Social Justice and Health Equity

Health equity curricula often emphasize factual knowledge of health disparities and unconscious bias, but these efforts do not consistently produce health equity proficiencies. Beyond relegating personal contributions to health disparities to unconscious bias or a lack of informational awareness, critical self-reflection is a crucial and simultaneous skillset that must accompany health equity knowledge and skills. This chapter exposes how aversive and colorblind racism may be used as mechanisms for practitioners to unknowingly, and sometimes knowingly, perpetuate healthcare oppression and disparities. Providers are especially vulnerable to aversive and colorblind racism when caring for and evaluating patients whose presentations lie at the intersection of psychiatry and the law. Therefore, this chapter offers an experiential education journey that juxtaposes idealized hegemonic knowledges of health equity with real-world, real-time inequitable outcomes.