QUT Carumba Institute researchers have had an article published in the Medical Journal of Australia's special 'Indigenous health' issue examining the challenge of eliminating racism in health care by addressing race and culture directly.
The perspective piece offers a framework for developing an Indigenous antiracist training approach, devised through the work of the Carumba Institute and Children's Health Queensland Hospital and Health Service, as part of an NHMRC Indigenous Health grant.
Written by QUT researchers Professor Chelsea Watego, Dr David Singh, Kevin Yow Yeh, Dr Saran Singh, and Dr Helena Kajlich, the article argues that although the Australian Government aspires to a health system free of racism, there is a contradiction due to a lack of meaningful action to address the ongoing problem of racism in healthcare.
"The aspirational urge to 'eliminate' racism disguises the foundational nature of race as a structure of oppression, and the widespread refusal to attend to racism," the article says.
"This persisting refusal to address race and racism in a meaningful way is evident in a range of health education efforts and interventions designed to ameliorate it."
Carumba Institute Executive Director Professor Watego said that although health organisations often committed to addressing racism, there was not a shared understanding of key terms such as "race" and "racism".
"There is even less evidence of an understanding of the ways race is complicit in producing health inequalities beyond overt forms of racial discrimination," Professor Watego said.
The researchers say that transformative change cannot occur without challenging the workings of racial power.
"To do this, health systems must adopt a broader antiracist strategy that engages with the structural and lived realities of race and racism," the article says.
"Educational interventions are not a silver bullet. There is only so much that frameworks and methodologies can do to challenge something as complex, mutable, and entrenched as racism, particularly in Australia.
"However, it is their capacity to build communities of antiracist practice that makes educational interventions a critical foundation upon which broader antiracist efforts can be built."
Lead authors Professor Watego and Dr Singh were also co-authors on an expert report admitted into evidence in the Inquest into the death of Kumanjayi Walker, the findings of which were released yesterday.
The report was commissioned by North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency , titled Expert report for the coronial inquest of Kumanjayi Walker: 'in normal circumstances' understanding the structural nature of racial violence in the Northern Territory.
The Coroner stated "the report helpfully sets out and explains 'institutional racism'…and explains that 'structural racism' seeks to capture a 'deeper political structure underpinning or generating social relations, institutions and ideas' and that it identifies that 'peoples' lives and health may be profoundly structured through and around race even when overt expressions of racism are discouraged by law or policy'. The expert authors report that structural racism produces racist practices at all levels including at the interpersonal and institutional level".
Read the full perspective article, published in the Medical Journal of Australia, online.
Top image, from left: top row, Kevin Yow Yeh and Professor Chelsea Watego. Bottom row: Dr Helena Kajlich, Dr Saran Singh and Dr David Singh.
