Race, Law, and Health Disparities: Toward a Critical Race Intervention

Abstract

In response to persistent and pervasive differences in health across racial and ethnic groups in the United States, there is a national commitment to achieving health equity, or optimal levels of health for all. Achieving health equity and eliminating health disparities is not without its challenges and will require interventions and approaches that focus on improving opportunity structures for racial/ethnic minorities. We provide a brief overview of the literature documenting black/white differences in health across the life course. We then discuss current conceptual models guiding this research and discuss the importance of translating legal theory—specifically, critical race approaches—to both the study of health disparities and the development of interventions to address them. We conclude with examples of research that incorporate, although not explicitly, aspects of critical race theory and discuss how this approach can be leveraged in future studies.