Institutional Mechanisms of Structural Racism and Children’s Brain Development: Argument for System Dynamics

• In Event: Inequities in Children’s Environmental Exposures: Integrating Toxicant, Social, and Structural Influences on Children’s Physical Health

Abstract

Background: Racial disparities and inequities in environmental exposures known to harm brain development are well established. In environmental health sciences, research largely focuses on measuring individual level outcomes and exposures (e.g. blood lead levels), yet increasingly researchers and advocacy groups argue for shifting the focus away from describing outcome disparities and towards systemic or structural racism (SR) as the target of work to address health inequities (e.g., how did those contaminants get there in the first place). Even within discourse on measuring and characterizing structural racism there are criticisms that current approaches measure the downstream consequences or manifestations of SR (redlining, disparities in SES or education, exposure to police violence) rather than the upstream processes that create and perpetuate those consequences. Theoretical Framework: We conceptualize structural racism as being produced and reproduced by laws, rules, and practices implemented by various institutions, and embedded in the economic system as well as in cultural and societal norms that generate and reinforce inequities among racial and ethnic groups. Though well established in management and engineering domains, system dynamics (SD) modeling is emerging as a well-suited methodology to explicitly explore and represent processes of structural racism. Our argument is that that SD provides language, concepts and methods to operationalize, interrogate and model the “structures” in structural racism, presenting opportunities for research and practice that moves beyond description. Objectives: In this presentation we will delineate how SD may contribute language and conventions for formal representation of the “mental models” and resulting policies and decision rules as sites of structural racism in increased environmental health risk. We will argue for the importance of connecting those mental models and policies to operational processes through which these policies act, and the feedback processes through which children’s environmental health inequities may be reinforced by structurally racist policies. Discussion: A system dynamics framework provides not only a language but also a set of methodological tools which can more easily operationalize existing multidisciplinary scientific evidence and conceptual frameworks on SR. Additionally we discuss how SD can illuminate a more diverse array of relevant policy insights for targeting resources by shifting the predominant “mental models” of researchers, institutions, regulators and other stakeholders towards “seeing” the system structures that create and maintain disparities in cumulative chemical and non-chemical exposures and poor child health outcomes.

Authors

• Devon C. Payne-Sturges, University of Maryland - College Park
  Presenting Author

• Ellis Ballard, Washington University

• Janean E Dilworth-Bart, University of Wisconsin - Madison