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 Researchers examined U.S. survey data on racial attitudes from 1993
to 2002 and linked the responses to death records through 2008, to
explore the impact of prejudice on mortality. Altogether they had
data from almost 11,000 people living in 100 communities nationwide.
By 2008, 1,651 people died, accounting for about 15 percent of the
participants.
Living in a community with higher levels of anti-black prejudice
increased residents’ overall odds of death by 24 percent when
mortality risk was assessed independent of individual and
neighborhood socioeconomic factors and individually held racial
attitudes, the study found.
“Racial prejudice compromises health for the community as a whole,”
said lead study author Yeonjin Lee, a sociology researcher at the
University of Pennsylvania.
The findings challenge a widespread belief that only victims of
racial prejudice can be harmed by prejudice, Lee said by email.
Instead, the study found prejudice was harmful for the health of
both black and white participants.
“The current finding - that adverse effects of structural racism
were not specific to blacks - show that structural discrimination
not only damages the low-status group members but also majority
group members who live in the same community,” Lee added.
Structural racism is when social systems, social forces,
institutions, ideologies, and processes interact to create and
maintain racial and ethnic inequities, according to John A. Powell
writing in the open-access Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository
(http://bit.ly/1gycM4T).
The survey questions that Lee and colleagues analyzed asked whether
black people had worse jobs, income or housing due to less in-born
ability to learn; and whether black people lacked motivation to get
out of poverty.
Additional questions touched on both black and white individuals,
asking if one race was more or less intelligent or lazy than the
other and whether there should be laws against marriages between the
two races.
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One limitation of the study is its reliance on survey participants
to honestly answer questions about race because some people may try
to provide what they think are socially acceptable responses even if
they are not truthful, the researchers acknowledge in the American
Journal of Public Health.
Researchers also lacked data on some factors that can influence
mortality, such as how people eat and whether they smoke or drink.
While the paper doesn’t prove prejudice causes premature death, it’s
possible that residents of communities with less racial tension may
have a greater ability to band together to advocate for policies and
services that help foster a healthier neighborhood, the authors
suggest.
Researchers call this social capital, and they found higher levels
linked to a 17 percent reduction in community-level mortality.
Social capital was lower in communities where racial prejudice was
higher, the study found.
It’s also possible that communities with high levels of racial
prejudice may create a hostile living environment that triggers
certain stress responses in the body that can negatively impact
health and mortality, said David Williams, a professor of public
health and African-American studies at Harvard University in Boston.
Many little indignities – like being treated disrespectfully or with
fear or mistrust – can create a hostile environment in a community
and add up to enough stress to trigger a biological response to
racial prejudice, said Williams, who wasn’t involved in the study.
Over time, heightened stress can lead to more abdominal fat, heart
disease and the buildup of plaque in the coronary artery, all of
which have the potential to hasten death.
“Little indignities can predict mortality,” Williams said.
“Sometimes we think it takes a big event, but if you are exposed to
a series of chronic ongoing little indignities it all adds up.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1V0KDpY American Journal of Public Health,
published online September 17, 2015.
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