STRESS KILLS! BUT DO YOU KNOW WHAT REAL STRESS IS?



…The map of life expectancy and racial discrimination in the US.

 

New study shows why Black Lives are shorter than Whites.

 

We have all probably heard the phrase, “Stress kills!”  And most of us can probably agree that there have been many studies to support this statement.  But do we really understand what qualifies as “stress”?  We can also likely agree that chronic stress, is probably bad for your health, so this really isn’t new news.  But can we say we really understand the many kinds of stress there are out there?

 

There was a recent study about the experiences of racial discrimination on the Black community and the stress caused by having this experience.  The study has shown, racial discrimination is often accompanied by a sense of powerlessness, of anxiety, and of serious anger. These key stressors, especially over an individual’s lifetime, can lead to negative health impacts. The TV comedian pundit, Jon Stewart, had no idea how right he was when he said, "If racism is something you're sick of hearing about, imagine how exhausting it must be living it every day."

To give you an idea of some of the results of the stresses of racial discrimination, there are neighborhoods in Baltimore in which the life expectancy is 19 years less than other neighborhoods in the same city. Residents of the Downtown/Seaton Hill neighborhood have a life expectancy lower than 229 other world nations.  This Baltimore number is exceeded only by the violent, 3^rd world nation of Yemen.  According to the Washington Post, 15 neighborhoods in Baltimore have a lower life expectancy than those in North Korea where their dead citizens are collected from the city streets every morning.

 

The study I am referring to is called the Measure of Area Racism and Black Mortality and it has come up with the map of the US shown above. 

 

As illustrated, the dark areas show the lowest life expectancy of black Americans to whites. It also happens to coincide with the areas with the most racial discrimination.  And those areas are mostly located in the rural Northeast and down along the Appalachian Mountains into the South.

 

We had thought that we knew how racism has injured and killed black Americans. But do we really? There are those obvious cases, like the deaths of Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, that we all saw some of on video tape.  But we never see the silent killers.  Those are the hypertension and the chronic medical conditions that has lead so many more blacks to an early grave than they do whites. According to the study, it shows that racist attitudes today may lead to 30,000 early deaths every year.

 

According to the authors of the study, current research points to the reasons for the disparities in health between white and black Americans, many of which can be traced to racial segregation. Many blacks are restricted to high-crime neighborhoods that are lacking in outdoor recreational areas, access to healthy foods, and decent health care. Discrimination in employment leads to lower wages that make it difficult to access healthy food, exercise, and recreation.

 

Studies on discrimination have found evidence of early deaths due to hypertension and atherosclerosis.  In fact, a recent study found that racism may also be associated with accelerated aging at the cellular level.

 

The way the study’s authors structured how they located the areas of increased racism is very interesting.  They started by using Google Internet searches using the "N-word" for helping find those areas of racist attitudes in America.

 

Using this information to find areas in which racism is alive and well, they then looked at black mortality rates using the data from 2004–2012, offered by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). The group examined four leading causes of death among blacks: heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes. Unsurprisingly, they found a significant association between the area racism indicated by the internet searches and the increase in black mortality.  They stated that there was an uncanny association between these two issues.
 

Results from the Google Internet study had shown that living in an area characterized by an increase in racism by a single degree, meant an associated 8.2% increase in the mortality rate among Blacks. When these numbers are added up from all of the areas in the nation, this “cause and effect” estimate amounts to over 30,000 Black deaths annually, due to this stress nationwide.

 

The study’s findings indicate that this “area racism” is significantly associated with not only the Black mortality rate, but also the Black-White disparities in mortality.

 

In other words, racism doesn't just kill with a bullet, it also kills by a thousand cuts, silently and deaths that have gone mostly unnoticed.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2015