The Lancet: advancing racial equality
“Racism is a public health emergency of global concern. Anti-racism is a struggle all of us must join. We pledge to educate ourselves about racism. We will support Black and minority health workers. We will use the evidence we publish, together with our values, to speak out for Black and minority ethnic communities. We pledge our solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. We will now turn that pledge into concrete actions in our own work.”
— The Lancet antiracism pledge
Racial and ethnic injustice is a burning issue of our time. In 2020, the appalling police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black men and women in the USA and worldwide were met with global condemnation.
The groundswell of emotion and anger among the Lancet Group staff prompted self-reflection and brought our own work and environment into sharp focus. Elsevier, our publisher, has expressed its continued commitment to ensure a culture and practice of equity, diversity, and inclusion and announced a formal pledge to eliminate systemic racism in health and research.
Building on the Lancet Group’s diversity pledge and after the publication of editorials in the Lancet journals and an anti-racism pledge by the Lancet Group to address racial and ethnic inequality, 11 editors from different racial and ethnic minority backgrounds who work across the Lancet titles came together to form a task force —the Group for Racial Equality (GRacE).
A Comment by the GRacE task force outlines how the Lancet journals will turn those pledges into action, including an assessment of our journals’ policies and the diversity in our workforce and contributors, an examination of The Lancet’s past and a special theme issue on racial and ethnic inequalities in science, health, and medicine among others.
Working alongside our readers, authors, and colleagues, the Lancet journals will highlight issues of racial and ethnic injustice, celebrate diversity, and debate ways forward. In this resource centre, we have highlighted selected content, published across the Lancet journals since May 2020, organised by content type on issues related to racial equality. This page will evolve as our work on advancing racial equality progresses.
