- I would say that structural racism can be defined as an overarching system in which public policies and cultural norms, institutional practices, all lead to racial inequities. It's when there's a system that's set up to distribute the goods and the resources, and all the things that society has to offer, in order to give it to one group of people more than another group of people. And when that happens, you set the stage for adverse health consequences and disparities. And redlining is an example of that. This study focuses on redlining in the city of Columbus, Ohio, in the mid-20th century. But those practices were present throughout the United States. So additional work, I think, can be done on looking at those practices in other parts of the country, looking to see how those practices interact with other policies that may have had an influence. It's unlikely that redlining is the only structural racist policy that's creating problems. There are likely to be others and there may be some things that mitigate the effects of redlining. And so by focusing only on one particular policy, we're not getting a full picture of cause and effect here. So we can see a correlation, but it's likely that redlining is itself associated with many other factors, so we can't say that it's the most important factor. We can just say that it's one factor. And so I think additional work needs to be done to look at the effects of these other things, like a school quality, the levels of pollution in different communities, what sorts of healthcare were available. These are all important factors to, ideally when when one does a epidemiologic study, you need a lot of different factors and information included, a big rich dataset, in order to see which things are truly explanatory and which things are correlating with the other. And so this is a good first step and I think future research will tease out some of these complex issues over time.