendel, M., Kerr, J., Brooms, D., & Rollins, A.
- Affiliations
- University of Louisville (US)
- University of Cincinnati (US)
- Corresponding author
- Castle, Billie
- Venue
- Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities
- Published
- 2018-05-04
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 27-36
- ISSN
- 2196-8837 (ISSN-L)
- 2197-3792
- OpenAlex
- W2801414827
- Cited by
- 81
- References
- 15
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 21 · 2021: 14 · 2020: 11 · 2019: 2
- FWCI
- 2.40
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (U01CE002711)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Racial and Ethnic Identity Research
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Public Health Policies and Education
- Social Sciences › Health › Health disparities and outcomes
- Keywords
- systemic racism, public health, social determinants of health, structural racism, health disparities, marginalized communities
- MeSH terms
- Humans, Public Health, Racism, Social Determinants of Health
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
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