The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and other leading organizations have called for all of us in the child health space to go beyond describing racial and ethnic inequities in child health. Instead, we must examine structural racism as a root cause of these inequities and understand the historical and present policy decisions that have enabled it. Researchers and policymakers have increasingly recognized “place” as an important social determinant of child health. The neighborhoods where children live have socioeconomic, physical, environmental, institutional, and social characteristics that offer opportunities or disadvantages for healthy development. However, that understanding alone overlooks a key cause of these inequities. It is imperative that, in addition to examining the effects of neighborhoods on child health, we acknowledge and address that structural racism has helped build the high levels of residential segregation and vast inequities in children’s neighborhood resources that drive the large racial and ethnic gaps in child opportunity and outcomes.
