By Gina Lovasi, PhD, MPH, the Dana and David Dornsife Dean and Professor of Epidemiology at Drexel University's Dornsife School of Public Health

February is Black History Month, marking 100 years since a precursor tradition which started with a week of recognition in 1925, expanding to a month in 1976. Our Drexel library has a dedicated guide with reading lists.

While there are many who will be recognizing the month through events, museum visits, or gatherings, the reading list stood out to me because of my own love of books. I love that among the recommended books is A Legacy to Share, with stories from Drexel alumni as curated by the Drexel University Black Alumni Council. And, I wanted to take this occasion to encourage dedicating time to explore these resources, and also to share about two books that have influenced my own research and thinking about place and health.

The two books are Root Shock by Mindy Fullilove and There Goes the 'Hood' by Lance Freeman. Both are works both by Black scholars, and are about the history of places where Black communities have lived. The focus is not on a single snapshot in time, but on ways that neighborhoods have been changed and the collective understanding of that change.

These works, and the direct collaborations with the authors that I was honored to have while working at Columbia University, opened up for me the importance of two things.

First, that current or proposed neighborhood change is interpreted against a backdrop of experience, and that experience includes injustice and deception. The backdrop of history in predominately Black communities includes creating meaning and connection to place despite disinvestment, and then seeing that connection ruptured in the wake of changes that are imposed on rather than owned by the longstanding residents.

Second, the collective understanding of the intention behind change matters for public health, and for our understanding of pathways from place to health. A collective understanding of why a streetscape has changed, for whom new amenities like supermarkets were brought in, will itself be a determinant of what people do and feel. The stories about the intention behind change are not directly observable in our geographic information systems (GIS) data or street imagery. We will miss something crucial if we are not using these data on the visible in conjunction with hearing how residents perceive neighborhoods and neighborhood change.

These insights have changed the direction of my own research. The insights have changed the grants I write and the teams I bring together. Importantly, this appreciation of how history frames the present has enhanced my appreciation of colleagues in public health and beyond whose training and approaches and lived experiences are quite different from my own.

What I wanted to highlight this month is that while current change and uncertainty are affecting us all, there are members of our community who are in fear and under threat in distinct ways. There are many for whom this moment is all the more painful given injustices they have experienced, and ways that the current actions and rhetoric seem to call out their own identities as illegitimate or unworthy of solace and protection.

Today, I want to say to all who are reading this that you are worthy. Every member of the populations we serve is worthy of our attention and care. This is not only because of past injustices, and is not conditional on our contributions. We are worthy of attention and care because of our shared humanity. Here at Dornsife, we commit to defending health as a human right, and I thank all of those who join me in an ongoing quest to find ways to lean into that commitment.

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