Journal of Health and Social Behavior最新文献

Scholars cite racist political-economic systems as drivers of health inequities in the United States (i.e., racial capitalism). But how does racial capitalism generate health inequities? I address this open question within the historical context of predatory lending during the 2008 financial crisis. Relevant hypotheses are tested with multiple waves of data from Black and White participants of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N = 8,877). Across socioeconomic strata, I find that Black participants report higher rates of foreclosure, eviction, repossession, delinquent bills, lost income, and new debts in the wake of the financial crisis. Using structural equation and quasi-experimental models, I then show that Black participants also self-report rapid health declines and increases in prescription drug abuse throughout this period, much of which is explained by chronic financial stress. I conclude that racial capitalism can generate health inequities by ensnaring Black Americans in a toxic web of financial exploitation and stress proliferation.

Just a few years after the U.S. government's decision to fully fund the Human Genome Project (HGP) in 1990, an important harbinger of things to come was the publication of the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. The authors' most controversial claim was that human intelligence was at least 60 percent genetic. At that time, the national advisory group to the HGP, the Ethical Legal and Social Implications committee (ELSI) requested that the American Journal of Human Genetics critique and respond to the authors' claim. The editorial board of the journal refused on the grounds that "this book was about behavioral genetics" while the HGP was about human molecular genetics. Members of ELSI committee argued vigorously that this distinction between different forums and platforms used to explain human genetic variation would soon collapse and merge. However, it was only a matter of time before behavioral geneticists would claim the legitimacy of being under the mantle of molecular genetics. In this address, I show just how prescient the ELSI group had been. Much of the answer lies in the reward structure for science publications that strongly favor reductionism versus emergence.

This research adopts an analytical spatial perspective to explain ethno-national health inequality between Palestinians and Jews in Israel. The work identifies the forces that instigated and maintained the spatial segregation of Palestinians and elaborates the role of segregation in generating health gaps between Palestinians and Jews. The analysis suggests a novel conceptualization of two types of segregation: (a) exclusion from the center and confinement to the periphery and (b) segregation within the geographic periphery. Using administrative data on COVID-19 incidence, hospitalization, and death and various health indicators for localities, I devise a decomposition method that evaluates the relative contribution of each type of segregation to the total health gap. The findings indicate that the segregation of Palestinians from the center and their confinement to peripheral regions are crucial determinants of their poor health outcomes and that the segregation of the Palestinian community within the geographic periphery also contributes to poorer health.

Few studies examine how high-achieving Black women navigate chronic reproductive health morbidities. Black women are disproportionately more likely to experience uterine fibroids, with earlier onset and more severe symptoms. This study leverages a national mixed-methods data set of Black women academics to examine how they describe symptomatic fibroids impacting their careers and lives. We find that participants (1) actively coped by engaging in superwoman schema, (2) postponed treatment due to the demands of their tenure-track position, and (3) normalized pain. Our findings suggest a potentially high prevalence of uterine fibroids among Black women faculty, that symptomatic fibroids were an impediment to some women's careers, and that women with symptomatic fibroids often identified expectations of their careers as an impediment to seeking timely treatment. We provide insights for how highly educated, successful Black women cope and navigate career stress coupled with challenges resulting from chronic reproductive health morbidities.