Story at a glance
- A new study analyzed how racial prejudice impacts health in communities across the country.
- Researchers found people living in a community with more prejudice experienced more prejudiced interactions, leading to harmful stress.
- That stress can lead to “maladaptive coping behaviors,” like poor diet and exercise.
Living in areas with higher levels of racial prejudice can cause poor health outcomes such as heart disease and mental health problems, according to a new report.
A group of researchers conducted a systemic review of 14 different studies that used data from Google, Twitter and other big-data sources to understand how prejudice and health are intertwined in communities across the country. The study was published by the American Psychological Association.
The results revealed there was an association between levels of racial prejudice in a community and adverse health outcomes for people of color who lived there. Researchers said there are various theories explaining this trend, with one being living in a community with more prejudice could increase the number of prejudiced interactions that a person experiences — causing harmful stress.
That stress can lead to “maladaptive coping behaviors” including poor diet and exercise. Racial discrimination can also cause psychosocial stressors, a situation the creates an unusual or intense level of stress that can contribute to mental disorders and other illnesses — such as going through a divorce or experiencing the death of a child.
Researchers said psychosocial stressors in the context of racial discrimination can lead to increased anger, anxiety and chronic physiological stress adaption — all of which can have negative impacts on the body and undermine health.
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Researchers concluded that area-level racial prejudice was associated with adverse health outcomes that ranged from preterm births to premature mortality across racial and ethnic minority groups — and that racism is a fundamental driver of health inequities.
Living in a community with more racial prejudice can also erode social capital, something researchers defined as “the norms of reciprocity, trust and social obligation.” That can lead to less social and emotional support to buffer stressful life events, while also leading to less political support of policies and programs that could potentially enhance the health and welfare of all community members.
“Because racism is multidimensional, dismantling it and its effects on health will require multidimensional solutions. Research identifying the root causes of, and testing interventions to shift, our collective prejudice is an urgent priority,” said Eli Michaels, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley and a co-author of the study, in a statement.
Researchers noted that prejudice is distinctly different from discrimination, as it pertains to cognitive and affective aspects of racism. Discrimination describes behavioral manifestation. They also said that much of the research in this area has focused on anti-Black racism, but there is evidence documenting unique manifestations and harmful effects of prejudice on other racial and ethnic groups in the U.S.
“As we see from this review, living in an environment with an overall climate that is prejudiced against people of color is not only bad for racially marginalized groups, but for everyone. Area-level racial prejudice is a social determinant of population health,” said Amani M. Allen, a professor at the University of California Berkeley and a senior author of the study, in a statement.
More research is needed to understand the several factors that influence community-level racial prejudice and adverse health outcomes for communities overall, particularly for people of color.
“Racism is gaining recognition as a fundamental driver of health inequities. Leveraging big data to capture area-level racial prejudice is one innovative approach to measuring the overall racial climate in which people live, work, play and pray,” said Michaels.
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