14 - Just to “Get By”: Poverty, Racism, and Smoking through the Lens of Talib Kweli and Nina Simone’s Music

Summary

Ruquaiijah Yearby uses Talib Kweli’s 2003 song “Get By” as a lens through which the reader can understand racialized health care disparities. In 1906, W. E. B. DuBois noted that social conditions, not genetics, impacted the health of blacks, causing racial disparities in mortality rates. Almost eighty years later, during the Reagan administration, the federal government identified racial health disparities as a problem in the Heckler Report on Black & Minority Health but focused on individual responsibility and solutions. In 2008, the Obama administration developed the Social Determinants of Health framework (“SDOH”), which recognizes that social factors outside an individual’s control impact individual health outcomes. The SDOH, often noted as the root cause of racial health disparities, are “conditions in the environments in which people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affects a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks.” However, not only does the SDOH framework fail to acknowledge or discuss the ways that law is used to limit racial minorities’ equal opportunity to healthy conditions, but also some public health researchers and policymakers using the framework have tried to eliminate racial health disparities by focusing on individual responsibility.