The Water Surrounding the Iceberg: Cultural Racism and Health Inequities

Context: Cultural racism is a pervasive social toxin that surrounds all other dimensions of racism to produce and maintain racial health inequities. Yet, cultural racism has received relatively little attention in the public health literature. The purpose of this paper is to 1) provide public health researchers and policymakers with a clearer understanding of what cultural racism is, 2) provide an understanding of how it operates in conjunction with the other dimensions of racism to produce health inequities, and 3) offer directions for future research and interventions on cultural racism.

Methods: We conducted a nonsystematic, multidisciplinary review of theory and empirical evidence that conceptualizes, measures, and documents the consequences of cultural racism for social and health inequities.

Findings: Cultural racism can be defined as a culture of White supremacy, which values, protects, and normalizes Whiteness and White social and economic power. This ideological system operates at the level of our shared social consciousness and is expressed in the language, symbols, and media representations of dominant society. Cultural racism surrounds and bolsters structural, institutional, personally mediated, and internalized racism, undermining health through material, cognitive/affective, biologic, and behavioral mechanisms across the life course.

Conclusions: More time, research, and funding is needed to advance measurement, elucidate mechanisms, and develop evidence-based policy interventions to reduce cultural racism and promote health equity.