Bloomberg School of Public Health professor Debra Furr-Holden delivered a lecture entitled “Is There a Health Crisis in the African American Community?” last Tuesday.
The Office of Multicultural Affairs organized the event in succession with a series of others to commemorate Black History Month.
Furr-Holden employed Baltimore as a model for her to discuss the relationship between race and socioeconomic status in underprivileged communities.
“There is an interesting correlation between race, place and class,” Furr-Holden said. “This, for me is a call for action.”
Baltimore is a city divided. For example, according to Furr-Holden, there is a twenty year difference in life expectancy between the Upton Druid Heights community, which is 97 percent African American, and the Roland Park community, which is 87 percent white.
The focus of her presentation centered on her research in Baltimore.
Examining the problems of drugs and alcoholism in inner-city Baltimore, she discovered an error in the enforcement of a Maryland law that requires any liquor seller to be located at least 300 feet away from any school or religious building.
She found that just in the area around the Bloomberg School of Public Health, there were myriad violations to the law: 35
out of the 37 schools had a liquor store within 300 feet of their premises.
“Kids that went to schools where there are liquor stores...those kids were 5 times more likely to be drug involved in High School, they were eight times more likely to be alcohol involved by High School. They are more likely to see acts of violence on their walk to and from school, and they are also seven times more likely to walk to school,” Furr-Holden said.
Because of her work, Baltimore now enforces these regulations more strictly. Five liquor stores have been closed, and Baltimore’s city government has seen 13 alcohol-related bills.
Furr-Holden also underscored the connection between public health and policy.
“All policies have the opportunity to impact health,” Furr-Holden said.
She stressed the need to compare differences in health among communities not as health disparities, but as health inequities. Solutions coming from health disparities fix problems only at the surface level. However, by examining problems as health inequities, which deal with justice in the realm of health, one can confront issues more effectively at their source.
Furr-Holden is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mental Health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Director at the Drug Investigations Violence and Environmental (DIVE) Studies Laboratory, and public health expert in the field of alcohol and drug dependence epidemiology, psychiatric epidemiology and prevention science. She has been very influential in shifting the lens through which the public health field views health disparities, and has even been recognized by the President for her work, receiving the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2006.
Sophomore Tierra Langley was one of the students involved in bringing Furr-Holden and planning the events encompassed in Black History Month. Black History Month has been acknowledged by Johns Hopkins since 1989, however, only last year has its jurisdiction fallen under the Office of Multicultural Affairs. This years theme is titled “Modern Blackness: The Unified History.”
“We really wanted to emphasize this modern perspective of looking at the problems facing African Americans and the celebrations that Africans Americans have so that people can better understand where they’ve come from and what’s going on now,” Langley said.
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