This section offers examples of graphics that illustrate the relationships between structural racism, violence, racial justice, and safety.

Pathway to violence

Several theories, frameworks, and models describe the relationships between structural racism, violence, racial justice, and safety. One way of describing the relationships between structural racism and violence is through a metaphor of a pathway. There is a pathway that starts with racial inequity and leads to violence. On this pathway, racism is enacted by people who build bias and discrimination into all institutions and systems through structures, policies, and practices manifesting as structural racism. Inequitable institutions and systems, in turn, create inequitable community conditions of high-risk factors associated with violence and low protective factors associated with safety. For instance, structural racism perpetuates inequitable financial, regulatory, and planning institutions and systems. The policies and practices of these inequitable institutions and systems, such as redlining (denying people of color loans in specific neighborhoods), increase community risk factors for violence, such as concentrated disadvantage and underfunded schools. Exposure to these community risk factors can increase individual and relational risk factors for violence, such as economic stress and low educational achievement. As risk factors mount, the likelihood of violence increases, and too often, this results in trauma, injury, or death.

What is racial justice, and how does it contribute to safety?

Racial justice is the systematic fair treatment of people of all races, resulting in equitable opportunities and outcomes for everyone. When there is racial justice, all people can achieve their full potential regardless of race, ethnicity, or the community in which they live. We will achieve racial justice when systems and institutions no longer generate advantages or disadvantages for groups of people based on phenotype (i.e., an individual’s observable traits, such as skin color) and when phenotype no longer serves as a predictor of health, safety, and other outcomes.

Racial inequities in multiple forms of violence are rooted in structural racism, and therefore, safety needs to be rooted in racial justice. In other words, racial justice is a social determinant of safety. In communities and societies characterized by racial justice, the protective conditions that promote safety where people of color live, learn, and work, are distributed equitably. In these communities and societies, racial inequities in violence are eliminated, substantially reducing the burden of violence. While some neighborhoods and cities are more racially equitable in the United States, broadly speaking, racially just communities do not yet exist in the United States. Comprehensive and continuous application of racial justice principles and processes are necessary to eliminate and reverse the policies, practices, systems, structures, and norms that create differential outcomes based on phenotype and uphold inequities in health and safety outcomes between white people and people of color.

Pathway to safety

On the pathway that leads to safety, people challenge inequitable structural power dynamics and rebalance structural power to build racial equity, resulting in equitable institutions and systems. Centering the leadership and solutions voiced by people most impacted by structural racism and violence, equitable institutions and systems, and the people working within them, in turn, create equitable community conditions of low-risk factors for violence and high protective factors for safety. Examples of these protective factors include equitable economic opportunities, residential stability, social capital, government-community trust, and collective efficacy. We build the pathway to safety through processes that recognize and enhance community protective factors, including the inherent strengths and assets and generational legacies of resistance and resilience within communities of color and all communities. Government and community efforts to enhance community protective factors increase individual and relational protective factors for safety, such as social connectedness. As protective factors increase, the likelihood of violence decreases, and people can experience safety and healing within equitable interdependent, multicultural communities.

The above graphic, Pathways to Violence or Safety, comes from Prevention Institute and Big City Health Coalition’s brief, Community Safety Realized: Public Health Pathways to Preventing Violence.

There are additional graphics that represent additional models and frameworks that may help illustrate the relationships between structural racism, racial justice, violence prevention, and safety. For example:

• The social-ecological model considers the complex interplay between individual, relationship, community, and societal factors. It allows us to understand the factors that put people at risk for violence or protect them from experiencing or perpetrating violence. The overlapping rings in the model illustrate how factors at one level influence factors at another level.
   
• The World Health Organization’s conceptual framework for action on the social determinants of health shows how social forces interact to generate and perpetuate health inequities. This framework depicts the need to build social cohesion and social capital to challenge inequitable distribution of power and rebalance power dynamics associated with structural racism and other forms of structural inequities.

All graphics, models, and frameworks will have advantages and disadvantages, depending on the context and purpose. Groups need to consider criteria for determining which graphic, model, or framework to use (e.g., buy-in among users, practical utility for operationalization and action) and arrive at a shared decision about which one(s) to use and why.