Includes bibliographical references (pages 280-325) and index.

Part OnePoliticizing Health: Overview of How Oppression is a Social Determinant of Health -- Oppression: A Social Determinant of Health / Elizabeth A. McGibbon -- People and Planet Under Threat: Social, Ecological, and Structural Determinants of Health / Elizabeth McGibbon -- Raising the Volume on the Social Determinants or Health in Canada and Elsewhere / Dennis Raphael -- Part Two: Oppressions in the Everyday: How Oppression Operates to Promote and Sustain Health Inequities -- Racialization of Oppression / Josephine E. Etowa and Elizabeth McGibbon -- Oppression and the Health of Indigenous Peoples / Marie Battiste & James [Sa'ke'j] Youngblood Henderson -- Social Exclusion as a Determinant of Health / Grace-Edward Galabuzi -- Oppression and Im/migrant Health in Canada / Denise Spitzer and Sara Torres -- Politics of Mental Health: Pathologizing the Impacts of Systemic Oppression / Elizabeth McGibbon -- Part Three: Imperatives for Structural Change: Belling the Cat -- Redistributive Politics and Public Policy / Toba Bryant -- Obsessed by Profits: Big Pharma and the Corruption of Health / Joel Lexchin -- Aboriginal Peoples' Constitutional Right to Health / James [Sa'ke'j] Youngblood Henderson -- Oppression and the Political Economy of Health Inequities / Elizabeth McGibbon and Lars Hallstrom -- Health, Human Rights and the Social Determinants of Health / Elizabeth McGibbon and Maureen Shebib -- COVID-19: Oppressions Laid Bare / Scott Aquano, Toba Bryant, Joesphine B. Etowa, Joel Lexchin, Elizabeth McGibbon, Dennis Raphael, Denise L. Spitzer, and Sara Torres.

"The interconnected mechanisms of oppression bear many similarities across time and across earth's geography. They include genocide, cultural genocide, policy-created poverty, and numerous actions and inactions that create and sustain systems of dominance. At the heart of oppression is structural power. While individuals can exert social and cultural power over other individuals, it is structural power in systems such as education, governance, law, and health that cements and sustains oppression over time and over geographies. The cycle of oppression, described in more detail below (updated 2nd Edition version), shows how individual acts of stereotyping and discrimination form an integral link in creating and sustaining systemic oppression. As Iris Marion Young (1990) tells us, oppression refers to "the vast and deep injustices some groups suffer as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions, media and cultural stereotypes, and structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms."-- Provided by publisher.