Issue 18 - Racism and child health

Photo by Patrick Hans Mulindwa

This issue of the Race & Health Quarterly brings together stories of children’s health shaped by displacement, incarceration, and inequality within health systems. Across Uganda, the United States, Latin America, and England, these articles show that children’s health is never just a clinical matter: it is profoundly conditioned by histories of race, place, and power.

Patrick Hans Mulindwa’s The Living Memory of Place takes us to the slopes of Mount Elgon in Uganda, where the Mosopisyek people were evicted from their ancestral forest in the name of conservation. For generations, the forest was both teacher and physician, embedding knowledge of nutrition, medicine, and belonging in children’s everyday lives. Today, Mosopisyek children face a “triple burden” of environmental deprivation, healthcare exclusion, and cultural erosion. Their health struggles such as malnutrition, anaemia, spiritual disconnection cannot be separated from the politics of land, race, and conservation.

In The Hidden Toll of Incarceration on Child Health by Caroline Parker, we turn to the largely invisible crisis of how imprisonment reshapes the lives of children worldwide. With more than 11.5 million people behind bars, parental incarceration is linked to asthma, developmental delays, depression, and anxiety among children. Evidence from the United States demonstrates stark racial disparities: Native American and Black children are far more likely to experience parental incarceration, fuelling intergenerational inequities. Yet, beyond the US, incarceration’s health toll remains absent from most global datasets, leaving millions of children uncounted and unsupported.

Finally, Hiwot's Academic Highlight features Brewster and colleagues’ study, Understanding Responsibility for Health Inequalities in Children’s Hospitals in England, highlights how institutions themselves grapple with responsibility. Drawing on interviews and focus groups with staff across nine hospitals, the study reveals a paradox: while reducing inequalities is seen as “everyone’s business,” it is also perceived as “no-one’s responsibility.” Structural ambiguity, lack of guidance, and weak accountability frameworks mean that commitments to equity often falter in practice, demonstrating the gap between statutory duty and lived delivery of care.

Together, these articles remind us that the health of children cannot be understood apart from the structures that shape their lives. From Indigenous children severed from ancestral forests, to children navigating the absence of incarcerated parents, to patients in hospitals where responsibility is diffuse, the message is clear: health is collective, political, and racialised. By situating children’s health within these wider systems, this issue challenges us to reimagine equity not as an aspiration, but as a duty embedded in practice, policy, and justice.