Daily Archives: November 13, 2017

Racism’s chronic stress likely contributes to health disparities

NPR Health News: You, Me And Them: Experiencing Discrimination In America. “Scientists Start To Tease Out The Subtler Ways Racism Hurts Health.”

“Both studies investigated the impacts of specific, dramatic events — and the results were consistent.

“You could time exactly when it happened,” says Geronimus. “We could measure before and after.”

But she views such events as merely slivers of insight into patterns that may quietly be happening on a much larger scale among many populations. Patterns that are harder to tease out and measure — like the effects of centuries of racism against black Americans, or a persistent series of incidents involving police brutality against minorities.

Maybe, Geronimus says, the cascade of stress that such events initiate sets the stage for health disparities in a generation of children — before they even enter the world.”