Objective: Psychosocial stress is a major predictor of chronic disease among African American (AA) women. Stress is a process involving exposure, appraisal of threat, coping, and psychobiologic adaptation. However, many studies focus on the frequency of stress events and/or coping; few explicitly study stress events and their appraisals; and AA women experience high levels of racial discrimination, a well-known form of social identity threat (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Policy Points Cultural racism-or the widespread values that privilege and protect Whiteness and White social and economic power-permeates all levels of society, uplifts other dimensions of racism, and contributes to health inequities. Overt forms of racism, such as racial hate crimes, represent only the "tip of the iceberg," whereas structural and institutional racism represent its base. This paper advances cultural racism as the "water surrounding the iceberg," allowing it to float while obscuring its base.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs evidence of the relationship between place and health mounts, more epidemiologists and clinical science researchers are becoming interested in incorporating place-based measures and analyses into their examination of population health and health inequities. Given the extensive literature on place and health, it can be challenging for researchers new to this area to develop neighborhood-effects research questions and apply the appropriate measures and methods. This paper provides a road map for guiding health researchers through the conceptual and methodological stages of incorporating various dimensions of place into their quantitative health research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: On March 16, 2021, a white man shot and killed eight victims, six of whom were Asian women at Atlanta-area spa and massage parlors. The aims of the study were to: (1) qualitatively summarize themes of tweets related to race, ethnicity, and racism immediately following the Atlanta spa shootings, and (2) examine temporal trends in expressions hate speech and solidarity before and after the Atlanta spa shootings using a new methodology for hate speech analysis.
Methods: A random 1% sample of publicly available tweets was collected from January to April 2021.
Background: In recent years, there has been growing interest in "moving beyond the individual" to measure area-level racism as a social determinant of health. Much of this work has aggregated racial prejudice data collected at the individual-level to the area-level.
Objective: As this is a rapidly emerging area of research, we conducted a systematic literature review to describe evidence of the relationship between area-level racial prejudice and health, whether results differed by race/ethnicity, and to characterize key conceptual and methodological considerations to guide future research.
Purpose: In the United States, Black females are burdened by more aggressive subtypes and increased mortality from breast cancer compared to non-Hispanic (NH) White females. Institutional racism may contribute to these inequities. We aimed to characterize the association between home mortgage discrimination, a novel measure of institutional racism, and incidence of Luminal A and triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) subtypes among NH Black and NH White females in California metropolitan areas.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Racial Ethn Health Disparities
February 2023
Federally Qualified Community Health Centers (FQHCs), serving Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSAs), are fixtures of the healthcare safety net and are central to healthcare delivery for African Americans and other marginalized Americans. Anti-African American bias, tied to anti- "welfare" sentiment and to a belief in African Americans' supposed safety net dependency, can suppress states' willingness to identify HPSAs and to apply for and operate FQHCs. Drawing on data from n = 1,084,553 non-Hispanic White Project Implicit respondents from 2013-2018, we investigated associations between state-level implicit and explicit racial bias and availability of FQHCs and with HPSA designations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study examined whether killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor by current or former law enforcement officers in 2020 were followed by shifts in public sentiment toward Black people. : Google searches for the names "Ahmaud Arbery," "Breonna Taylor," and "George Floyd" were obtained from the Google Health Application Programming Interface (API). Using the Twitter API, we collected a 1% random sample of publicly available U.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMounting evidence suggests that law enforcement organizational factors contribute to higher incidence and racial disparities in police killings. To determine whether agency policies contribute to race-specific civilian fatalities, this exploratory study compared fatality rates among agencies with and without selected policies expected to reduce killings. A cross-section of 1085 fatalities in the 2015-2016 The Counted public-use database were matched to 481 agencies in the 2013 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) database.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The objective of the current study is to investigate whether an area-level measure of racial sentiment derived from Twitter data is associated with state-level hate crimes and existing measures of racial prejudice at the individual-level.
Methods: We collected 30,977,757 tweets from June 2015-July 2018 containing at least one keyword pertaining to specific groups (Asians, Arabs, Blacks, Latinos, Whites). We characterized sentiment of each tweet (negative vs all other) and averaged at the state-level.
Background: Intermittent Prone Positioning (IPP) for Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) decreases mortality. We present a program for IPP using expedient materials for settings of significant limitations in both overwhelmed established ICUs and particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) treating ARDS due to COVID-19 caused by SARS CoV-2.
Methods: The proning program evolved based on the principles of High Reliability Organizations (HROs) and Crew Resource Management (CRM).
Preliminary evidence suggests that the experience of the novel coronavirus is not shared equally across geographic areas. Findings in the United States suggest that the burden of COVID-19 morbidity and mortality may be hardest felt in disadvantaged and racially segregated places. Deprived neighborhoods are disproportionately populated by people of color, the same populations that are becoming sicker and dying more often from COVID-19.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
November 2020
Mounting evidence reveals considerable racial inequities in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outcomes in the United States (US). Area-level racial bias has been associated with multiple adverse health outcomes, but its association with COVID-19 is yet unexplored. Combining county-level data from Project Implicit on implicit and explicit anti-Black bias among non-Hispanic Whites, Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, and , we used adjusted linear regressions to estimate overall COVID-19 incidence and mortality rates through 01 July 2020, Black and White incidence rates through 28 May 2020, and Black-White incidence rate gaps on average area-level implicit and explicit racial bias.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Racial Ethn Health Disparities
October 2021
Social media sites, such as Twitter, represent a growing setting in which racism and related stress may manifest. The aims of this exploratory qualitative study were to (1) understand the essence of Twitter users' lived experience with and response to content about race and racism on the platform, and (2) explore their perceptions of how discussions about race and racism on Twitter may impact health and well-being. We conducted six focus groups and four interviews with adult Twitter users (n = 27) from Berkeley, California, and Greenville, South Carolina.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOn March 8, 2020, there was a 650% increase in Twitter retweets using the term "Chinese virus" and related terms. On March 9, there was an 800% increase in the use of these terms in conservative news media articles. Using data from non-Asian respondents of the Project Implicit "Asian Implicit Association Test" from 2007-2020 ( = 339,063), we sought to ascertain if this change in media tone increased bias against Asian Americans.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRacial discrimination, a psychosocial stressor, may contribute to disproportionate rates of hypertension among African American women. Coping moderates the effects of psychosocial stress on health. Coping dispositions describe stable personality characteristics, whereas contextual frameworks emphasize flexible coping behaviors in response to specific stressful encounters.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Studies suggest that racial discrimination impacts health via biological dysregulation due to continual adaptation to chronic psychosocial stress. Therefore, quantifying chronicity is critical for operationalising the relevant aetiological exposure and hence maximising internal validity. Using one of the most common discrimination scales in the epidemiological literature, we develop a novel approach for more accurately assessing chronicity and compare it with conventional approaches to determine whether coding influences differential exposure classification and associations with hypertension and depression among African American women.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To examine the association between self-reported racial discrimination and allostatic load, and whether the association differs by socioeconomic position.
Methods: We recruited a purposive cross-section of midlife (ages 30-50) African American women residing in four San Francisco Bay area counties (n = 208). Racial discrimination was measured using the Experience of Discrimination scale.