A White Paper By The Racial And Ethnic Health Disparities: Fill & Download for Free

Here’s the thing about the racial gap in the United States: if you think you know how bad it is, you probably don’t. This isn’t a personal attack, as it’s almost certainly true of me as well; the racial gap is probably so wide that there isn’t any one person any more who can wrap their head around the whole thing any more.If you read the paper[1], this is how they define “less poor” and “more poor” neighborhoods:The percentage of individuals living below the poverty level was binarized at the median poverty rate of the data set (ie, 10.7%) into less-poverty counties and more-poverty counties. …… For the less-poverty counties, the median county-level income was $79 834 (range, $53 060-$119 731)compared with $60 240 (range, $36 850-$88 960) for the more-poverty counties.The researchers binned a wide range of counties into “more-poverty” — the poorest of the “poor” counties had less than half the median income of the richest! I wouldn’t be surprised if the counties that had more non-White minorities were, in fact, relatively poorer than those with more White Americans, and that would explain part of the model.But you should know that income inequality is just the tip of the turdberg that is America’s racial gap. For example, would you expect a Black family earning the same income as a White family to be as rich? Then you’d be wrong[2] :Across every income level, a Black household typically has much less wealth than a White household of the same income. This has tremendous impacts on life outcomes, and the one most relevant to Covid is that people with less wealth tend to live in areas with worse services, which would include health services.Are there genetic factors? Possibly. In the UK, ethnic minorities have anywhere between a 10% and a 100% increased death rate from coronavirus, after some careful statistical analysis[3]. But notice that the American study found a death rate nine times higher based on race. That’s not a purely genetic difference — that’s the result of systemic inequality so deep and vast that it goes beyond even income level.Footnotes[1] Community-Level Disparities in COVID-19 Infections and Deaths in Large US Metropolitan Areas[2] Examining the Black-white wealth gap[3] Ethnicity and covid-19

It is generally more accepted that the American society allows "all this race talk" to go on. It does. But that doesn't equate with the fact racist beliefs are not existing in the American society, or that it is not part of a process whereby it is accepted, normalized, and becomes part of the psyche that makes racist beliefs taken-for-granted, and largely impossible to counter. Refusal to see racism outside analytical moulds of "systemic racism" entails that a significant chunk of the population suffer from emotional stressors because they are living in a society where apparently, there is no race problem, or little race problem.The problem in speaking about racism is that people are quick to jump to conclusion regarding the economic, political, or systemic effects. The language used to talk about sexism today--the invisible and intangible ways it cuts across layers of privilege and affects women--is not seen, neither used, when people are talking about racism or the more cutting ways in which it amounts to psychological abuse.As to sexism, in the Unites States, girls are taught higher-level of self-regulation than boys,( “Boys will be boys” in U.S., but not in Asia) as compared to three Asian countries, where due to the latter's supposedly conformist model of society, sexism could be running rampant. Girls are also taught to be less confident than boys, through various controlling mechanisms: 10 Ways Society Can Close the Confidence Gap. And of course, girls are nurses, and boys are doctors, when meaningless, incessant sexism are drilled in, because as they say: "Catch them young!"Image Source: Sociological ImagesIntertwined with recognizing sexism and racism in the American society (by Americans themselves, which is the hopeful part), another interesting aspect has been commodifying feminism, where the concept of power is cleverly used, and given space (and shown the space perhaps) by referencing it to cleaning power of detergents, and a nice but flippant skirt. Till today, an overwhelming number of detergent ads, cleaning products, and kitchen utensils, feature only female models, suggesting the products are only used by females. And we shouldn't forget the price American women pay for being women, up front: Tampons Are Taxed More Than Candy and Soda in These StatesHow could we choose one over the other and say Sexism is more rampant and Racism or vice versa, when bigotry has multiple adherents on multiple levels. Of course, people wouldn't behave in these ways unless they were the "accepted" ways to be, the "normal" ways to be. What I find problematic to accept is how our tone, accepted criteria, and standards get different when we talk about sexism as compared to racism. It appears they operate on two different channels, when in reality, they might not be.Does Racism Exist in the American Society Today?More Americans than ever before say that racism is a problem today:It is a majority opinion especially among the non-whites:Source of the above graphs: Racism is a 'big problem' to more Americans, poll findsSince a recognition of the fact that "racism exists" is present, a facile conclusion could be that racism is not accepted by a significant chunk of Americans. A history of looking into racism as systemic discrimination creates certain blind spots where looking into racism escapes our vision precisely because racist beliefs are accepted and normalized, in certain basic things as:HealthcareA new study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has revealed that even the medical world hasn’t escaped racial stereotyping. It’s widely acknowledged that black Americans are undertreated for pain relief compared to white Americans, and this study suggests that this could be because numerous medical students still believe that black people feel pain differently, among other completely false beliefs.“These beliefs have been around for a long time in our history. They were once used to justify slavery and the inhumane treatment of black people in medicine,” Kelly Hoffman, a University of Virginia (UVA) psychology PhD candidate and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “What’s so striking is that, today, these beliefs are not necessarily related to individual prejudice. Many people who reject stereotyping and prejudice nonetheless believe in these biological differences.”Source: Here's Just A Few Of The Horrifying Things That Medical Students Believe About Black PeopleDoesn't look like a sea-change from the days of Henrietta Lacks or the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Even with contending that the above people in the study are innocent, impressionable, young medical students, here's something more:This study1 recruited 33 hospital-based doctors from western Pennsylvania and found that black patients found less compassionate care from doctors, than white patients. It is easy to guess how getting less compassionate care can make someone feel, especially when the source of treatment aligns with the colour of your skin.The following link lists several studies that show how racism in the USA is visible in the public health sector: Why Racism Is A Public Health Issue. If anyone is interested, here's a paper documenting not one, but multiple effects of emotional injuries that are the result of racism. Just the anticipation of the fact that one could be subjected to racist attitude and behaviours, could be an emotional stressor: How Racism Is Bad for Our Bodies.If there were awareness and acceptance that a part of the society could lead other groups of different "races" feel distressed, these practices wouldn't be so pervasive. For people of colour, things are more difficult to verbalize now, because now they have equitable protection of the law, the right to education, equal treatment to healthcare, and mobility just like everybody else, and yet graphs after graphs after graphs continue the same tradition:Source: The FBI is trying to get better data on police killings. Here's what we know now.More African American millennials have to earn two educational levels higher than their white counterparts in order to have the same employment probability:Black men without a high school diploma are over 15 percentage points less likely to be employed than white men with the same degree of education. In fact, an African American male has to have at least taken some college classes before he has the same employment prospects as a white male without a high school diploma. Increased educational attainment clearly closes the gap, and closes it dramatically.Source: https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/yicare/pages/141/attachments/original/1403804069/Closing_the_Race_Gap_Ntnl_6.25.14.pdf?1403804069American Indians are taught to be a thing of the past but people feel comfortable dressing like them in house parties (Columbus Day-Themed “Bros and Hos” Party at Harvard ) while the default American setting in the media remains WHITE:Source: Race, Sex, and Casting Hollywood FilmsIf these trends were not socially accepted, could these go on?Is it Race or is it Gender?Consider the following graph:Source: How Does Race Affect the Gender Wage Gap?We can see that white women make 78¢ for every dollar a white man makes. Black men make 72¢ for every dollar a white man makes, that is lesser than a white woman. Black women make 64¢ for every white male dollar, and Latina women make 53¢ for every white male dollar.Race mixed with gender is a double whammy, not only in case of earnings but also in case of incarcerations:As the number of women incarcerated has increased by 800 percent over the last three decades, women of color have been disproportionately represented. While the number of women incarcerated is relatively low, the racial and ethnic disparities are startling. African American women are three times more likely than white women to be incarcerated, while Hispanic women are 69 percent more likely than white women to be incarcerated.Source: The Top 10 Most Startling Facts About People of Color and Criminal Justice in the United StatesMeanwhile, this should be interesting:Source: Sociological ImagesA Sociologist, David Pedulla did a study (Full Paper available here: The Positive Consequences of Negative Stereotypes) in which he evaluated 231 white individuals in a national probability sample. Study participants were asked to suggest starting salaries for the position of fictional prospective employee. The resumes had typical raced names (either “Brad Miller” and “Darnell Jackson”) and listed participation in “Gay Student Advisory Council” half the time.The study found that while straight Black men were more likely to be perceived as threatening, gay Black men were considered by far the least threatening. Gay black men were also judged to be the most feminine, followed by gay white men. Consequently, gay, Black, and male attracted the highest salaries, as the gay Black men were considered the most valuable employee overall. Straight white men were offered slightly lower salaries and gay white men and straight black men were offered even lower salaries. Herein, gender, sexuality and race offers a classic case of analytical study while reality is etched out in critically impacting ways.The bottomline is: we tend to make distinctions in types of stereotyping and bigotry because it facilitates analysis. In the real world, it's a complex mishmash making the use of Intersectionality an imperative analytical tool to use in these cases.Source:http://www.jpsmjournal.com/article/S0885-3924(15)00402-9/abstractImplicit Bias among Physicians and its Prediction of Thrombolysis Decisions for Black and White Patientshttp://www.commonwealthfund.org/usr_doc/mead_racialethnicdisparities_chartbook_1111.pdf

Your friend is not correct. If anything, Mexican Americans have higher testosterone levels. Here are excerpts from first three papers I pulled upAfter applying sampling weights and adjusting for age, percent body fat, alcohol, smoking, and activity, testosterone concentrations were not different between non-Hispanic blacks (n = 363; geometric mean, 5.29 ng/ml) and non-Hispanic whites (n = 674; 5.11 ng/ml; P > 0.05) but were higher in Mexican-Americans (n = 376; 5.48 ng/ml; P < 0.05).Serum Estrogen, But Not Testosterone, Levels Differ between Black and White Men in a Nationally Representative Sample of AmericansWith or without adjustment for covariates, there were no significant differences in testosterone, bioavailable testosterone, or SHBG levels by race/ethnicity.Serum Androgen Levels in Black, Hispanic, and White MenContrary to the hypothesis that the racial/ethnic disparity in prostate cancer has a hormonal basis, we did not observe a difference in serum testosterone concentration between non-Hispanic black and white men in the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III), although non-Hispanic black men had a higher estradiol level.Racial/ethnic differences in serum sex steroid hormone concentrations in US adolescent males