I want to take this time to thank you for sharing the "Racism's Hidden Toll" article (July/August) with Miller-McCune readers. It is absolutely therapeutic to hear an outsider talk about what many outsiders do not want to talk about. I am a 47-year-old African-American woman who experiences sometimes blatant, sometimes subtle discrimination and racism — where I work, where I leisure, where I shop, where I live. It's almost a daily experience. Up to my early 40s, I just accepted it, but I always knew that these types of experiences were definitely taking a toll on me physically and ... Read More
Black Male Faces More Likely to Be Seen As Threatening
July 22, 2009 • By • 6 Comments
Many details remain unclear regarding the recent arrest of Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates at his Cambridge, Mass., home. But this much is certain: Police sped to the residence after someone reported a break-in in progress. A black man attempting to push open the stuck front door of his own house was assumed to be a burglar. To many columnists and commentators, the incident strongly suggests that racism — and specifically a tendency to stereotype black males — is alive and well in Obama-era America. Their fears are backed up by a just-published study, which suggests white ... Read More
New Conversations on Race
July 2, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
Race, of course, is a defining component of American life.But in the past several months, the conversation around it seems to have moved to a new place. By now, the racial significance of President Obama's election is almost old news. And with the Supreme Court's recent decision in regard to the New Haven fire department and the accusation by the political right of Supreme Court nominee Sonya Sotomayor's racism, talk of reverse racism is in the air. It is far too premature to link purported moments of reverse racism to racism's end, but these different events do suggest that we are ready ... Read More
New Evidence Links Stress With Racism
June 25, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
Chronic exposure to racial discrimination is associated with increased levels of anxiety and depression. That's one finding of a newly published study that adds to evidence that racism may be taking a toll on the health of African Americans — the subject of an in-depth cover story in the July/August issue of Miller-McCune magazine. A research team led by psychologist Anthony Ong of Cornell University collected two weeks' worth of daily diary data from 174 highly educated African Americans. (One-third had earned a doctorate degree, while two-thirds were enrolled in a doctoral program.) ... Read More
Racism’s Hidden Toll
June 15, 2009 • By • 37 Comments
In the fall of 1976, Arline Geronimus began living in two separate, unequal worlds. At Princeton University, the political theory major became a research assistant to Charles Westoff, a professor who studied teen pregnancy among the urban poor. Down the road at Planned Parenthood in Trenton, N.J., she spent time with real-life, impoverished pregnant teens. A self-assured, middle-class Jewish girl from Brookline, Mass., Geronimus shuttled between the extremes of haves and have-nots, eventually spotting a chasm between the theories of Princeton researchers and the experiences of the women she ... Read More
Racism in Schools: Unintentional But No Less Damaging
April 8, 2009 • By • 3 Comments
Alejandra is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who speak little English and hold down jobs cleaning houses and working in a hotel. Last year, she graduated from a high school in Santa Barbara, Calif., where the student population is roughly half poor Latino and half affluent white. Their worlds rarely intersect, with most white students taking high-level courses and most Latinos enrolled in the general-ed classes. But during her high school years, Alejandra was the exception. She was the only Latino student with immigrant parents enrolled in a college-level program known as ... Read More
Mother’s Travails May Appear in Offspring’s DNA
February 18, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
For years, scientists have wondered why African Americans die of cardiovascular disease and diabetes complications at much higher rates than European Americans. Despite advances in health care and living conditions, African Americans succumb to heart disease at a rate 1.3 times higher than that of whites. But even after accounting for income differences and known risk factors, researchers find there is still an unexplained "racial" disparity. Some scientists have argued that the difference must be due to some underlying genetic difference between races, while others contend that the ... Read More
Make Real Racial Progress
December 22, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
There are few places where the United States is further away from achieving "post-raciality" than in our prisons and courtrooms. For instance, though blacks make up roughly 12 percent of the population (and roughly 13 percent of casual drug users) they made up 35 percent of all drug-related arrests in the United States, 55 percent of all drug-related convictions and 74 percent of all drug-related prison sentences as of 1995. Similarly disturbing statistics abound in the areas of racial profiling, death penalty convictions, state executions and nearly every other arena of criminal justice. It ... Read More
