Black Lives Matter Principles as an Africentric Approach to Improving Black American Health

Abstract

Although public health has made substantial advances in closing the health disparity gap, Black Americans still experience inequalities and inequities. Several theoretical frameworks have been used to develop public health interventions for Black American health; yet the existing paradigms do not fully account for the ontology, epistemology, or axiology of Black American populations. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement provides a basis for understanding the constructs that may contribute to Black American health. By drawing from the 13 BLM principles, this paper presents an alternative approach for developing, implementing, and evaluating public health interventions for Black populations in the USA. Furthermore, the approach may inform future public health research and policies to reduce health disparities within and across Black populations in the USA. Keywords Public health interventions. African American. Black American. Population health. Health disparities. Black Lives Matter "When Black people get free, everybody gets free." Alicia Garza, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement 1 Although there is disagreement on whether to use Black or African American, I will use the Black identifier throughout this article to underscore that some people of African descent living in the USA are descendants of Africans from across the transatlantic slave trade.

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