Climbing Down the Ivory Tower: Challenging Racial Injustice Through Community Health

“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” Most of us know these famous words by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In fact, some of us even referenced them in our applications to graduate school. They stirred within us a call for action and allowed us to connect our fascinations with the human body, epidemiology, and biostatistics to a movement bigger than ourselves. For us, medicine and public health represented a means to an end – tools we would use to work towards our social justice goals as we sought to improve public health and reform the health care system from within.