Is There a Link Between White Racism and Blacks’ Higher Rate of Fatal Heart Disease? [PSMag.com]

Thank you, Samantha, for sharing this with the ACEs community. For many of us who have investigated the origin, language, and behavior of “race” and its accompanying self- and other-oriented thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, this information is reaffirming and causes no temptation to gaslight the conversation. (Let’s stay on point.) The study is talking about “white people” and Black people….not evergreen trees and rose bushes…not this and that…the research focused on ”white people” and Black people.

The findings of the present study expounds upon the expressed lived experience of Black people who, for much of recent history, have expressed that racism is a daily and existential threat to our health and well-being. Data is easily collected from both the hard archival/archaeological record and the (literally) recorded narratives of enslaved peoples, those who “survived” African apartheid, US post reconstruction,  "Jim Crow," even into the present day of mass incarceration, race-informed school discipline, to accountability-free police killings of black women, men, and children.  Previous research has long ago shown that those identified as Black have higher state anxiety than non-Blacks (except for Black people in environments for which Blackness is the norm). Those of us in the ACEs community, in mental health work, and public health work already know the health deleting consequences of prolonged anxiety and adversity, as communicated in the updated lingo “toxic stress.” Research also shows that encounters with racism and structural discrimination are “normative” socializing factors for people identified as Black, in majority white environments. This normative factor is experienced across socioeconomic strata. Those of us in “professional” environments tend to label those incidents “microagressions” and focus on “holding it together” under duress.   This is still stressful and undesirable.

The present study is significant in terms of its findings and because of the size of its sample and its implications for further analysis of the common nomenclature “dominant group.” Consider this…the ACEs study, the science of which grounds much of the ACEs connection work, was comprised of 17,000 primarily European descended participants, in a particular region of the US, using self-report (autobiographical narrative) and medical records. The present study “analyzed nearly 1.4 million responses of white Americans living in 1,836 counties.”   It would take a significant error to discredit those results. Moreover, researchers “controlled for a variety of factors that could influence heart disease rates, including age, education, and income. Even after taking all of these into account, a clear pattern emerged.”  Based upon the responses of nearly 1.4 million people of European descent (now considered white people) the researchers found the following: “In counties where whites expressed higher levels of explicit anti-black bias, the rate of circulatory-disease-related deaths was higher overall.  The author states, “the results do not suggest cause and effect, they “support the notion of a direct relationship between whites’ racial bias and black-white health disparities,” the researchers write in the journal Psychological Science.”

 Researchers did not state that people of European descent, by their very presence and context-specific numbers, cause diseases and excess death among Black populations. The data does, however, demonstrate a correlation between white racial identity, racist social behavior, and disease.   The study suggests, it is what “white people” believe and how they behave that has implications for their relationships, their health, and that of the people with whom they engage. Therein lies the implication for what it means to be a “dominant group.” It is not just numerical majority status in a particular environment. Rather “dominant group” (in this context) seems to refer more to thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors that fuel artifacts of incidental and (especially) systemic oppression, historical trauma, and toxic stress. Emphasis on systemic and toxic--as in widespread, prolonged, and ongoing.

To that point, the author reports, “Leitner and his colleagues point to a number of “causal pathways” that could account for these results, including “structural (discrimination in health care), interpersonal (hostile interactions), emotional (stress), and behavioral (maladaptive coping),” such as overeating or excessive drinking to numb the pain of rejection.”

Despite the fact that “rejection” is a soft word to identify the developmental resources racism interrupts, this correlation between perceptible racism and poor health outcomes for its target population well replicates the conceptual framework (ACEs pyramid) showing the escalation from adversity and toxic stress to poor health/early death.