Reparations as Public Health

“Health is wealth,” said Julia Mejia, Boston City Councilor At-Large, during a conversation Monday afternoon with Harvard’s Mary T. Bassett about reparations for slavery as a public health measure. “All these things are really interconnected…and health has to be a part—if not the anchor—of this [reparations] conversation. Because people are not going to do well unless they are well.” Bassett, the director of Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights and a former New York State health commissioner, has been making this same case for several years. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2020, she called reparations a “long overdue approach” to closing the stubbornly persistent health gap between black and white Americans: “There has not been a single year since the founding of the United States when black people in this country have not been sicker and died younger than white people.” In 2022, after COVID-19’s dramatically unequal toll had laid bare the healthcare system’s enormous disparities, Bassett and others noted in an FXB Center report that only a handful of peer-reviewed public health articles had ever referenced reparations. One of those was an empirical study from 2021, showing how a full-scale reparations program that...