Racial residential segregation in the US is persistent and associated with racial health inequities.
FHA map courtesy of Mapping Segregation DC
This month’s special guest is Dr. Kristen Brown, a senior research associate at Urban Institute. We discuss her recent publication Still Separate, Still Not Equal: An ecological examination of redlining and racial segregation with COVID-19 vaccination administration in Washington DC. We talk about methods for measuring racial residential segregation and contemporary/historical redlining, and we discuss the implications of the paper’s findings.
Here are a few links to resources and papers discussed in the podcast:
- Mapping Segregation DC: Source of documents and maps about the historic role of real estate developers, citizens associations (white homeowner groups), the Federal Housing Authority (FHA), and the courts in segregating the city.
- They note that the FHA and the Veterans Administration were “far guiltier of promoting housing inequality” during the first half of the 20th century than the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), which did not practice redlining itself.
- Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute: The Roots of Structural Racism – Twenty-first century racial residential segregation in the United States.
- University of Richmond: Mapping Inequality – Redlining in New Deal America
- Williams DR, Collins C. Racial Residential Segregation: A Fundamental Cause of Racial Disparities in Health. Public Health Reports. 2001;116(5):404-416. doi:10.1093/phr/116.5.404
See video below for the complete discussion and visit the Healthy Intersections Podcast page for past episodes! Audio-only version available via Podomatic, Spotify, Apple, Amazon/Audible, and anywhere you get your podcasts.
Transcript below.
Transcript:
Lisa Lines (00:08):
Hello, and welcome to the October 2024 episode of Healthy Intersections, where we talk about the intersection between public health and medical care and some other things as well. I’m Lisa Lines, I’m your host and the producer of this podcast, and I’m also a senior health services researcher at RTI International, which is an independent nonprofit research institute. This podcast is sponsored by the American Public Health Association’s medical care section, and we are hosted on the medical care blog. If you’d like to see the transcript for this podcast, you can go to The Medical Care Blog.
(00:54):
If you’re just listening on Spotify or Audible or wherever you get your podcast content, we usually put in resources and other links and things like that, and of course, the transcript and the video. It’ll be good to see the faces of today’s podcast, and we’re going to be doing some show and tell as well. With that said, I am delighted to introduce today our special guest, Kristen Brown, Dr. Kristen Brown. Thank you for coming today and welcome.
Kristen Brown (01:23):
Thank you so much for having me, it’s a joy to be here.
Lisa Lines (01:26):
Oh, it’s great to have you, and I’m really excited about our conversation today. Why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about yourself?
Kristen Brown (01:35):
My name is Kristen Brown, I am trained as a social epidemiologist. I currently work as a senior research associate at the Urban Institute in Washington DC.
Lisa Lines (01:45):
Wonderful. Let’s just start talking about this paper that you’re the first author on. It was published this year, right?
Kristen Brown (01:54):
Mm-hmm.
Lisa Lines (01:55):
The Journal of Urban Health.
Kristen Brown (01:57):
Yes.
Lisa Lines (01:59):
Can you give us a quick overview of the paper?
Kristen Brown (02:01):
Sure. In this paper we looked at redlining and racial segregation, both historically and contemporarily. We looked at historical measures of redlining and racial residential segregation, and we also looked at contemporary measures of redlining and racial segregation. We were interested in assessing whether those measures were associated with vaccine administration in DC, went in the time period before COVID vaccines were available for everybody. If you remember earlier with vaccine rollout, only certain groups of people could get it. We were saying, or trying to assess were there variations in who could get it and who could not get it, and what implications would that have for racial health disparities that we know have been so longstanding in our time.
Lisa Lines (02:48):
Absolutely, yeah. Was that the motivation for the research question for this paper, or how did you get interested in this question more broadly?
Kristen Brown (02:57):
Sure. We had a paper prior to that that went to an even earlier stage of the pandemic that was trying to assess where COVID cases percent positivity and tests were being distributed in DC. What we found in that paper was that the neighborhoods that were predominantly black of DC had higher cases, had higher percent positivity but were getting lower testing rates.
(03:26):
What does that say about our distribution of resources and how we distribute resources in our country where the people that were being most affected were actually getting the lower number of resources? I think with COVID, it’s really funny how we collectively as a society forget how traumatic it really was and what was really going on in those early days, but it was really hard to get tests, and even amongst the people who were getting tests and who weren’t at a time when tests were limited. When we talk about racial health disparities, it’s really about the inequitable distribution of resources. Here we’re watching in real time, everything in our fancy degrees have told us about every other disease, but now it’s happening in real time in a COVID pandemic and trying to get the narrative out, the message out to the world of this is why disparities exist.
(04:17):
In real time is we’re not getting the test. The areas that need it aren’t getting the vaccines. It was to document in real time what was happening. It felt like this was the moment for an epidemiologist, a black epidemiologist specifically, to speak to what is happening and what this means for the greater way in which we distribute healthcare resources and societal resources in our country. If I’m thinking about the macro message, it was the macro message, and yes, this is a small part and one small analysis of that, but it’s part of a greater story about racial health disparities and what causes them in our country.
Lisa Lines (04:58):
Yeah, I mean, because the risk factor is not the color of a person’s skin, the risk factor is the structural racism, the interpersonal racism, the bias, the stress, the trauma associated with the racism that exists in our country. To me, the focus on resources is a really, really important part of this piece. Let’s talk more about segregation. Would you like to share anything about segregation where you grow up?
Kristen Brown (05:29):
Sure. I grew up in a town called Neptune, New Jersey. It’s a beach town on the Jersey shore. Where I grew up, it was actually pretty, I don’t know if I’ll say diverse, it was black and white, it’s half black, half white, very little other races, ethnicities represented, at least at the time I was growing up. Going to school, I had black friends, I had white friends. My gym class, my art class it was, I don’t know if I’d call it integrated because it was integrated if not diverse, I guess. That’s where I grew up. One of the moments I think that really sticks out, it is not even childhood, it’s actually adulthood, about growing up in Neptune… Okay, I will say the thing about growing up in Neptune, even though it was pretty split, I would say black and white, when a town has that many black people, it’s considered a black town.
(06:24):
Relative to the county, it’s considered a black town, even though numbers wise, it’s kind of split. That’s just kind of how our culture goes. If I think about one specific experience about growing up in Neptune that mattered, I was actually a fifth year college senior so I wasn’t a kid at this time, I was a fifth year college senior, I had already had majors and had conversations about health disparities. In my fifth year I went to Rutgers for undergrad. In my last year I actually commuted back and forth. In my fifth year is a time as I was studying for GREs, because I was planning to go to graduate school. I went to my Neptune public library, and when I went to my Neptune public library, I wanted to get a GRE test prep book, the graduate, the test you take to get into graduate school. This is about 2009 or so, and the most recent GRE test book they had was 2004.
(07:15):
It was like, okay, this is problematic. Just out of curiosity, I went to the next town over that’s a predominantly white town, and this is 2009, and they already had the 2010 book. It was so stark because what does that say about educational opportunity? What does that say about a black kid from Neptune trying to go to grad school, and what resources are freely available to them? I remember just sitting in my car coming out of the predominantly white library and realizing like, okay, I can drive over here because from my house it’s pretty equal distance to get to either library, but I am not a resident here so I can’t actually take this book out. If a resident of this predominantly white town needs this book, they can take the book and take it home where it’s convenient to have.
(08:14):
That’s such a small example, but that’s how it works across our society. I’m just talking about a GRE test book, but in access to healthcare, overall access to education, overall in economic opportunity and how different communities are policed is that if you can geographically separate the races, you can give resources to one race and not to the other. And how does that perpetuate across all of these different sectors of American society and ultimately affect health and health outcomes? That’s, I guess, my story about where I grew up, but it came at a time, senior in high school and starting to start my career, that really set and was meaningful about what do we do about this and where do my skills, talents, gifts, interests fit into trying to speak to this and get this message out.
Lisa Lines (09:09):
Yeah. For me personally, I mean, I’m really motivated by the fact that I see this is unfair, this is not fair, and how can I contribute to trying to make it more fair? That’s really kind of a big motivation for me because it’s just not fair. You know what I mean? I mean, it goes way deeper than a book in a library, it’s like life expectancy, huge, huge disparities from one place to another, and it’s just not fair. When I see something so blatantly unfair, it makes me want to fight. Yeah.
Kristen Brown (09:53):
In fact, I live a little bit outside of DC and I work in DC, there’s actually a map showing life expectancy by what metro line you get off of. DC is not very big, but depending on what metro line you take to go home, it’s like an eight-year difference or something like that in life expectancy.
Lisa Lines (10:15):
That’s crazy.
Kristen Brown (10:17):
It’s not happenstance, right?
Lisa Lines (10:19):
No.
Kristen Brown (10:19):
I think that it’s very easy just to, for most people, for the general population just to say, oh, that’s just the way it is, or that’s the way it’s always been. What’s wrong with those people that they’re not thriving? It’s very easy to do that if you’re not speaking to the root causes, the reasons, the history about why all of this exists in putting the story together so that people can see this is unfair, this is unjust. Not only is it unfair and unjust, it was intentional and systematic, and now it’s a system that it’s just going through the process and working as it was intended to work. How do we bring in those who will do something and motivate people to do something and develop that political will to change it, because it’s really just not good for all of us as a society.
Lisa Lines (11:10):
Absolutely. Right. Absolutely. I, a hundred percent agree. Organizing, that’s one of the things I talk about a lot. Let’s talk about some of the literature on residential racial segregation. I usually abbreviate that RRS, because it is a lot of syllables, but RRS in writing. I remember in 2021, there was a study that came out of Berkeley, their Belonging in Othering Institute showing that the US is more racially segregated now than it was in 1990. As of the 2020 update, they said 24% of the metropolitan areas were more segregated in 2020 than they were in 2010, and 54% were more segregated in 2020 than in 1990. What is up with this?
Kristen Brown (12:04):
I think that’s the hard part, because it is not as obvious as it may have been in previous generations. In previous generations it was very explicit that there was a colored only and there was a whites only. There were signs that made it explicit, and now legally you can’t do that, but there’s an undercurrent that still allows these things to persist, there’s still ideas that still allows this to persist. For example, there’s studies now, I’m talking about home appraisals of black homes versus white homes-
Lisa Lines (12:41):
Oh, yeah.
Kristen Brown (12:43):
It’s not a colored only and a white only sign, but there’s still this undercurrent, it’s like if you’re not paying a lot of attention, then you’ll miss it or think it’s not even there and then be surprised that like, oh wait, this is still happening in 2024. Yes, it’s still happening. The methods have changed, the mechanisms have changed, but really, the country is still what the country is.
(13:14):
Racism is still a fundamental cause of racial health disparities. David Williams from Harvard has a paper talking about racial residential segregation as a fundamental cause of racial health disparities. It is still going on. I think I feel the mantle, I guess, of a scholar of this generation to point to, no, this is still going on. The scholars of the 60s and 70s and 80s, they wrote it one way, and now as a scholar of 2024, we still have to speak to what it looks like in our day and how it’s manifesting.
Lisa Lines (13:54):
Yeah. Let’s talk about some of the methods that you used in this paper because I think they’re really interesting. First, can we talk about some of the ways that racial residential segregation is measured?
Kristen Brown (14:06):
Sure. There are a variety of ways. I think when it comes to measurement, there are just pros and cons to each, depends on what you’re trying to measure, where you’re trying to measure it, what geographical unit you’re trying to use. I specifically use the measure called the ICE measure, the index of concentration at the extremes, in part for a few reasons. One, because that measure is really good at low levels of geography. I’m looking only in DC and I’m trying to look at neighborhoods within DC and trying to do something at that small level of geography. ICE is really good for that. Also, it’s easy to calculate and it’s also easy to interpret, which some measures just aren’t. There’s problems, I don’t know if I really have a favorite, I think it kind of just depends on what the project calls for and what the message, I think, that needs to be said is.
Lisa Lines (15:02):
The census has a couple of measures that I’ve looked at before, the dissimilarity index and the isolation index. I think it’s really interesting because the way that they define sort of the ideal state is for a neighborhood to have an equal distribution, a proportionate representation of every race, in the same proportions as we have in this country. If our overall black population is 15%, there should be 15% of black people in every census tract. What do you think about that? Does that make sense to you?
Kristen Brown (15:38):
I’m of two minds on that, right? I think there is something about integration, that effective resource issue. If air quality, for example, in an integrated neighborhood, I’m going to breathe the same air as you, but what does that do with policing? Am I being overly policed if I’m a black person in a white neighborhood? I think it depends on the variable about what may be the right measure or what may be the implication of the measure that you used. I think to also make clear is that, the reason for the relationship between racial segregation and health outcomes, it is and is not the separation of races, it’s the inequitable distribution of resources.
(16:25):
It’s not that living near white people is inherently good for my health, it is not that, it’s resources that tend to congregate in white communities that’s good for my health. I think at that point is also important because what black people, there also is a community aspect that gets lost with integration, there’s a culture that gets lost with integration. It’s balancing that correctly, because what we also know, separate but equal doesn’t work in this country, we debated that, we know that that’s not the solution either, it is not an easy solution because there’s either, or’s, and’s this, and’s that to this whole nuance, to this whole conversation that, I think, needs to be appreciated, needs to be spoken out.
Lisa Lines (17:20):
Yeah. When we’re talking about historical redlining, I’ve looked at this topic quite a lot, but I’ve usually looked at the HOLC maps, the Homeowners Loan Corporation, HOLC, let’s go ahead and pull it up because I think it’s very interesting. When we’re talking about historical redlining, the Homeowners Loan Corporation, they basically assigned grades to neighborhoods. You can look at this in Baltimore. I’m going to pull this up real quick here. Here’s this historical map. This is a website from the University of Richmond, Virginia, and they’ve collected all these maps and sort of overlaid them with contemporary on top of contemporary maps, but you can kind of see in Baltimore in 1940s was, 30s, 40s, a mixture of best still desirable, 47% was blue or green, and then the yellow is what they called definitely declining, and then the red is where we get the name redlining, what they called hazardous. This is a little bit different from what you all used, you had DC specifically, right?
Kristen Brown (18:45):
Yes.
Lisa Lines (18:47):
They didn’t have these HOLC maps, they had a municipality that created their own grading and they graded from A to H, right?
Kristen Brown (18:58):
Correct.
Lisa Lines (19:00):
This historical redlining, tell us a little bit about really, what are the implications of having these kinds of zones where they’ve marked grades? What are we talking about here? What does it mean?
Kristen Brown (19:13):
Sure. It’s the same, I guess, concept for DC. DC is just a little bit different than that, it does go through A through H. If you read, along with DC, they had guide for the underwriters of mortgages, so really these maps were created to guide people who were underwriting mortgages because they were going to insure mortgages following the Great Depression, but what it was, it was a federal guide of where and arguably who to insure mortgages for and who not to insure mortgages for. Specifically in DC’s manual, where they are telling, okay, here’s A neighborhood, here’s a B, here’s a C, here’s a D, they gave guidelines on what it meant to be A, it essentially meant rich and white. If you go down in one of the categories, they literally say, if there’s any possibility of Negro infiltration, deny the mortgage.
(20:20):
In that way, they were also taking what was a federal program of insuring mortgages so that people could be homeowners and specifically saying, it’s not a good neighborhood if there’s too many black people here, but make sure that there are not too many black people here. A neighborhood becomes unstable if it becomes racially integrated so make sure we don’t do that. In other neighborhoods, in each neighborhood, I believe it says something to the effect of, this is more for the exploitation of the Negro rather than a planned development. This is how the federal government was deciding who would become homeowners and who would not become homeowners, and if you were to become a homeowner, where you could become a homeowner. We still see the implications of those decisions today in a number of health outcomes, that was one of the things that also motivated this paper that we’re talking about. In recent years, researchers have been looking at these maps and finding them associated with contemporary measures of health outcomes now in 2022 and 2023 or 2024.
(21:37):
Because it set racism into motion, so even when you do have civil rights era legislation coming later and saying like, oh, we shouldn’t do this anymore, but you didn’t rectify the problem that you started with years ago. You’ve already set it into motion, you can’t say, oh, I took my hands off, what’s wrong? Why do we still see these patterns? Why do we see these health outcomes? That’s what this paper was also just trying to point to, is like, no, something was set into motion that we never rectified, and now we have a global pandemic, and now we’re suffering, still suffering from it because now you have an infectious disease that gets everybody sick if people have it. Now you’re under testing these areas where you called them they were for the exploitation of the Negro a hundred years ago, nearly a hundred years ago, and now you see the lack of tests, the lack of vaccines there, and now we got to care about it because it’s in their face and we’re shut down and everybody’s stuck at home. That’s what we were also trying to just highlight in this paper.
Lisa Lines (22:45):
To my mind, the whole infrastructure piece of the pandemic, I was living in Los Angeles during the beginning of the pandemic, and you could sort of see the movie business and the TV business, kind of the infrastructure around keeping the business running, there’d be little pop-up tents on a corner in random neighborhoods because the business interests were very much aligned in, the show must go on, we’ve got to test everybody every day or every week, but where were the people who were kind of organizing for front line workers? Which that terminology always really gets me because it’s like you think about the front line of a war, who’s on the front lines of the wars? The retail workers, the delivery drivers. There was no organization trying to really make sure that those folks had daily testing or anything like that. The moneyed interests were not aligned to help people in those jobs and still aren’t. I mean, corporations basically said, you’re dispensable, we don’t care if you get sick. That really gets me. It really gets me.
Kristen Brown (24:21):
Yeah. I mean, I think even the pandemic though, this was, to me, a time when people had to care a little bit more, because it is an infectious disease, but we knew what was going to happen because this has been happening with other diseases, chronic and infectious. There’s been health inequities in cardiovascular disease, in cancer, in diabetes, in obesity, in kidney disease, in liver disease. Stop me when I get to something that doesn’t have a racial health disparity. Right? Now, because you have an infectious disease, oh, now that black person over there that I normally don’t have to really care about can get me sick, and then now I might have to care a little bit more about the things that are making them sick than I typically would have to. It was just an interesting moment that I just hope we don’t lose the lessons that we thought we learned in those first couple of years of the pandemic, even as we come out of Covid being a public health emergency, and that we carry those lessons into health outcomes overall.
Lisa Lines (25:36):
I was actually really struck by your finding that there’s not a single neighborhood in DC where there is racial equality in mortgage lending. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Kristen Brown (25:46):
Yeah. I mean, DC is interesting because DC also is very high in income inequality, to be the nation’s capital. There are separation there, and pretty much anywhere you look at any neighborhood of DC, that you don’t see that a black person is equally likely to be able to get a mortgage. I will say that one of, I think, the limitations of the measure is that we don’t have down payment, like the down payment number. That is it, but the way that I think of that is that that’s a mediator, because I think of racism as a process, and there’s a reason that is on the causal pathway to me of why that may differ, but not a place in DC where you can expect there to be equality using the measure that we used.
Lisa Lines (26:32):
Yeah, and this measure, it was about mortgage approval, and you had it by race and ethnicity, and you had it by age, sex, maybe, or just sex, loan amount. Yeah. That was the way you were looking at actually contemporary segregation or equality and borrowing?
Kristen Brown (26:58):
Yeah, contemporary redlining. That’s my contemporary redlining-
Lisa Lines (27:01):
Right. Your outcome measure was, vaccinations per thousand residents as of 2021, right?
Kristen Brown (27:08):
Mm-hmm.
Lisa Lines (27:09):
This was during that tiered eligibility system, so they were prioritizing people over age 65, people who lived in group home settings, nursing homes, workers with public facing professions, that’s our frontline workers, and people with comorbidities. Was there a higher proportion of black people in those groups?
Kristen Brown (27:34):
Not getting the vaccinations. Not getting the vaccine. Obviously there’s a number of reasons for that. Historical-
Lisa Lines (27:43):
Trust.
Kristen Brown (27:44):
Obviously trust is a huge one because this is set in the context, again, where there has been racial health disparities in everything, and now all of a sudden you’re giving me a free vaccine. Why? Who doesn’t side eye that? The problem is that I think a lot of the conversation around Covid became like, oh yeah, for some reason the black community doesn’t trust the healthcare system, but in reality, the healthcare system has not been trustworthy. That’s just common sense, that if an institution that at every point in history, it hasn’t been trustworthy for me, it hasn’t been trustworthy for my mother, for my grandmother, for my great-grandmother. At no point in history has it really been trustworthy.
(28:35):
I know we elevate like a Henrietta Lacks story, we elevate Tuskegee Syphilis Study, those are the well-known ones, but even just the oral history that goes on in black communities that has orally documented how not trustful this healthcare system is. We have papers now where we still think that black people don’t deal with pain the same, that the lungs are different, that the kidneys are different. The healthcare system has not been a trustworthy institution, and now you have this emergency situation where the healthcare system is like, oh, trust us, we’re doctors. You have not been trustworthy ever. Trying to deal with that, that was also a huge struggle during the Covid-19 pandemic and still is.
Lisa Lines (29:28):
Absolutely. Yeah. What did you all find in terms of the relationship between racial residential segregation and Covid-19 vaccination rates?
Kristen Brown (29:37):
Sure. We found associations for pretty much everything. When we looked at historical redlining, historical segregation using the 1940 census, when we looked at contemporary redlining using the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act database that we just talked about, we looked at contemporary racial segregation using a more recent census, across all those measures, we’re finding of different levels of strength, but associations between those measures and who got vaccines in that early stages of the pandemic.
Lisa Lines (30:12):
What do you conclude? What are the implications of this relationship between vaccination and segregation?
Kristen Brown (30:19):
I think it goes beyond vaccination. I think it goes to how we distribute healthcare resources and healthcare as a whole, because I guess it’s easy to talk just about vaccinations, but really this is part of a greater structure of our healthcare system that we’ve developed in this country, that the same things that affected who got vaccinated and who didn’t are the same resources that is affecting who is getting heart disease and who is not. It’s the same thing about who is getting screened for cancer and who is not. It’s the same reason of who is getting kidney transplants and who is not, right? I think that if we zero in on just on vaccinations, it somewhat gives a disservice to the fact that it’s really these upstream factors. I’m just pointing out one downstream way. That was the public conversation of the moment. We’ve had inequities in vaccinations forever.
(31:20):
This isn’t new, it’s just that Covid vaccines, it was a pandemic so everybody was talking about it, we had to talk about it, so that’s not new. There’s inequities in tuberculosis. We know these things. I think it’s the story of these historical factors are still mattering, and to some extent they’ve evolved in the way that they are affecting our distribution of resources, and that if we’re going to actually talk about disparities, if we got to talk about the resources that caused them, and we have to think about more upstream, what is it about the way that we’ve structured our healthcare system? And really, I’ll say, if I’m talking about structural racism, our healthcare system, our education system, our criminal justice system, et cetera, our society as a whole that is producing these inequities.
(32:13):
We have so many scholars writing about this in this slice of time, but we can go back to the boys who wrote about this 125 years ago about the inequitable distribution of resources and the health consequences of it. We’re writing the same story, and it becomes this question of how do we change that? How do we do that? I think that that may somewhat be yet to be determined.
Lisa Lines (32:41):
Yeah. I think a lot of us in public health and healthcare have been banging this drum for a long time. I’m personally totally over describing disparities. We’ve done that. What I want to do is talk about how we can realign the existing systems that we have to eliminate these disparities and inequities. What are the solutions? Does it have something to do with zoning? I mean, what are the things that we should be thinking about in terms of decreasing racial residential segregation?
Kristen Brown (33:23):
I definitely think that there are different types of policies, and I think it has to happen at a policy level because people aren’t going to do it out of the goodness of their hearts. I don’t know if that sounds so cynical, but history suggests that people are not out of the goodness of their hearts going to say, yes, let me share my awesome education system with these people that don’t have it. Or, let me share my awesome hospital access if that cost me something. Policies created it, and it’s going to have to be policies that dismantle it.
Lisa Lines (34:02):
What does it look like? We were talking earlier about what is the ideal state? You were mentioning sort of the health benefits of, I mean, I think of living in a place where people look like you, speak your language, eat the same foods, and we know that there are benefits to belonging in a neighborhood and feeling like you belong. Yeah, I mean, what are the health benefits of living in an integrated neighborhood? Is it really that simple or is it more like, no, we need to actually adjust? I think, personally, this is my opinion, we need to adjust the incentives around this stuff. I think like an economist in that way, where’s the money going now and how do we actually reroute, re-divert, make things more equitable?
Kristen Brown (34:54):
This is a hard nuance and it kind of depends on what day you ask me about how I’m going to answer this question. People are also not monolithic and people will thrive in different spaces because there is that balance of community that can get lost as an unintentional loss, but at the same time, you can have community but not have the air quality or live closer to the landfill. What’s that trade off in? What do people prefer? I think the word here is opportunity.
(35:29):
The freedom to be able to live and move in the place that you think is best for you and your family. I think that that’s what it comes down to is that if I want to live over here, I can live over here, and if I want to live over here, I can live over here, and just having that autonomy to make that decision for yourself and knowing that you’re going to be safe and able to thrive and live to your best potential no matter what decision that you make, or there’s no structural forces that keep you from reaching the potential that you want to reach. I think that that’s part of the nuance is that people aren’t the same and people may want different things and people may value different things, but that where you live, the quality of air that I breathe should not be dependent upon if I live in a predominantly black or predominantly white or whatever community. In this country, it very much does. If we can make that equal, then maybe we can be getting somewhere.
Lisa Lines (36:37):
Well, we’re not going to solve it all today, I guess. What’s next for your research? What should we be looking out for? How can people follow your work?
Kristen Brown (36:45):
Yeah, a lot of our work is moving a lot more upstream, a lot more trying to think about the way that our society is structured and how that affects health outcomes. I just want people to thrive. I just feel like people should just have their greatest opportunity to live the life that God has given to them, and I just feel like the way that we structure our society shouldn’t inhibit some people from being able to do that, that everybody should be able to live to their God-given potential. That’s my motivation, that’s what I want to do. I guess, if you want to follow me, on LinkedIn I’m Kristen Brown PhD, on Twitter or X now, I guess, I’m Kristen Brown PhD. I’m not hard to find.
Lisa Lines (37:29):
Great. That’s wonderful. Well, I really appreciate you being on our podcast today. Is there anything else you’d like to share before we wrap up today?
Kristen Brown (37:38):
Oh no, I’ve had a great time. This was really fun, thanks for inviting me.
Lisa Lines (37:44):
Absolutely. I’m so glad that you were available and that we can make this work because it was a really great conversation and I really appreciate your time. Thank you. Congratulations on this paper, it’s a really great paper, and I think we’ll put a link in the episode so people can read it.
Kristen Brown (38:00):
Okay, that sounds great. Thank you so much.
Lisa Lines (38:05):
Thank you so much. Thank you so much listeners and viewers, and we’ll see you next month.
Lisa M. Lines