Health disparities across racial and ethnic groups suggest that discrimination affects your health. I co-authored a new report from the American Psychological Association that finds minorities are far more susceptible to many diseases than majority groups, most notably heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. The data are as consistent as they are maddening.

The data are open to other interpretations, however. A college professor of mine once floated to our class the possibility that higher blood pressure among African American might not be the result of constantly having to deal with discrimination. Rather, he conjectured, African slaves with higher blood pressure might have been more likely to survive the grueling trip from West Africa to U.S. shores than those with low blood pressure, thus “selecting” for high blood pressure among today’s African Americans. Others might point to the different diets among racial/ethnic groups as the culprits of these health disparities, or any number of cultural or social factors.

These potential explanations are, of course, inter-related; availability of food choices, living environments, and other contextual factors are themselves intricately linked to discrimination. But can one’s psychological experience surrounding discrimination—how we and others feel about our racial group membership—itself be related to important health outcomes? Having data that directly address this critical question is an important tool for those of us who are interested in moving beyond armchair theorizing about the underlying reasons for health disparities.

Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton is coeditor of the <i>Greater Good</i> anthology <a href=“http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807011576/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0807011576&linkCode=as2&tag=gregooscicen-20”><i>Are We Born Racist?: New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology</i></a> Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton is coeditor of the Greater Good anthology Are We Born Racist?: New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology
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New research from the laboratory of David Amodio of NYU promises to yield an important tool in the data-driven fight against discrimination. In a forthcoming paper in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, Amodio’s lab directly establishes a link between attitudes towards racial groups and important health markers.

The authors did not just look at group-level differences (how Whites differ from Blacks as a group, for example), which leads to the problem of data interpretation I just described above. Instead, the researchers directly measured individual differences within a community of Black and Latina study participants in how negatively they thought other people judged their own group. They then examined whether these psychological variables helped explain variability in health risk within this community.

What were the health markers the group focused on? One of them was participants’ levels of the inflammatory cytokine IL-6, assayed from saliva. Chronic levels of inflammation are being increasingly recognized as a serious health risk that over time can lead to cardiovascular disease and cancer (which, coincidentally, are among the two outcomes that show the greatest minority-majority group disparities), and Il-6 serves as a marker of that risk. The researchers found that the more participants felt that their group was seen negatively by other people, the greater the levels of Il-6 in their saliva.

It’s important to point out that the community members that the researchers studied were not particularly unhealthy; they ranged in age from 18 to 44 with a mean age of 29. Beneath the surface, the data suggest, having to psychologically cope with others’ negative attitudes about one’s group is already exacting a toll on the immune and endocrine systems that, over time, become full blown health disparities.

But as I often emphasize in my blog (see here and here), targets of discrimination are not passive recipients of bias. Rather, they find ways to cope, to survive—even to thrive—in the face of negativity.

And the research bears this out as well. Specifically, the researchers also measured how people privately felt about their own group (this is in contrast to how one feels other people feel about one’s group, as above). The more participants reported agreeing to items such as “in general, I’m glad to be a member of my group,” the greater participants’ levels of a protective, stress-modulating hormone called DHEA-S.

So this story does have a silver lining. The study shows that attitudes about race directly impact health outcomes. But, while we can’t always influence others’ attitudes, we can determine our own—with the potential to benefit our health. So don’t take pride in your group for granted, especially when your group is stigmatized by society. Follow the lead of James Brown!

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Comments

One of the challenges with American society will always be that there is us and them in how we view society. Perhaps this is an unavoidable fact. Yet othering groups, othering ourselves, continues to contribute to the racial divide as much as racism itself. The racial divide will continue to exist as long as it is used. Like currency, it gets its value from its use. I don’t think that we can just stop thinking about it and it will dissapear yet in this very complex web of event it contributes to it. I remeber reading a book about the two general perspectives that had been on the discussion table regarding race relationships in The United States: the melting pot vs the salad analogy. A well intended author seemed to favor the second because it allowed all to remain who they were, what they brought with them, and in the process enrich the American culture through variety, if we could only accept differences. This sounds nice, yet the implication is that I can never really and trully accept that your culture can be part of mine—ignoring the fact that culture in not a fixed set of values but like klanguage and many other aspects of society a changing one—in many Latin American countries this is obvious as the merge between all the racial groups concided in one identity as Mexicans, or Argentinos, or tohers—but here it appears that those who came from one place or another will never be willing to integreate and accept a sameness as a nation with diversity embeded in it. Because no two Mexicans are the same, no two Blacks are the same, No two Asians are the same. I problem I had and keep having in that I tend to skip the political labels when I present cases at work, I naturally ignore the racial labes because of my multiracial experiences as a Mexican, my family is very mixed, as my relationships; it seems that there is no place for many like me as you are forced to take a side somewhere along the lines. Is sad.

Roberto Macias | 10:07 am, December 19, 2012 | Link

 
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