TABLE 1.

Definitions of Public Health and Selected Concepts of Critical Race Theory

Concept	Definition
Public health	The art (i.e., practice) and science (i.e., research) of protecting and improving the health of communities
Centering in the margins	Making the perspectives of socially marginalized groups, rather than those of people belonging to dominant race or culture, the central axis around which discourse on a topic revolves
Critical consciousness	Digging beneath the surface of information to develop deeper understandings of concepts, relationships, and personal biases
Experiential knowledge	Ways of knowing that result from critical analysis of one's personal experiences
Ordinariness	The nature of racism in post–civil rights society: that is, integral and normal rather than aberrational
Praxis	Iterative process by which the knowledge gained from theory, research, personal experiences, and practice inform one another
Primacy	Prioritizing the study of racial influences on outcomes
Race consciousness	Explicit acknowledgment of the workings of race and racism in social contexts or in one's personal life
Social construction of race	The endowment of a group or concept with a delineation, name, or reality based on historical, contextual, political, or other social considerations

Source. Critical Race Theory concepts adapted from Delgado and Stefancic.⁵