How Racism is Bad for our Bodies

Featured yesterday in the Atlantic:

How Racism Is Bad for Our Bodies

The piece goes into detail about how racism has been shown recently to be linked to raising the risk of many emotional and physical problems:

Discrimination has been shown to increase the risk of stress, depression, the common cold, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, and mortality. Recently, two journals -- The American Journal of Public Health and The Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race -- dedicated entire issues to the subject. These collections push us to consider how discrimination becomes what social epidemiologist Nancy Krieger, one of the field's leaders, terms ‘embodied inequality.’”

It is also not just racism but the fear of racism that brings stress upon people of minorities. These individuals are also less likely to seek help to extinguish the stress, due to many already being at a social disadvantage. The last sentence of the article explains this best: “Racial profiling should be considered a social determinant of health, because it exposes people to discrimination and the fear of discrimination. Race may be a social construct, but racism materializes in poor health.”

Indeed, here we can look at racism using performance theory – racism being embodied physically, especially within a person, as part of a political and social construct in society. As Dwight Conquergood wrote in his piece “Performance Studies: Intervention and Radical Research”: “It is no longer easy to sort out the local from the global: transnational circulations of images get reworked on the ground and redeployed for local, tactical struggles. And global flows simultaneously are encumbered and energized by these local makeovers” (145).  In this case of racism, the body is the local and the issue the global; the issue of racism is reflected in individual health and well-being. 

We cannot just look at racism now from an outer, critical perspective – as these studies show, a more performative-based, interpretive approach is needed to address this issue and work towards solutions.