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A Look at Latina Teen Pregnancies: Intersections of Race, Gender, and Class
Posted by: | CommentsSilvia Henriquez has an interesting article on today’s Huffington Post entitled “Policies to Curb Latina Teen Pregnancies Have the Reverse Effect.” In the piece, Henriquez argues that the policy efforts designed to curb Latina teen pregnancies are too narrow and shortsighted—they focus on birth control and marriage rather than on big picture issues like immigration, poverty, and inequality. What’s most important about Henriquez’s article is that she skillfully highlights the ways intersecting factors of race, gender, and class overlap to shape these high rates of teen pregnancy. Henriquez begins by offering some important context in which to situate the debate. She writes:
“Latina teens give birth at a rate more than twice that of white teens. Latinos have a much lower high school and college graduate rate compared to white teens.”
This background information gives insight into the environment facing pregnant Latina teens. Other sociological research has shown that when women give birth at young ages they are less likely to finish school, less likely to land well paying, stable jobs, and thus more likely to be poor. When the fathers are in comparable situations (like the lower high school and college graduation rates Henriquez describes), this only compounds young women’s likelihood of raising children in poverty. And given that institutional and employer-based racial discrimination still runs rampant, Latino/as are likely to face higher jobless and underemployment rates than whites, further exacerbating the chances of remaining poor. (Deirdre Royster’s book “Race and the Invisible Hand” is one such example of insidious racial discrimination in low skilled labor markets, though there are many others.) Henriquez continues on to say that:
“Myths — rather than realities — have too often guided the public discourse about Latinas and pregnancy. Latina teens don’t have sex more often than their white counterparts and most desire a college education. In addition, despite the demonization of immigrants in recent health care debates, most Latina teen moms are not immigrants.”
These are critical points that highlight the ways Latinas are cast in what Joe Feagin insightfully describes as the white racial frame. This frame (discussed elsewhere on this blog) encompasses stereotypes, sincere fictions, and ideologies about different racial groups. However, these stereotypes, images, and beliefs are shaped by gender as well as race. Thus, women of color often are cast as hypersexual, while men of color are likely to be depicted as criminals. As such, when Henriquez writes that Latina teens do not have sex more often than white teen girls, nor are they mostly immigrants, she counters white racial framing of Latinas as hypersexual, irresponsible, and a drain on national resources. (Similar imagery and framing was present in Ronald Reagan’s depictions of “welfare queens” in the 1980s.) Henriquez then identifies some of the factors that influence Latina teens’ high birth rates:
“Compared to white teens, Latina teens have higher pregnancy rates because they use birth control much less often and reject abortion much more often. Religion and family influence are very important factors, but for sexually active Latina teens these are not the only or even most relevant obstacles to birth control usage. For many Latinas, the top barriers to birth control usage are much more mundane: transportation, lack of health insurance or cash for health services, confusing and intimidating immigration regulation for households with a combination of citizens and non-citizens, and lack of guidance about available services. When teen pregnancy prevention programs and messages ignore these obstacles, Latinas become distanced from sex education efforts.”
Here is an incredibly important point that highlights Henriquez’s central thesis that bigger issues than simple individual choice are at play for Latina teen moms. The issues she cites—transportation, lack of health insurance—are directly linked to social class. If you’re a teenager in the suburbs with your own car, it’s relatively easy to head off to your local Planned Parenthood for condoms. If you have health insurance, you can visit your doctor, tell him or her you’re planning on becoming sexually active, and get safe, confidential counseling and birth control. Switch out the car, the suburbs, and the health insurance for an impoverished neighborhood, no access to a doctor, and no money to find one, and the picture gets much bleaker.
Note also that these aren’t just class issues. For Latinas, intersections of race and gender are also factors. Henriquez astutely points out that immigration regulation can add layers of bureaucratic confusion that can make it difficult for these teen girls to access social services. This is a point that highlights that race makes a difference, and that not all racial groups are interchangeable—these issues of immigration regulation are less likely to impact poor black teens, for instance. But they are more likely to impact teen Latinas who, by virtue of their sex, face greater potential consequences of sexual activity than do Latinos. Gender, race, and class all come together to shape this issue. Henriquez continues:
“Sex education programs often tell teens that delaying parenthood until they finish high school and college will bring them some version of the American dream: a good job, economic security, family stability. The troubling reality is that for Latinas this promise comes true for only a limited few. Recent research confirms that Latina teen mothers have roughly the same socioeconomic circumstances at age 30 as those Latina teens who delay childbirth. The unfortunate reality is that access to college and the opportunities that emerge as a result is starkly different for Latina teens and white teens.”
This reiterates Henriquez’s point that broader issues than personal choice are at play here. If Latina teen mothers are in the same socioeconomic place by age 30 as those who’ve chosen to delay childbearing, then this points to major issues in our educational and economic spheres. Most studies show that more education translates into increased economic rewards. Do Latinas have the same access as women of other racial groups to access higher education and its attendant rewards? Perhaps more importantly, do women of all racial groups have the same access as white men, who despite being a numerical minority of the population remain overrepresented in the highest paid, most prestigious positions?
I agree with Henriquez that these are the structural conditions that should be the subject of focus, rather than simplistic, “one-size-fits-all” policies that fail to take into consideration the ways that intersections of race, gender, class, and other factors shape groups’ experiences differently. Latino/as are the fastest growing segment of our population, and by the middle of this century, whites will cease to be a numerical majority as the population of other racial groups continues to grow. Given our rapidly changing national demographics, we would be wise to establish policies that eliminate institutional disadvantage for all groups of color.
Infant Mortality & The Stresses of Everyday Racism
Posted by: | CommentsI think that the national discussion about racism and health care reform gets so abstract sometimes that we forget that when we’re talking about health, we’re talking about people’s lives. And, as this short clip (about 4 minutes) demonstrates very powerfully, leading researchers contend that racism plays an important role in infant mortality among African American women, even when controlling for income and education. This clip, from Episode 2, “When the Bough Breaks,” in the video series “Unnatural Causes,” (2007), features UCLA obstetrician and gynecologist Dr. Michael Lu. Lu believes that for many women of color, racism over a life time, not just during the nine months of pregnancy, increases the risk of preterm delivery, one of the leading risk factors for early infant death:
And, in an interesting piece of research by one of the experts featured in the full episode, Dr. Camara Jones, concludes that: “being classified by others as White is associated with large and statistically significant advantages in health status, no matter how one self-identifies.” So, there’s a very real, somatic level at which racism both takes a toll on some and provides an advantage to others.
I think we should keep this in mind as the health care debate rages on. What kind of society do we want to create?
Racism and Racial Inequality in Health: Re-Thinking Health Care Reform as Social Justice
Posted by: | CommentsI’m gearing up for teaching this fall in an Urban Public Health program; part of what I like about the field is that it requires a very practical application of what can seem like abstractions in the field of sociology. So, to talk about racism and racial inequality in public health means to talk about how these affect people’s bodies, health and illness. Most eloquent on this subject recently is Marion Wright Edelman who has written about the impact of racial inequality on the health of children, she writes:
Right now, we live in a nation where children of color experience significant health disparities that begin before birth and follow them throughout their lives. Black infants are more than twice as likely as white infants to die before their first birthday and have higher infant mortality rates than children in 62 nations including Barbados, Malaysia and Thailand. One in every seven babies born to black mothers is born at low birthweight, a core risk factor for infant mortality and childhood developmental disorders. The rate of black infants born at low birthweight in the United States is worse than the rate of low birthweight in more than 100 nations including Algeria, Botswana and Panama.
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Not surprisingly, black and Latino children also have higher incidences of childhood illnesses than white children. For example, one out of eight black children has asthma — one of the most common illnesses in children — compared to one in 12 white children. One out of every four black two-year-olds and one out of every five Latino two-year-olds is not fully immunized, although we know that every dollar spent vaccinating children against measles, mumps and rubella saves $16 in future costs. More than 30 percent of black children and about 40 percent of Latino children report not receiving dental care. Minority children are more likely to be living in poverty. However, racial disparities aren’t just about socio-economic status, although more than three-quarters of uninsured black children have a working parent, and more than half have a parent who works full-time throughout the year.
Edelman, a long-time defender of children’s rights, emphasizes “It doesn’t have to be this way,” and urges for reform on health care which would help address these persistent inequalities. Yet, even as much of the national public debate right now is focused on “health care reform” and that discussion has been derailed by racism.
Some anti-health care protesters, like the one in this photo (from here), cast their objections to health care reform in rather explicitly racist terms. As Maggie Mahar writes, the health care reform effort has reignited what she refers to as the “Culture Wars,” a familiar story in the American political landscape. When viewed in terms of Edelman’s point about the impact of racial inequality on children’s health, these kinds of battle lines seem even more cruel.
I want to suggest that we re-frame the current health care reform debate in terms of social justice. In my view, supporting universal health care for everyone in the U.S. is an important step toward re-dressing the persistent racial inequality that is endemic in our society.
Racism: The Impact on Health
Posted by: | CommentsA recent article in the American Journal of Public Health presents findings on experiences of everyday racism and HIV testing which are consistent with those from two other studies examining experiences of everyday racism’s relationship to preventive behaviors (condom use behaviors & mammography screening). The greater the level of everyday racism, the less likely people are to engage in health prevention behaviors. (Full citation for the article, which is behind a paywall: Ford CL, Daniel M, Earp JL, Kaufman JS, Golin CE, Miller WC. Perceived Everyday Racism, Residential Segregation and HIV Testing in an STD Clinic Sample. American Journal of Public Health Apr 2009 99;(Supp 1):S137-S143.)
The fact that racism takes a toll on the lives of people of color, and in particular on African Americans, is not especially new information. There’s a literature on this that’s been growing for some years. For example, Joe’s book with Karyn McKinney, The Many Costs of Racism, details the physical and psychological toll of racism on African American’s health.
What seems to be new here is that scholars in public health are increasingly documenting racism as an important underlying factor, if not a causal variable, in creating a number of specific health hazards and pathways to disease and mortality. In the past, public health – like many other fields – had attributed racial inequality to the vagueness of social determinants phrased in the passive voice. A research agenda that now explicitly includes racism is a step forward.
However, researchers are still overly cautious in their use of the term “perceived” as an ubiquitous qualifier to “everyday racism.” Calling the experiences of everyday racism “perceived” leaves open the possibility that these experiences were not, in fact, racism but instead, a misundertanding of the actual situation. If there is a “perception” of racism, then perhaps there is room for “misperception.”
Why does this matter? It leaves unsettled then what the root cause is: is it white racism that’s inflicting real harm on real people? Or, is it the “perceptions” of black folks and other people of color that need to be adjusted?
Make no mistake, this burgeoning field of studying the impact on health of racism is important. Yet, still largely missing here is a robust analysis of the cost of racism to whites. A colleague of mine, Amy J. Schultz and I wrote a book chapter on this “Whiteness and the Construction of Health Disparities,” (Jessie Daniels and Amy J. Schulz, pp. 89-127, in Gender, Race, Class, and Health, (Jossey-Bass, 2006), Leith Mullings and Amy J. Schulz, Eds.). Also missing here is what might be effective interventions, to use the public health language, to reduce the level of racism so that black and brown people might live longer, healthier lives.
Updated 6/26 to add: There’s an important piece on Racism’ Health Toll at Miller-McCune (from 6/15) that I should have referenced here. Highly recommended.
Racism Harmful to Mental and Physical Health
Posted by: | CommentsRacism is harmful to the mental and physical health of those who are the targets, yet little research has explored the impact of racism on those who perpetrate racism (photo credit: JessieNYC). 
First, the health impact of racism is well documented. I’ve written about this many times before, as have other scholars who blog here, but here are a few of the relevant studies.
In terms of physical health and longevity, there is evidence that racism shortens peoples’ lives. A U.S. study found that discrimination increased mortality (rates of death) among African Americans compared to whites in a large sample (N=4154) of older adults. At the beginning of life, racism also takes a toll. Another study in the U.S. finds that black-white difference in infant mortality (deaths among those 0-1 years old) is due to racism, not race per se. (More about racism and infant mortality here.) And, if you take into account Native Americans’ health, the research clearly documents they suffer worse than average rates of depression, diabetes and cardiovascular disease (lots more on Native American health here).
In terms of mental health, racism costs people their sanity. One Dutch study of 4,074 people found that those who felt victimized by discrimination and forms of racism were twice as likely to develop psychotic episodes in the following three years. Being on the receiving end of racism creates intense and constant stress which boosts the risk of depression, anxiety and anger.
And, of course, because of the mind/body connection, factors like depression, stress (as Claire noted in her recent post) and anger can lead to or aggravate high blood pressure and heart disease. Even when people seek care to address these health issues, research consistently shows that racial and ethnic minorities receive inferior care compared to whites, even when everything else is equal (e.g., insurance, income, age, and severity of conditions).
Camara P. Jones, MD, MPH, PhD, is research director of Social Determinants of Health for the CDC is a leading specialist on the health impact of racism. According to an interview with Jones:
“We know that black folks are at higher risk of hypertension, but in childhood, there are no differences between black and white blood pressure rates. By the time you get into the 25-44 year-old group, you start to see changes. We have evidence that in white folks, blood pressure is dropping at night, but not in black people. There’s a kind of stress, like you’re gunning your cardiovascular engine constantly if you’re black that results from dealing with people who are underestimating you, limiting your options. It results from little things like going to a store and if there are two people at the counter — one black and one white — the white person will be first approached. If you have stress from other sources, like a bad marriage, it’s not something you think about constantly. But the stresses associated with racism are chronic and unrelenting.”
Jones goes on to say that her research suggests that 50% of blacks think about their race at least once a day (and 22% said they think about it constantly), while in sharp whites rarely give any thought to their race in the course of a day.
And, it’s this part of the racism and health puzzle that’s little researched. While “whiteness studies” have been en vogue in the humanities and social studies for about 10 years, the academic trend has yet to have much of an impact on the study of health disparities. Few medical or public health researchers have taken up the investigation of what Joe has called the white mental health problem of persistent racism.
In a 2006 piece I co-authored with my colleague Amy Jo Schulz (Daniels, J., & Schulz, A.J. (2006). Constructing whiteness in health disparities research. In A. J. Schulz & L. Mullings, (Eds.), Gender, Race, Class, and Health (pp. 89-127), in which we examined the way that whiteness and white racial privilege are part and parcel of health disparities research. Here’s a brief excerpt that describes what typically happens in the “disparities” research:
“..the use of racial categories and comparisons with no consistent foundation for theorizing, understanding, or interpreting observed racial differences (or their absence) in health outcomes provides space for a wide range of potential explanations. Each of these “explanations” implicitly or explicitly constructs both race and Whiteness.
For example, within the literature on racial disparities in cardiovascular disease, comparisons of Black or Latino/a to White Americans show disparities not only in cardiovascular mortality rates (Cooper and others, 2000; Wong and others, 2002) but also in multiple risk factors, including high blood pressure (Cooper and Rotimi, 1997; National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, 2004; Crespo, Loria, and Burt 1996), obesity (James, 1999; Kumanyika, 2001), physical activity (Brownson and others, 2001; Crespo and others, 1996), and intake of micronutrients and macronutrients associated with cardiovascular risk (Li and others, 2000). In the absence of an explicitly social theory of race, analyses explaining racial disparities in cardiovascular disease in terms of biological, “lifestyle,” or “cultural” factors can reify racial differences and obscure connections to socially structured inequalities. In other words, explaining racial differences in health in terms of individual biology, genes, or behavior can locate health problems in the bodies of those most negatively affected by social inequalities. Such explanations fail to make explicit connections to histories of racism and the struggles against oppression by subordinated groups (Bonilla-Silva, 2003; Mullings, 2005). In the process, they also take out of the equation—and thus make invisible—the processes through which Whites maintain positions of relative advantage or privilege within racial hierarchies. In this sense, such explanations are consistent with the “colorblind” strategies of neoconservative and neoliberal Whiteness projects described above, in that they explain racial disparities in health in nonracial terms. “
Put another way, there are no actors in the world of health disparities research. There is only the passive voice of ’structural inequality.’ Indeed, I witnessed this firsthand in on a meeting I sat in on recently about how to address infant mortality in New York City. When one of the people of color gathered around the table raised the issue of addressing racism as a root cause of infant mortality, one of the white people responded with a laugh, “well, I don’t think there’s much we can do to address racism.” This kind of flippant defeatism on the part of whites is surely part of the problem.
The fact is, racism continues to extract a toll from people of color in terms of physical and mental health. It brings death sooner to the elderly and diminishes the life chances of the newly born. As this inequality persists and there continues to be lots of agreement among liberals that this sort of inequality is wrong, there is scant little attention paid to the ways that we can dismantle racism and improve everyone’s health, rather than continuing the current system of inequality that systematically and disproportionately benefits the health of white people.
Poverty, Stress, and Achievement: What Role Does Racism Play?
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Two weeks ago, the results of an important study – “Childhood Poverty, Chronic Stress, and Adult Working Memory” – were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers, Gary W. Evans and Michelle A. Schamberg, examined the relationship between poverty and poor academic achievement, which they note has been studied extensively for many years (
photo credit: frerieke). What makes their research unique is that they measured the mediating effects that chronic stress, resulting from living in poverty during childhood, have on later achievement. They found that the chronic and intensive stressors caused by poverty leads to “working memory deficits” in young adulthood.
Because working memory is critical for language comprehension, reading, problem solving, and long-term retention of information learned, weakened working memory from poverty-induced stress may be central to explaining why young adults who lived in poverty as children have poorer educational outcomes than young adults who lived above the poverty line as children. The longer the child was poor, from birth to age 13, the weaker her or his working memory was as a young adult.
I read Evans and Schamberg’s study with great interest because of its important implications. Poor parents have long been exhorted to spend more time reading to their children and taking them to museums and other educational venues where admission may be free on certain days of the week, with the expectation that these activities, routinely provided by more affluent parents to their children, would improve poor children’s academic achievement.
However, while undoubtedly enriching, the Evans and Schamberg study indicates that these activities are not sufficient to compensate for the negative impact of the daily stressors inflicted by a life of economic deprivation.
Those stressors must be alleviated as well. As important as the findings are, though, the Evans and Schamberg study may not be generalizable to children of color. That’s because their sample was composed of 195 white male and female young adults. This surprises me given that, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, while 12.1% of white families live below the poverty line, 29.1% of black families and 24.3% of Hispanic families live in poverty. And the further impoverished a family is, the more likely they are to be black or Hispanic.
Certainly, poor black and Hispanic families experience the same kinds of stressors that poor white families experience: e.g., housing problems, the dangers posed by living in high-crime neighborhoods, stretching the limited income available to buy food and pay for other necessities. But poor families of color experience a stressor that poor white families do not experience: racism.
There is a substantial body of research that shows that racism is a chronic stressor throughout the life course for people of color, and that the stress caused by racism has serious negative effects on both psychological and physical health. For instance, Nancy Krieger and Stephen Sidney found that stress induced by racial discrimination has as much or more of an impact on blood pressure as smoking, lack of exercise, and a high-fat, high-sodium diet (“Racial Discrimination and Blood Pressure: The CARDIA Study of Young Black and White Adults,” American Journal of Public Health, 86(1996):1370-1378). Ruth Thompson-Miller and Joe Feagin found in their interviews with elderly blacks that memories of racist interactions with whites produced a number of negative physical and psychological reactions indicative of what they call “race-based traumatic stress,” the impact of which lasts a lifetime (“Continuing Injuries of Racism: Counseling in a Racist Context,” The Counseling Psychologist, 35(2007):106-115).
Importantly, Thompson-Miller and Feagin show that men and women of color experience race-based traumatic stress regardless of their social class. But when we consider the additional stressors of poverty and the fact that people of color are disproportionately represented among the poor, the need to examine racism as a stressor in research such as Evans and Schamberg’s seems essential.
Although they do not mention examining racial differences or the potential role of racism on working memory or other indicators of academic achievement in future studies, I hope Evans and Schamberg, as well as other scientists, will undertake this challenging but important research.
For an extensive review of research on the physical and especially psychological impacts of racism on people of color, see a special issue of The Counseling Psychologist. I’m grateful to Ruth Thompson-Miller at Texas A&M University for bringing this special issue to my attention.
Racism and Health Disparities
Posted by: | CommentsIn a report just released from the NIH, as many as 1 in 100 black men and women develop heart failure before the age of 50, which is 20 times the rate in whites in the same age group. In public health terms, these racial differences in health are referred to as “health 
disparities,” and the newly released report from the NIH raises questions about why there are such stark disparities across racial groups ( photo credit: derek*b).
According to the NIH, this sharp rise in heart failure is directly related to the increased levels of hypertension (aka, high blood pressure) for blacks. There’s a growing body of scientific literature which points to the experience of racism as a major factor in elevated blood pressure, one of the leading risk factors for early heart failure. David Williams was a pioneer in this field with his 2001 article, “Racism, discrimination and hypertension: evidence and needed research,” (Ethn Dis. 2001 Fall;11(4):800-16). That piece spawned a bunch of others, including an excellent piece by Wyatt and colleagues entitled, “Racism and cardiovascular disease in African Americans,” (Am J Med Sci. 2003 Jun;325(6):315-31), which posits that there are three levels of racism that affect the cardiovascular disease (CVD) of African Americans, namely:
First, institutional racism can lead to limited opportunities for socioeconomic mobility, differential access to goods and resources, and poor living conditions that can adversely affect cardiovascular health. Second, perceived/personally mediated racism acts as a stressor and can induce psychophysiological reactions that negatively affect cardiovascular health. Third, in race-conscious societies, such as the United States, the negative self-evaluations of accepting negative cultural stereotypes as true (internalized racism) can have deleterious effects on cardiovascular health.
And, in a recent cross-sectional study that included African American men (n = 393) and women (n = 717), researchers at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill found that the likelihood of hypertension significantly increased with higher levels of perceived stress following racism from non-African-Americans.
While many people contend that racism is no longer a relevant or life-threatening issue, this kind of evidence persuades me that addressing racism is more crucial than ever.
AMA Apologizes, Yet Racism in Medicine Continues
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In the last few days, there has been a telling confluence of events related to racism in medicine. In the story that’s getting the most coverage from major news outlets and a few blogs, the American Medical Association (AMA) has issued an apology for more than a century of discriminatory policies toward black physicians, including those that effectively restricted membership in the AMA to whites only. The way the AMA did this in the 1890s was to restrict access so that the only physicians eligible for membership were those doctors who already belonged to a state or local medical society. The state and local medical societies were almost all racially restrictive, meaning only open to white membership. The AMA never took any action to challenge the racist practices of the state and local societies. So, the AMA could say they had a “race blind” policy, when in fact, they were complicit in the same racist exclusionary practices that ended in the same result: African-Americans were not allowed to become members in the AMA.
That’s the way they did it. The reason? Decrease competition for patients, and the revenue that patients represent. If you have any doubts about this, read Paul Starr’s compelling The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982). And, an excellent companion to that book is Harriet Washington’s recent Medical Apartheid (2007).
And, the result? Quite simply, the racial discrimination by the AMA is part of:
“a litany of discriminatory practices that have had a devastating effect on the health of African-Americans,”
according to Dr. Nelson L. Adams, president of the National Medical Association (NMA). The NMA is an African-American physician group founded in 1895 when black physicians were excluded from the AMA. In his written statement, Dr. Adams goes on to commend the AMA for their “courageous step” and encourages us all to “seize this opportunity to move forward to correct these injustices.” It’s a noble move on Dr. Adams’ part, unfortunately, these injustices are do not exist exclusively in the distant past.
UPDATED (5:20pmEST): For example, in New Jersey just two days ago, three EMS workers were fired by the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey over a racist incident. 
The university’s president said that the three were terminated after cell phone camera images surfaced of paramedic trainees at University Hospital in Newark garbed in white sheets resembling Ku Klux Klan robes (photo from here). On a local news report in the area, they interviewed a person on the street and got their reaction to this, and it reminded me of some of the accounts in Living with Racism (Feagin and Sykes, 1993). The man, who was black (and yes that’s relevant to this story), said something along the lines of: “If this is what they got caught doing, you know that there’s other stuff going on that they didn’t get caught doing!” This is the kind of everyday racism that black people live with in this country (and elsewhere). The harm here is not only in this incident, it’s also in the wondering about “what else” is happening in the back stage of white people’s behavior. And, for their part, white people engage in this sort of behavior and then call black people “paranoid.” What’s interesting too, here, is the language. How is this ‘hazing” – a ritual following which someone is inducted into a group, club or state of being? I don’t think that applies here. The lead-in to the local news report I heard also referred to this incident as “horrifying for the memories it evokes of another time.” It seems to me that such an analysis misses the harm of such acts in the present. Of course, this kind of ongoing racism has serious health consequences for in the present tense; and, indeed, the white EMS workers in this incident are working and making emergency calls in a predominantly black and Latino neighborhood. So much for our putatively “post-racial” society.
Racism as the Root Cause of Infant Mortality
Posted by: | CommentsFIrst, apologies for being away from posting, but the ISP at my apartment has been intermittent of late (indeed, I’m typing this post really quickly and saving often, in the hopes that the ISP doesn’t crash again before I can click “publish”). I’m also finishing up the last details on the book and, it being summer, getting out papers for peer-review (three so far, the goal is two more), all of which can distract from the much more compelling blog-related tasks. So, with all those excuses firmly in place, I return to blogging here.
Second, I discovered a fairly cool new tool, “Slideshare,” wherein you can view, download, and share slideshows created by others, and upload your own. Exceedingly groovy, in my opinion, although a tier below most of the presentations at TED Talks, which are quite simply addictive.
And, finally, on to the actual substance of this post, racism as the root cause of infant mortality. Infant mortality is one of those “index measures,” that demographers and public health officials use to measure quality of life. High rates of infant mortality indicate that people in the general health and well being of a group of people, whether the ‘group’ is a city neighborhood, developing country, or a racial/ethnic group. Most of the time that scholars and researchers talk about infant mortality it’s in terms of large, structures of inequality as contributing factors, such as poverty. More recently, however, researchers have begun to pay attention to racism as a root cause of high rates of infant mortality, independent of poverty, educational levels, living conditions, or even maternal health behaviors. The following slideshow from Barbara Ferrer, PhD, MPH, M.Ed., the Executive Director of the Boston Public Health Commission, makes a convincing case for racism as a root cause of infant mortality:
