Research Brief: Collateral Damage to Health from Invasive Police Encounters in New York City

• • police

Overpolicing in the form of invasive police encounters like stop-and-frisk affects the health of residents in American neighborhood according to sociologists Abigail Sewell and Kevin A. Jefferson. This infographic illustrates the key findings in their research.

 

ResearchHealthandPoliceEncounters

(Image credit: Melissa Brown)

In a recent Journal of Urban Health article, they use data from two datasets based on the health and policing experiences of New Yorkers. They argue that numerous public health risks are associated with overpolicing including:

  • Poor/fair health
  • Overweight/Obesity
  • Diabetes
  • High blood pressure
  • Asthma episodes

In their analysis of the health and policing in New York, the researchers sought to answer the following questions:

  1. What are the health effects of the concentration of police stops within certain neighborhoods?
  2. Is there a relationship between reports of poor health and invasive Terry stops?
  3. If health effects of invasive police encounters in neighborhoods exist, do they vary by race and ethnicity?

The researchers found that neighborhoods with high frisk rates increased the odds of having health issue related to all the risks mentioned above. They also found that police stops generally worsen the health of Blacks and Latinos, but does not have as significant effect for Whites and Asians. In light of these results, the researchers argue that police actions potentially affect communities by exposing residents to invasive practices that generate illness. You can download a pdf of the graphic here.

 

~ Melissa Brown is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Maryland and social media manager for the Critical Race Initiative. 

Research Brief: Reframing Race and Policing as a Public Health Issue

• • criminal justice

The policing and criminalization of Black men in America has several origins: the prison industrial complex, socially sanctioned lynching, stop and frisk, and zero tolerance, as Keon L. Gilbert and Rashawn Ray  point out in their recent article in Journal of Urban Health. This graphic illustrates some of the key ideas in their research.

Gilbert and Ray on race and policing as a public health issue

Download this infographic as a PDF.

Gilbert and Ray use a framework they refer to as Public Health Critical Race Praxis (PHCRP) to question how justifiable homicides affect Black men continue to occur with such alarming frequency. These researchers use PHCRP to argue that the excessive use of force applied to Black men during encounters with law enforcement should be seen as a public health challenge.  The PHCRP framework advocates for health equity with theories and methods drawn from critical race and public health scholarship. PHCRP has several principles based on its four focal areas:

  1. Contemporary patterns of racial relations
  2. Knowledge production
  3. Conceptualization and measurement
  4. Action

The authors question this legacy of policing in three substantial ways. First, racial stratification leads to unequal life chances due to the way current research criminalizes Black men of all ages. Second, criminalization of their race and gender limits health identity formation for Black men. Lastly, prejudice and racism lead to a negative experience for Black men within the criminal justice system.

PHCRP also provides principles that confirm inform policy aimed at correcting this legacy of policing in order to achieve health equity for Black men. This includes:

  1. The collection of data on death by legal intervention
  2. The repealing of stop and frisk laws nationwide
  3. The implementation of Community Review Boards
  4. The establishment of accessible mental and preventive health services

Thus, Gilbert and Ray use PHCRP to demonstrate how critical race theory offers solutions to build more equitable relations between law enforcement and the communities they serve.  Find more research on race and policing here.

~ Melissa Brown is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Maryland and social media manager for the Critical Race Initiative. 

 

 

 

Study: Racial pride can help protect young Black and Latino men

• • youth

In the wake of the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, President Obama launched an initiative called My Brother’s Keeper to send the message the lives of young men of color matter.

One of the key ways to help Black and Latino young men thrive is through racial pride. This may sound counterintuitive in a world in which a majority of young people in a recent poll said they thought their generation was “post-racial.” Our research with young men leaving jail and returning home suggests just the opposite, that embracing racial and ethnic pride can really matter in ways that can help these young men protect themselves.

Based on our research in New York City jails in the last 15 years, we’ve found that workshops that focus on “racial pride” – teaching about historical antecedents to contemporary movements like #Black Lives Matter – offers a powerful shield against the discriminatory policies that result in the mass incarceration of black and brown bodies.

What we, and a team of colleagues, offered was a 30-hour educational program that served as a bridge between the young men’s time in jail and their return home.  The eight sessions focused on a range of topics, including the political economy of the drug war, gender and sexual relationships, and a session on racial and ethnic pride called, “My people, my pride/ Mi gente, mi orgulla.” Half of the 552 people in the 5-year study participated in the educational program, and the other half got the usual discharge plan from jail. The focus on these young men, in particular, was driven by the complex intersections of masculinity, race, criminal justice status, and health.

The idea for an intersectional approach to this work came from previous research with young women.  Researchers Gina Wingood and Ralph DiClemente (Emory University) began doing similar work with young African American girls. In workshops designed to reduce their risk of HIV/STDs, instead of focusing exclusively on the biology of disease transmission, they included material on black feminist heroines, like Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells.  Their results were promising.  They found a significant drop in risk for young girls who participated in the workshops versus those who did not. And, they made a compelling case for interventions that explicitly took gender and power into account. We wanted to replicate their work with young men who had been unlucky enough to land in jail at Rikers Island.

-Arte-USProductos-ArteGrande-MiorgulloG black_pride_rectangle_magnet

Our results were similar. When we followed up with the young men in our study a year later, we found that those who had participated in the educational program spent fewer days in jail compared with those who didn’t. We also found that they had fewer problems with drug dependence.  When the young men had higher levels of racial pride at the time of their incarceration, they were significantly less likely to be reincarcerated or be engaged in illegal activities even up to one year after release from jail compared to men with lower levels of racial pride. The same young men were less likely to endorse violence to resolve conflict.

Other research with young people who haven’t been caught up in the legal system confirms the importance of racial pride as a protective factor against discrimination. Survey research of 630 mixed-gender adolescents from middle class backgrounds in 2013 by Ming-Te Wang (University of Pittsburgh) and James P. Huguley (Harvard University) found racial pride to be the single most important factor in guarding against racial discrimination, and discovered it had a direct impact on the students’ grades, future goals, and cognitive engagement.

While we know that racial pride can be transformative, we also recognize its limitations. Racial pride is still no guarantee against death at the hands of the state or others, and the young men we worked with know this. When we piloted the workshop on ethnic pride, we showed the men photographs of civil rights leaders – Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King – and asked the young men what they thought when they saw these images. One telling response to the images:  “These guys are cool, but they’re all dead.”  This observation aside, most of the young men we encountered in jail had heard little in their traditional educational programs about what might make them proud of being African American or Latino, outside of limited “Black History Month” or “Hispanic Heritage” events. The young people we’ve met in jail are eager to learn about their history and taking pride in it made a difference for their lives.

It has been heartening, against a backdrop of police-perpetrated racialized violence in the U.S., to watch young people take to the streets to let their voices be heard and join social movements that challenge this type of violence.  There is some evidence that lawmakers, prosecutors, and even President Obama continue to listen. We know that racial pride can be a source of strength and resilience but the true test is whether society can support such resilience.

 

 

~ Megha Ramaswamy and Jessie Daniels 

 

~ This post originally appeared on the LSE blog on American on Politics and Policy and is based on the paper ‘The Association of Ethnic Pride With Health and Social Outcomes Among Young Black and Latino Men After Release From Jail’, in Youth & Society. 

 

Racism, Whiteness and the Health Disparities Industry

• • health, racism, scholarship, scientific racism, white racial frame

There’s a growing body of evidence that implicates racism in a variety of negative health consequences.  Yet, the research on ‘health disparities and race’ neither focuses on whiteness nor on the ways that racism plays a role in health.

racism
( Creative Commons License photo credit: rwdownes )

The Health Disparities Industry. Much of public health is driven by a concern with, and research on, ‘health disparities.’   If you’re not familiar with this field (or, subfield), it works like this:

“The literature on racial disparities in health by definition involves comparisons across groups defined by some racial classification system.  Perhaps the most common of these comparisons take the form of the following general proposition: [Black/Hispanic/Native American] [children or adults] have higher rates of [the condition, disease, or ‘disability’ under investigation] than whites, primarily because of [explanatory variable]” (Daniels and Schultz, 2006, p.97).

There is a vast amount of scientific literature, and a number of federal agencies, built on this formulation.  The equation is always the same: measure some health outcome (rates of heart disease, diabetes, HIV/AIDS) in “minority” populations and compare it to the rates in the white population.   Don’t misunderstand me.  I think it’s a good thing, indeed an important thing, to focus on the health of folks who are black and brown because they carry a disproportionate burden when it comes to health.  And, black and brown folks endure less than equal care when they encounter the health care system.  Both these – health and health care – deserve attention from scholars, activists and those in public policy.

In a recent article critical of the health disparities industry, Shaw-Ridley and Ridley chart the scope of this industry and question the ethics of it.  The problem is that there’s a lot that remains unexamined in the ‘health disparities’ framework.

Whiteness & The White Racial Frame in Health Disparities. Defining whiteness has been a central project of the construction of what it means to be American.   What it means to be “white” is built into the U.S. Census. This history is the subject of a recent book by Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People.  She observes that:

“Until the 1960′s, there were two racial dialogues going on the United States. One was more or less Southern, and that was black-white. The other had to do with various kinds of white people.”

The fact that white people have dominated the U.S. since its founding has also meant that they (we) have shaped the very way that we view reality (e.g., everything from laws, relationships, media, discourse,) in the U.S.  This shaping of how we ‘frame’ things is referred to by Joe Feagin as ‘the white racial frame.’ The basic idea of the white racial frame is as follows:

The North American system of racial oppression grew out of extensive European exploitation of indigenous peoples and African Americans. It has long encompassed these dimensions: (1) a white racial framing of society with its racist ideology, stereotypes, and emotions; (2) whites’ discriminatory actions and an enduring racial hierarchy; and (3) pervasively racist institutions maintained by discriminatory whites over centuries. White-generated oppression is far more than individual bigotry, for it has from the beginning been a material, social, and ideological reality. For four centuries North American racism has been systemic–that is, it has been manifested in all major societal institutions.

Even though as Painter and Feagin note that whiteness and the white racial frame are central to the the American social and political context, these are little remarked upon within the literature on racial disparities in health outcomes.   Indeed, the white racial frame permeates the research on race and health, and in particular, the research on ‘health disparities.’

The usual construction of ‘health disparities’ research constructs whiteness in two ways:

“First, it establishes a comparison between whites as a referent group and some ‘other’ group whose health is evaluated in comparison to that of whites.  In an Ideal world, such comparisons may demonstrate arenas in which health outcomes do not differ by race, challenging ideas of racial group difference.  If, however, funders are less likely to support research in which susbstantial racial differences are not apparent, or if publishers are less likely to publish articles that find no statistically significant differences….the literature will reinforce racial health differences while minimizing similarities…  (Daniels and Schultz, 2006, p.97).

The comparison group in this research is always whites, which puts those who are not white in a “one down” position.  The question as it’s framed in this research is always “What’s wrong with this [non-white] group? What’s happening that their health outcomes are ‘disparate from’ [not as good as] the health outcomes of whites?”   The second way that that health disparities research constructs whiteness is through:

“….the use of racial categories and comparisons with no consistent foundation fo rthe 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’ implicity or explicitly constructs both race and whiteness.  ”  (Daniels and Schultz, 2006, pp.97-8)

The overwhelming majority of research on ‘health disparities’ never examines whiteness nor implicates the actions of white people in this equation.   This may be changing, however.  Very recent research by Blodorn and O’Brien (of Tulane University, “Perceptions of Racism in Hurricane Katrina-Related Events: Implications for Collective Guilt and Mental Health Among White Americans) examines the implications of health disparities on whites.   This is a rare focus in this research.

Racism. Contrary to the passive voice construction of most ‘health disparities’ literature, there are indications in the literature that there are actors responsible for at least some of the racial inequality contributing to the racial inequality in health outcomes.   As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, there’s an increasing amount of evidence in the scientific literature that supports the claim that racism is a contributing factor to ill health.  The pernicious sleight-of-hand in the ‘health disparities’ literature is that most of this research focuses on “perceptions” of racism among black and brown folks, but none of this research (at least none that I’ve found) acknowledges the reality of racism nor does it address those who are the perpetrators of racism in contemporary American society.

What Needs to Change. Clearly, there are unequal health outcomes that need to be addressed (see for example, Glady Budrys, Unequal Health: How Inequality Contributes to Health or Illness).  On almost every measure, those in our society who are Black, Latino or Native American will die sooner than those who are white.   For almost every disease, such as cancer and diabetes, those who are Black, Latino or Native American are more likely to contract the disease than whites, and once the disease is contracted, more likely to die from it.

This is one of the many costs of racism in our society and it must change.

However, looking only at those who must pay these costs as the source for changing these mechanisms of inequality is misguided.   We need to begin to critically examine those who hold the most power and resources in society, that is at white people, for the ways that they contribute to and benefit from the inequality in health outcomes.