Maybe this explains just why America is so generally awful at so many health metrics. A new article in the American Journal of Public Health indicates that people who live in communities of higher racial prejudice, regardless of whether they personally hold such prejudices, have higher risks of mortality. Healthline reports:
“Racial prejudice affects community health significantly even after controlling for individual- and community-level socioeconomic status, such as poverty, level of education, and racial composition,” study author YeonJin Lee of the University of Pennsylvania, told Healthline.
The study doesn’t prove that racial prejudice causes premature death. But researchers suggest that racism can weaken a community’s social resources or social capital. For example, racial tensions may limit a community’s ability to come together and advocate for policies and services that promote health.
“Low levels of prejudice are associated with greater trust and diminished threat at the neighborhood level,” Lee said, “[while] high levels of prejudice likely discourage residents from developing social capital with their neighbors, given reduced levels of trust and mutual reciprocity.
Social capital, defined as the degree to which community decisions are marked by reciprocity and increase in the common good, has been found to be a key factor in public health and mortality. Income inequality also degrades social capital, and through this mechanism it degrades health independently of income itself.
A robust body of research has found that perceived and enforced racism negatively impacts the health of racial minorities. This interacts with the aspects of poverty, environmental injustices, and health access disparities that are also more diluted products of racism to make for a double whammy. But there hasn’t been much to study the effects of racism at a community level or for people who hold the prejudices themselves.
This new study in the Journal of Public Health adds to that body of knowledge. And in today’s climate, with outright racial prejudice holding fast and not receding the way common knowledge expected and with inequality skyrocketing, social capital may be degrading even faster. And that seems to be a fever that no amount of health policy can fix.