The health disparities research industrial complex as structural violence: insights from the U.S. South

The U.S. South experiences some of the most severe and persistent health inequities in the nation, shaped by a long history of racialized structural violence in housing, healthcare, education, and the criminal legal system. At the same time, the region remains a critical site of resistance, rooted in deep traditions of community organizing that have reshaped national understandings of social injustice. Against this backdrop, the Partnership for Southern Equity launched its Community-Informed Research for Change, Learning, and Equity (CIRCLE) initiative to address an enduring and underexamined form of structural discrimination: the unequal control of research, data, and knowledge production in communities of color. Drawing on CIRCLE's ongoing landscape scan, this article interrogates the Health Disparities Research Industrial Complex (HRIC) as a site of structural violence. This article draws on the Black radical tradition of the U.S. South, recognizing the control of knowledge as historically inseparable from the project of white oppression. Situated in a region bearing the sharpest edge of racialized health inequities, while also holding the nation's deepest traditions of community-rooted resistance, this article names the mechanisms through which epistemic violence operates in the present and uplifts the community-driven strategies already emerging across the South as pathways toward a more equitable and accountable system of knowledge production.