As a first-generation college student, when Dr. Brandi Summers, PhD left her hometown of Oakland, CA she had no intention of returning. “Growing up lower middle-class in the Bay Area and African-American, there just weren’t as many opportunities as I saw it,” she says. She figured leaving home would provide more opportunity, although she did not know exactly what future opportunities held, and it certainly was not academia. “I didn’t know what a PhD was honestly,” she says. She has now returned home, but in a way she never imagined when she first left, as an academic. As an assistant professor of geography and global metropolitan studies at UC Berkeley, Dr. Summers is working specifically to study how blackness contributes to the makeup, formation, and evolution of a city.
Before returning to Oakland, her work centered other cities. While earning her PhD at the University of California Santa Cruz, her dissertation was focused on Washington, DC which led to a position as assistant professor in African American studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research is brought to life in her book, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City which discusses the once majority Black city (Washington, D.C.), that has experienced a significant demographic shift and, as the description says, “how blackness contributes to our understanding of contemporary urbanization.”
Around the time the book was published in 2019, an opportunity at UC Berkeley presented itself and she realized how her work very much aligned with what has been happening in Oakland. “The population of African Americans in Oakland started to dwindle,” says Dr. Summers. “But it was still a Black city, so I wanted to understand the work and meaning of blackness in various contexts there.”
And thus she returned to her city. “I’m taking up questions around geography–around gentrification and how capitalism has this racialized impact on the environment,” she says. She sees a strong connection between her work and the upcoming UC Global Health Day 2022 theme of Centering Social Justice in Community Health, specifically how the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified health disparities. She wrote an op-ed in The New York Times in May 2020 specifically addressing this. “I wrote about how we can conceive of this pandemic exacerbating issues that are already there,” she says. “So, this is the literal way that a health crisis that disproportionately impacts Black people relates to what has already been going on throughout history.”
This is exactly how community health relates to social justice, says Dr. Summers. “We have to account for the fact that this [inequality] has a long, long history. Whether we have virologists and others looking at how this pandemic is different from the past, the reality is that the people who are most vulnerable to COVID are the same ones who are most vulnerable to violence, poverty, and cancer all because of inadequate access to healthcare.”
This is the lens that Dr. Summers brings to the UC Global Health Institute as a board member (since July 2021). Her hope is to demonstrate how health intersects with the built environment and to identify solutions to restructure cities and communities from that lens.
“Health isn’t just determined by medical innovation or thinking about disease as being limited to something in the body,” she says, “but an ecosystem we have to consider when we try to achieve justice.”