As she drives research on structural racism in health care, Rachel Hardeman faces a painful reckoning
As her research has gained prominence, health equity scholar Rachel Hardeman is realizing that antiracism work may not be possible from within academia.
MINNEAPOLIS — It’s been almost four years since George Floyd was murdered here at 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, a South Minneapolis corner anchored by a convenience store, its red awning still achingly familiar from once-saturating news coverage. Now, the legions of teddy bears placed in Floyd’s honor are dusty, the paint on street murals has chipped away, and community-built planters are overgrown. There are entire afternoons when no one visits; the city even tried to bulldoze this monument. The national and collective urgency to save Black lives this site once sparked has faded, but Rachel Hardeman is still hard at work.
A professor at the state’s preeminent educational institution, the University of Minnesota, she grew up here, just blocks from where Floyd was killed. Hardeman, who interrogates the many ways in which structural racism contributes to poor health for Black people, has published a stream of eye-opening and unsettling research, including findings that Black newborns are less likely to die when cared for by Black physicians and that U.S.-born Black women who live in intensely policed neighborhoods are twice as likely to have preterm births than those residing in other areas.
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