Interrogating Structural Racism When Doing Health Research in Canada: Using the Public Health Critical Race Praxis...

While race is frequently reported as a variable in Canadian health research, its use as a proxy for examining structural racism risks pathologizing racial identity as a risk factor for Black, Indigenous and other people of colour (BIPOC)'s health and illness. Recognizing how analyzing race without specifically interrogating structural racism can reproduce inequities that diversely impact BIPOC people's health, this commentary aims to conceptualize how health researchers in Canada can interrogate and mitigate the impact of structural racism when doing health research work. Guided by the four paradigms of the Public Health Critical Race Praxis (PHCRP): (i) knowledge production, (ii) contemporary race relations, (iii) conceptualization and measurement and (iv) action, we first delineate the need to question how and what we know about BIPOC people's health inequities, including its connections to settler colonialism and structural racism in Canada (knowledge production). We also call for health researchers to better learn and understand the historical and contemporary contexts of racialization in Canada that underpinned the segregation of BIPOC communities (contemporary race relations) and its subsequent impacts on their health outcomes. In conceptualization and measurement, we discussed how race and racism constructs are defined, mapped, and linked to each other, and the ways in which researchers can operationalize their distinctions when measuring the health impact of structural racism. Lastly, action orientates researchers to what we can do to integrate the knowledge learned into our research planning and design to mitigate the impact of structural racism in the long-term. With the goal of informing practice, we emphasize that health researchers have a social responsibility to utilize diverse decolonial and emancipatory research methods and engage in meaningful reflexivity to interrogate structural racism as a major root cause of health inequities in Canada.