Grant: Project Grant

The Pan American region is highly diverse. The region comprises Canada, the United States (US), the Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean, and 21 other Spanish speaking countries or territories from the Latin American subregion. However, outside of the context of administrative data in the US, Afro Diasporic populations (AD), including Black, Afro descendants, African American, and Caribbean populations are statistically invisible in the Pan-American region. Afro descendants make up 30% of the population in the Latin American region and in Montreal and Toronto, the most diverse cities in Canada, Afro descendants make up 10% and 4% of the population, respectively. Likewise, are a growing population in Montreal (5%) and Toronto (3%). Yet, Afro descendants and Latinx individual, although invisibilized populations, are overrepresented on the burden of COVID-19, police fatal encounters and chronic conditions. More importantly, the analysis and generation of evidence about inequalities in these populations is limited. Therefore, we propose a research project to examine the availability, quality and scope of data collected and used on race/ethnicity in urban areas in the Pan-American region. This work have critical implications for the accurate documentation of racial health inequities, the creation of measures designed to describe the social conditions in which marginalized racial/ethnic groups are embedded (e.g., racial residential segregation), and the development of policy action designed to mitigate and eliminate racial health inequities.