Changing the Story on Health and Racial Equity: Why Public Health Needs an Infrastructure for Building Narrative Power.

Abstract

Policy Points One form of power that is required for advancing health and racial equity is narrative power: the ability to shift the stories we use to make sense of the world. Building this form of power requires the field of public health to strategically work to connect institutions and organizations to align in complementary ways to create, build, and sustain new narratives-what we refer to as narrative infrastructure. We illustrate these ideas using real-world examples drawn from work in tobacco control and emerging work in addressing structural racism in public health.