Health Equity Resources | Emory School of Medicine

The School of Medicine has developed a toolkit of health equity resources to help address the need for our collective education, engagement, and growth. While diversity, equity, and inclusion have been championed in several areas, there is more work to be done. In our commitment against racism, hate, and injustice we have also created a series of webinars and trainings to support intercultural fluencies and frank conversations through humble inquiry.

2021 Executive Summary DEI Strategic Plan

Glossary of Terms

Diversity

Diversity is foundational to educational excellence and critical to a transformative academic experience. It helps to foster dynamic spaces of engagement where innovation, critical thinking, creativity, and understanding reside, and it helps to cultivate intellectual communities rooted in a mutual respect for individuals whose identities, experiences, gifts and talents mirror the communities that surround our campus, and better reflect the diversity of our world. Such efforts bind the value proposition of diversity to our institutional principles and ideals as we seek to create space for students, faculty, and staff to navigate an increasingly complex and diverse society, establishing models of practice that generate new knowledge and deeper human connections as we move from inclusive excellence to inclusive eminence. Thus, Diversity is understood broadly to mean race, ethnicity, gender, disability, national origin, age, health status, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, socio-economic standing, immigration status, family background, neurodiversity, intersectional identities, and the broad representations of human existence.

Inclusion

Inclusion in action is about creating an environment in which faculty, staff, and students can thrive, where they feel appreciated and can see themselves in the images, traditions, and culture of the campus community. Thus, Inclusion is the active, intentional, and ongoing engagement with the principles of diversity—in our scholarship, in our curriculum, co- curriculum, business operations and infrastructure of our institution. Inclusion is interwoven into the intellectual, social, cultural, geographical, local, regional, and institutional communities with which individuals might connect—in ways that increase awareness, content knowledge, perspective taking, and empathetic understanding of the complex ways individuals interact within societies, organizations, and institutions, and systems.

Equity

Equity is the guarantee of fair treatment, access, opportunity and advancement for all students, faculty, and staff, while at the same time striving to identify and eliminate barriers that have prevented the full participation of some groups. The guiding principle of equity acknowledges that there are underserved and underrepresented populations and that fairness regarding these unbalanced conditions is needed to assist in the provision of effective opportunities to all groups.

Equity-mindedness

Equity-mindedness calls attention to patterns of inequity in outcomes for students, faculty, and staff. Practitioners of equity-mindedness are willing to take personal and institutional responsibility for the success of their students, faculty, and staff, and critically reassess their own practices. It also requires that practitioners are race-conscious and aware of the social and historical context of exclusionary practices in American Higher Education.

Social Justice

The objective of creating a fair and equal society in which each individual matters, their rights are recognized and protected, and decisions are made in ways that are fair and honest.

Allyship

Allyship is the lifelong process in which people with privilege and power work to develop empathy towards another marginalized group's challenges or issues. The goal of allyship is to create a culture in which the marginalized group feels valued, supported, and heard. Being an ally is not a label - it is a verb.

Books

American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear – Khaled Beydoun
Antisemitism – Deborah Lipstadt
Biased – Jennifer Eberhardt
Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates
Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People – Banaji/Greenwald
Dear White America – Tim Wise
Diversity and Inclusion in Quality Patient Care: Your Story/Our Story – A Case-Based Compendium - Martin, Heron, Moreno-Walton, Strickland
Inclusive Leadership – Sweeney/Bothwick
Just Mercy – Bryan Stevenson
Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation – Derald Sue Wing
No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement - Joseph Shapiro
Notes of a Native Son – James Baldwin
So You Want to Talk About Race - Ijeoma Oluo
Stamped From the Beginning – Ibram X. Kendi
Strategic Diversity Leadership – Damon Williams
The Fire Next Time – James Baldwin
The Latino Threat – Leo Chavez
The New Jim Crow – Michelle Alexander
Whistling Vivaldi – Claude Steele
White Fragility- Robin Diangelo
White Rage – Carol Anderson