Table Of ContentDecolonising Public
Health through Praxis
The Impact on Black
Health in the UK
Faye Bruce
Ornette D. Clennon
Decolonising Public Health through Praxis
Faye Bruce • Ornette D. Clennon
Decolonising Public
Health through
Praxis
The Impact on Black Health in the UK
Faye Bruce Ornette D. Clennon
Department of Nursing, Brooks Building MaCTRI, Brow House
Manchester Metropolitan University MEaP
Manchester, UK Manchester, UK
ISBN 978-3-031-18404-8 ISBN 978-3-031-18405-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18405-5
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Preface
I am very pleased and honoured that this volume marks the first contri-
bution to the book series, Palgrave Studies in Decolonisation and Grassroots
Black Organic Intellectualism. In these current troubled times, we desper-
ately need clear thinking and mature praxis around how decolonisation
can be made useful in liberating and empowering grassroots communi-
ties. As will be explored by future contributions to the series, the rise of
populism and ethno-nationalism are forcing grassroots communities
around the world to fight for their very existence, as they confront their
increasingly unstable nation states. Although not as openly visceral, grass-
roots communities in the UK are also fighting equally hard for their exis-
tence, a fight that involves protecting their civil (human) rights to local
services. Nowhere is this felt more keenly than in the field of health. In
the UK, the instability of the state is represented by a diminishing
National Health Service (NHS) and an equally diminishing priority of an
equitable healthcare system that works for everyone. This volume and the
wider book series aim to make visible the not-so-hidden reasons why
inequity is felt more keenly by some more than by others.
The scholarship in this volume and across the series is intended to both
illuminate and agitate questions at both grassroots and policy levels to ask
what can be done to make positive changes and what are the mindsets
that stubbornly prevent positive change from taking place.
v
vi Preface
It is urgent that grassroots communities and policy makers grasp the
ethical and moral nettle of inequitable healthcare because the health of
the entire nation depends on it.
Manchester, UK Ornette D. Clennon
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank God without whom none of this would have
happened. We would also like to thank all of our community partners,
whose voices in this volume form a golden thread of community wisdom
whose absence would have made the writing of this volume impossible.
Ornette D. Clennon
I would like to thank my colleagues and work family at MEaP (Making
Education a Priority: Dr Esther Oludipe, Jumoke Quadri, Amber Abisai,
Henry Ngawoofah and Christina Ntow), who supported me in co-
writing this book. I would also like to especially thank Professor T. J. Curry
for his insightful suggestions that helped to broaden our scholarly enquiry.
Lastly but not least, I would like to thank my co-author for her golden
community insights.
Faye Bruce
It has been a pleasure working alongside my co-author, who has been
instrumental in the creative design and many scholarly aspects of this
book. I am so grateful to the Chief Executive Charles Kwaku-Odoi of the
Caribbean & African Health Network, who has been highly strategic and
operational in the development of the organisation which is the bedrock
of what we do to support and enable our communities. Finally, I would
vii
viii Acknowledgements
like to thank the Black communities for giving us the mandate to advo-
cate for them to tackle the health and well-being concerns in our com-
munities and hence help to meet our vision to reduce health inequalities
for Black people in a generation.
Contents
1 Introduction: How Does the African Diaspora Health-
Seeker Fair in the Current Health Market in the UK? 1
2 What Decoloniality Looks Like in the Health Market 13
3 The Racial and Gendered Determinants of Health 39
4 Decolonising Public Health: What Are the Alternatives? 79
5 Where Do We Go from Here? Decolonised Health
Advocacy 111
ix
1
Introduction: How Does the African
Diaspora Health-Seeker Fair
in the Current Health Market in the UK?
Abstract In this chapter, we will introduce our decolonial reading of
whiteness as a lens through which to present the current landscape of
Public Health for African Diaspora communities in the UK. The chapter
will also identify the hidden factors for systemic failure for the African
Diaspora health seeker and locate them within a “coloniality of white-
ness”. To do this, we will introduce whiteness as an unethical framework
(i.e. a distortion of Aristotelian human ethics) for social ordering that can
be traced back to historical patterns of behaviour over the longue durée.
We will also introduce the notion of the “grassroots Black organic intel-
lectual” as being the conduit for such decolonial analyses of whiteness in
the community, which will form a decolonial praxis that will be threaded
throughout the volume.
Keywords Human ethics • Whiteness • Decoloniality • Decolonisation
• Communities
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 1
F. Bruce, O. D. Clennon, Decolonising Public Health through Praxis,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18405-5_1
