Issue: Despite enduring racism and the need for greater racial equity, there is limited consensus among analysts, academics, and public officials on how to assess policy for its impact on racial equity. Without instructive conceptual frameworks, our ability to identify, examine, and eradicate racial inequity through health policy will be limited.
Goal: To establish a conceptually nuanced, empirically informed, and practically useful framework for analyzing the racial equity implications of health policies.
Key Findings and Conclusions: Analysts, academics, and public officials seeking to evaluate policy through a racial equity lens should consider multiple dimensions of the policy process, including design, implementation, evaluation, feedback, and key aspects of the policy environment. We can gain important insights by systematically probing how racism is structurally produced or reproduced through each of these specific dimensions. In doing so, it is especially crucial to examine the ways that policy: 1) creates or reflects disproportionality in the allocation of benefits and burdens to racial groups, 2) operates through forms of institutional decentralization, and 3) includes or neglects the voices of racially marginalized populations. The Racial Equity and Policy (REAP) framework provides a conceptually sound, empirically grounded basis for systematically assessing racial equity in health policy. (author introduction)