{"id":66805,"date":"2015-04-28T09:09:27","date_gmt":"2015-04-28T14:09:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=66805"},"modified":"2015-07-24T23:42:31","modified_gmt":"2015-07-25T04:42:31","slug":"racism-kills-new-data-on-discrimination-stress-and-mortality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2015\/04\/28\/racism-kills-new-data-on-discrimination-stress-and-mortality\/","title":{"rendered":"Racism Kills: New Data on Stress and Mortality"},"content":{"rendered":"

African Americans are less healthy than their white counterparts. There are lots of causes for this:\u00a0food deserts, lack of access to healthcare, an absence of recreational opportunities\u00a0in low income neighborhoods, and more. Arguably, these are indirect effects of racist individuals and institutions, leading to the disinvestment in predominantly black neighborhoods and the economic disempowerment of black people.<\/p>\n

This post, though, is about a direct relationship between racism and health mediated by stress. Experiencing discrimination has been shown to have both acute and long-term effects on the body. Being discriminated against changes the\u00a0biometrics that indicate stress and personal reports of stress (anxiety, depression, and anger). Bad health outcomes are the result.<\/p>\n

A new study<\/a>, published in PLOS One<\/em>, adds another layer to the accumulating evidence.\u00a0To get a strong measure of “area racism” — the prevalence of racist beliefs in a specific geographic area — epidemiologist David Chae and his colleagues\u00a0counted how often internet users searched for the “n-word” on Google (ending in -er or -ers, but not -a or -as). This, they argued, is a good measure of the likelihood that an African American will experience discrimination. Here are their findings for area racism:<\/p>\n

\"2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

They then measured the rate at which\u00a0black people over 25 in those areas die and the death rate from\u00a0the four most common causes of death for that population: heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes. They also included a series of control variables to\u00a0attempt to isolate\u00a0the predictive power of area racism.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0resulting data offer support for the idea\u00a0that area racism\u00a0increases\u00a0mortality\u00a0among African Americans.\u00a0Chae and his colleagues\u00a0summarize, saying that areas in which Google searches for the n-word are one standard deviation above the mean have an 8.2% increase in mortality among Blacks. The searches were\u00a0related, also, to an increase in the rates of cancer, heart disease, and stroke. “This,” they explain, “amounts to over 30,000 [early] deaths among Blacks annually nationwide.”<\/p>\n

When they controlled for area level demographics and socioeconomic variables, the magnitude of the effect dropped from 8.2% to 5.7%. But these factors, they argued,\u00a0“are also influenced by racial prejudice and discrimination and therefore could be on the causal pathway.” In other words, it’s not NOT racism that’s making up that 2.5% difference.<\/p>\n

Directly and indirectly, racism kills.<\/p>\n

H\/t to Philip Cohen<\/a> for the link. Cross-posted at Pacific Standard<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

African Americans are less healthy than their white counterparts. There are lots of causes for this:\u00a0food deserts, lack of access to healthcare, an absence of recreational opportunities\u00a0in low income neighborhoods, and more. Arguably, these are indirect effects of racist individuals and institutions, leading to the disinvestment in predominantly black neighborhoods and the economic disempowerment of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":66807,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[233,23384,252,283,285,1760,20063,1757,140,37],"class_list":["post-66805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-death","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-healthmedicine","tag-prejudicediscrimination","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-blacksafricans","tag-raceethnicity-prejudicediscrimination","tag-raceethnicity-whiteseuropeans","tag-internet","tag-social-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/04\/2-1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66805"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67539,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66805\/revisions\/67539"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}