This public dialogue brings together two world-leading experts on the impact of racism on health: Camara Jones, President of the American Public Health Association and professor at Morehouse School of Medicine, and Jonathan Metzl, Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry and Director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, at Vanderbilt University.

We define structural competency as the trained ability to discern how a host of issues defined clinically as symptoms, attitudes, or diseases (e.g., depression, hypertension, obesity, smoking, medication “non-compliance,” trauma, psychosis) also represent the downstream implications of a number of upstream decisions about such matters as health care and food delivery systems, zoning laws, urban and rural infrastructures, medicalization, or even about the very definitions of illness and health.