^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Newsweek health writer Dean Ornish thinks so--and the data is on his side:

In the past decade more than 100 studies have been published documenting the harmful effects of racial discrimination on a variety of health measures in African-American men and women.

For example, a recent study that followed nearly 60,000 African-American women for six years found that women who reported on-the-job racial discrimination had a 32 percent higher risk of breast cancer than others who did not. Women who said they faced racial discrimination on the job, in housing and from the police were 48 percent more likely to develop breast cancer than those who reported no incidents of major discrimination.

Another study of African-American women found that those who reported chronic emotional stress due to their experience of racism had more severely blocked carotid arteries (which supply blood to the brain) than those who did not. In yet another study perceived racism was associated with a significantly increased risk of uterine fibroids in black women, and this was unrelated to differences in health care utilization.

And then there are the effects of racially-correlated inequalities in health care access--the topic of Unnatural Causes, a seven-part, 14-hour documentary currently airing on PBS. Low-income black men have a median life expectancy of 67--a decade below the national average.

So what can be done about this? Ornish emphasizes the need to dismantle active racism, and to generally treat each other in a kinder way in our day-to-day lives. This is good advice, I believe, and should be taken to heart--but it doesn't address the core problem of racism, because white folks who make intentionally life harder for people of color are generally not the same white folks who ask themselves what they can do to make life easier for people of color. The EEOC has made some progress in fighting overt employment discrimination, but there's a limit to what can be accomplished by civil rights laws--particularly when the most significant problems impacting the health of people of color have more to do with institutional racism than personal racism.

So a systematic, institutional solution is needed. And as Brian Smedley points out, we're not talking about a revolution here--even mainstream, bipartisan policy proposals can have a dramatic impact on racism-related health disparities:

If we believe – as most Americans do – that the United States should be a place where everyone has a fair chance to achieve their full potential, then we can focus on achievable policy solutions. These include things like providing access to high-quality early child education programs for all children, reforming school financing to equalize the quality of education in K through 12th grade, and reducing financial barriers to college. We should also support living wage policies, so that no one who works full-time is forced to live in poverty, and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit program. We should provide job training so that more people can participate in high-growth jobs, such as in the technology industry. We should invest in affordable housing and fix the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. We should support housing mobility programs, so that people in low-opportunity communities can move to better neighborhoods, and invest in jobs and schools in low-opportunity communities so that they become attractive places to live and work.

And if we're willing to go a step further, universal health care must be a priority. Studies have consistently shown that about half of all uninsured Americans are black or Latino, when black and Latino Americans barely make up one quarter of the U.S. population.

There are ways to address the overall impact of racism on health and life expectancy, but most of them are inconvenient for Americans who already enjoy high standards of health care. These Americans need to be made more aware of the severity of the problem. A low-income black or Latino man who dies in 2008 due to racially-correlated health care disparities may not be as obvious a victim as a black or Latino man lynched in an earlier era, but he's just as dead.

See also:

• Institutional Racism