User:Cecilesaleh/Health status of White Americans/Bibliography

White Americans are often used as a comparative measure in health disparities research in the United States. This is because historically oppressed groups in America tend to have poorer health outcomes due to contributing determinants of health such as socioeconomic status. However, in recent years, scholarly discourse has switched from recognition of the immense positive health outcomes towards understanding the growing persistence of negative outcomes. The effects of racial prejudice have a negative effect on health outcomes and it is hypothesized that the racialized society that people experience in America is affecting health outcomes for all people, whites included. Additionally, white Americans have the highest rate of suicide and lifetime psychiatric disorders than any other ethnicity or racial category. In conjunction with these psychiatric issues, there are higher rates of alcohol usage as lower levels of psychological flourishing. Given this information, the health status of White Americans has gained increasinging importance due to the differences in health outcomes between White Americans and White people from other parts of the world.

Effects of Racial Prejudice

For the purposes of this article, the racism that is being referred to is a structural racism rather than interpersonal prejudice and discrimination. This system is composed of a unequal power dynamic that allows for members of the dominating social group to obtain unearned societal privilege through ideology and behavior without intention or dislike of the non dominant group.

Due to the racialized environment that people experience in the United States, scholars have wondered whether living in areas of high levels of racial prejudice negatively impact the health of individuals living there. There are many pathways that link racism to poor health outcomes. To name a few there is economic injustice and social deprivation, environmental and occupational health inequalities, psychosocial trauma, inadequate health care, state-sanctioned violence and alienation from property, and political exclusion. While it has been understood that racism and prejudice negatively affect the health the individuals who are being discriminated against, there is reason to believe that simply living in an area with racial disparities and tension can be harmful regardless of whether the person holds these beliefs or not. States in the US that had higher levels of "collective disrespect" toward Black people had higher age-adjusted mortality rates for both Black and White people . Collective disrespect level was measured through aggregate responses to a question given regarding people's attitudes toward why Black people had worse jobs, incomes, and housing than White people.

Lee et al built off of these results by combining existing research to learn the joint effects on mortality of community level and individual level racial prejudice. This study found that there was higher risks of mortality were associated with being male, advanced age, lower socioeconomic status, race, and being divorced or widowed. However, when community-level prejudice was added in to their model, higher levels of anti-Black predjudice increased the odds of participant mortality by 31%. They also found a relationship between individuals low in racial prejudice who lived in areas of higher community level prejudice to have the highest level of mortality risk compared even to individuals with higher racial prejudice living in higher prejudice communities. This study found community level racial prejudice to be a stronger predictor of mortality than socioeconomic status and racial residential segregation.

In a study done on Hurricane Katrina survivors, researchers measured the relationshup between perception of racism against African Americans among White and Black Americans. Similarly to the previously mentioned study, they found that perceptions of racism against African Americans were associated with negative mental health outcomes for Whites.

With all of this in mind, it is important to consider that measuring levels of racial prejudice and racial attitudes in general because of the variability of the way prejudice is presented, and the confounding variable of implicit bias in an individual's evaluation of themselves.

Dying of Whiteness (2019)

Dr. Jonathan Metzl pubished a book in 2019 called Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America's Heartland. This book explores further the effects of living in areas with high levels of racial resentment and prejudice. This research has pointed the direction of scholarly discourse toward understanding why White people are adopting political views that negatively affect their health outcomes. For example, Metzl found that through an anti-government rhetoric, Whites voted in favor of the rejection of Affordable Care Act expansion and opposition to gun laws, and tax cuts that were intended to build infrasture in areas concentrated with working-class White populations. His ethnographic research for the book suggests that the politics of racial resentment creates sentiments about government that would ultimately harm life expectancy in a variety of ways for White individuals. The more concerning trend that this book reinforces is the lack of acknowledgement among White individuals of macro-level social determinants of health due to a focus on individual effort. This nostalgic ideation of hard-work and self-sufficiency negates the impacts of larger health factors and further creates an environment that is not conducive to positive health outcomes.

Diseases of Despair

In the United States, there is a classification of behavior-related medical conditions that is called the diseases of despair. The three different diseases in this category is drug or alcohol overdose, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease. These diseases are deadly and the highest concentration of these disease outcomes are among middle-age working class White people in the United States. Many have argued that the decline in life expectancy among Whites in the US that is associated with diseases of despair. However, others have raised the idea that diseases of despair are attributable to a variety of worsening psychosocial problems that extend well into the 1980's and concern the United States as a whole.

Although these behaviors are thought to be seen with groups who experience lack of social and economic mobility, there are increasing risk factors involved with poor mental health. Despite the vastly different economic trends for White and Black Americans, Whites are more likely to percieve themselves as having lower social class, and are less optimistic about their future from a financial perspective. This trend among middle class Whites points to increased need for research on the health status of Whites due to continuing rise in premature death caused by these diseases. Further, this trend exemplifies why Whites should not be studied as a comparative measure to other ethnic and racial backgrounds in the United States.

Opioid Epidemic

Between 2010 to the present, there has been increased reports of opiod overdoses among White Americans, specifically in rural areas. Although this epidemic is not limited the White Americans, there has been well documented accounts of increased overdose deaths, and emergency room visits related to opioid usage issues, and treatment for opioid addictions. The director of the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis, Dr. Andrew Kolodny, describes this issues by explaining that physicians are much more likely to prescribe narcotics to White patients. The rhetoric from War on Drugs about Black and Hispanic individuals being more likely to use and become addicted to drugs has persisted. In this case, racial stereotyping is having a protective effect on non-white populations.

Comparison to other Whites around the world

The trend for deaths of despair highlight the health disparities seen among White Americans with other White people around the world. The life expectancy of Whites in the United States ranks behind countries such as South Korea, Chile, Greece, Cyprus, and Cuba. In addition, when comparing the health of White Americans to White people from rich countries, there is better health outcomes from birth to age 75. Futhermore, Whites from the highest socioeconomic levels in America had comparable health outcome rates to Whites from England who had the lowest income and education levels. Malat et al developed a framework published in 2016 that aimed to understand the relationship between Whiteness and health.

In a study of health disparities across Canada and the United States, the US consistently had far more pronounced racial health inequities. Furthermore, they found that the extent of racial health inequities were heavily dependent on the society in which they are occuring. These researchers cited the US as being characterized by racial and ethnic segregation, and policies that distribute health resources, housing, and education quality.