Racism: Mental and Physical Effects

In the article, America's 'reality' is white and male; Julia Wong talked about many cases where the victims weren’t accepted as they were. Julia Chen a news reporter was told that she looked disinterested and bored even though her news director knew that wasn’t the case, he was just using her facial traits to portray the Asian race stereotype. Julia went on and had surgery on her face, and felt like she looked more alert when looking back at recordings. There was also a case where a 14 year old girl that had gotten raped by a 50 year old white man that only served 31 days of a 15 year sentencing because the judge (a white man) said that the girls body was “older” therefore he ruled that it is an un-rapeable body. The girl committed suicide 2 years later. Society can have a big affect on how people perceive themselves and others, and as written in this article some go as far as getting physical surgery to be accepted in their social environments. What really stood out to me from this article is that it is important to remember that what woman are actually saying with their body is always real and right.

 In How Racism Is Bad for Our Bodies, an article by Author Jason Silverstein, talks about how racial profiling is a danger to a person’s mental and physical health. There was a study performed that Kathryn Freeman Anderson created in Sociological Inquiry that had confirming evidence to the hypothesis that racism harms health. 30,000 people were analyzed in a Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance system. Anderson came up with a pathway with two simple steps: being a racial minority leads to greater stress and  this stress leads to poorer mental and physical health. Her data showed that 18.2 percent of black participants experienced emotional stress whereas only 3.5 percent of white experienced emotional stress. 9.8 percent of blacks experienced physical stress compared to the 1.6 percent of whites, that is almost 6 times as much.

Diagnosing Discrimination: Stress from Perceived Racism and the Mental and Physical Health Effects, by Kathryn Anderson is a more in depth article about the two pathways that are mentioned in How Racism Is Bad for Our Bodies. She mentions that racism is manifested in different ways and dimensions such as, institutional, structural and internal. From the data gathered it showed that African Americans are more likely to experience symptoms of emotional and physical stress from racism than any other racial group. The data also suggested that socioeconomic status is also a reason for continued racial differences is the United States. Although the results for the emotional and physical stress were substantial even after controlling the socioeconomic status.