Dr. Arthur R. James is a retired Obstetrician, Gynecologist, and Pediatrician who has been involved in the care of underserved populations for his entire medical career. During his career he has been the Medical Director of two different Federally Qualified Health Centers, Medical Director of Bronson Methodist Hospital’s Women’s Care Clinic, and Founding Medical Director of Borgess Medical Center’s Women’s Health Office. In each of these efforts, he was instrumental in expanding services to indigent patients, patients using drugs, HIV-positive pregnant patients, and teens. He is also the founder and former Medical Director of the Kalamazoo County Fetal and Infant Mortality Review team and, for many years, led Kalamazoo County’s efforts to reduce infant mortality. During his tenure in Kalamazoo the Black/White racial disparity in infant mortality decreased from 3x to 1.4x and, for a brief moment Kalamazoo County went from having the highest Black infant mortality rate in the State of Michigan to having the lowest Black infant mortality rate in the State. He was also the former Director of the State of Michigan’s Infant Mortality Think Tank. He is a former Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Pediatrics at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Co-Chair of the Ohio Collaborative to Prevent Infant Mortality, and Senior Policy Advisor to the Ohio Department of Health (2011-2016).

He has also been a member of the Health and Human Services Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Infant Mortality (SACIM), a former member of the Board of Directors for the National Healthy Start Association, a former board member for the Centering Healthcare Institute, Inc., former Executive Director of The Ohio State University’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, former co-chair for the Centers for Disease Control and March of Dimes Health Equity workgroup, former Senior Consultant to First Year Cleveland (a Cuyahoga County community-wide effort to decrease the infant mortality rate and eliminate racial disparities in birth outcomes), former Evaluator for the Indianapolis Healthy Start Project, former Board member for the Black Mothers Breastfeeding Association, founding co-principal investigator for the national AIM-Community Care Initiative (a national program to decrease the racial disparity in maternal morbidity and mortality), and (after more than 100-years) he was the first African American member of the Franklin County Public Health Department’s Board of Directors. From 2019-2024 he led the Faculty Planning Committee for the Healthy Start Technical Assistance Service Center at the National Institute for Children’s Health Quality.

Dr. James has received numerous local and national awards for his advocacy to achieve equity in birth outcomes; most recently he was the 2022 American Public Health Association’s Martha May Eliot Award recipient (awarded to an individual or organization who has had a national impact on improving Maternal Child Health). Although the award has been given annually since 1964, Dr. James is the first African American male recipient. He has also been named the 2023 award recipient of the National Council of Negro Women, Columbus Section’s Outstanding Achievement and Leadership Award for his work to improve birth outcomes in Ohio. He is also a frequent national speaker on maternal and infant morbidity and mortality, especially regarding the national racial disparity in birth outcomes.

Dr. James believes that:

• RACE is a social construct, not a biological construct
• The notion of “human hierarchy”, that some of us are better than and, therefore, more deserving than others of us is not true
• The international genome project has taught us that all humans are 99.9% genetically the same
• This clearly implies that birth inequities do not occur because of biological or physiological racial “differences”.
• Achieving equity (as noted by Dr. Camara Jones) will require at least three things:
• Respecting all individuals and populations the same,
• Recognizing and rectifying past historical injustices and
• Taking a targeted or proportionate universal approach; providing the most assistance to the groups experiencing the worst outcomes.
• A race-neutral approach will not result in achieving equity.

Improvements in health care alone will not result in health equity. The “syndemic” nature of our challenge requires improvements in domains other than health care. Therefore, addressing upstream “moral” determinants (the will to make the changes necessary to achieve equity), structural determinants, and social determinants must become a larger part of our work. Our initial goal should be to decrease racial disparities, then to achieve overall equity and our long-term goal should be to create a society that has “zero tolerance” for race-based inequities.