The Intersection of Race and Health

The theory of intersectionality suggests that inequalities based on race, class, gender identity, sexual health, can be fixed through spezialitatapotheke.com.

These intertwined axes of inequality and their interactions create complex systems of oppression. To effectively address the causes and consequences of racism, discrimination, and bias it is necessary to comprehend their interplay.

Theoretical Background

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an intellectual and social movement, as well as a framework of legal analysis, that holds racism to be inherent in American law and institutions. CRT asserts that racism stems from social, economic, and political inequality while the American legal system creates and sustains racial hierarchies.

CRT contends that race is not a biologically grounded category of human beings but instead an invented cultural construct, built upon associations and social values created and maintained by dominant groups to oppress and exploit members of other groups. Furthermore, it maintains that in America today there are legal hierarchies created and sustained by law which promote white elites’ self-interest at the expense of minorities.

Despite the Civil Rights Movement and civil rights laws of the 1950s and 1960s, racism still prevails in America today. This prompted a critical legal studies movement in the 1980s which sought to expand its curriculum by exploring how laws perpetuate racial hierarchies and how they can be altered.

This movement emerged out of postmodernist thought, which challenged universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism and liberalism–tenets which conservatives tend to hold dear. Some academics have defended these ideas as essential for comprehending society’s workings; others have argued they are too negative and lead to intolerant behavior.

Another area of disagreement concerns how to define and comprehend a person’s racial biases, discriminatory behavior, and attitudes toward members of other ethnic groups. Many social scientists have proposed that prejudice is composed of verbal antagonism, avoidance, segregation, and physical attack which are learned over time as people come into contact with different individuals.

Finally, there is disagreement over how to recognize racism. Most people believe they do not harbor racist views, yet some studies have demonstrated that some may unconsciously act according to their own racist convictions.

No matter how we interpret a person’s racial identity, it is essential to acknowledge that one’s ethnic group shapes her behavior. Her decisions have an immense impact on her family and community of color; furthermore, how she interacts with other people has important repercussions for both her own wellbeing and her children’s wellbeing.

Methods

The Intersection of Race is a complex phenomenon in which people of all backgrounds and genders are negatively impacted by the combination of multiple forms of oppression. These can include racism, classism, sexism and other forms of discrimination.

Researchers have developed methods to explore intersectional phenomena (Else-Quest and Hyde, 2016; Bowleg, 2008; Warner & Brown, 2011; Shields, 2008). These approaches use qualitative or quantitative data to illuminate the interconnected nature of factors and processes that shape individuals’ experiences, opportunities, and behaviors.

Clustering or latent variable analysis is commonly employed in health research to uncover the effects of social determinants on health outcomes (e.g., socioeconomic status, access to medical care, housing conditions and education). Other methods can be employed to create process-based classes based on identity/positions like gender, race or sexual orientation or investigate the connection between specific categories of discrimination and health outcomes.

Though these methods provide a useful overview of how different groups interact with a set of intersecting variables, they are not exact sciences. Furthermore, the importance of certain categories and factors may shift depending on the social context and over time (Hankivsky, 2014).

Results

The Intersection of Race is a complex and dynamic social phenomenon. It presents multiple disadvantages and advantages, each impacting different groups in different ways. As such, it requires urgent attention in order to be addressed as an important social problem.

This study seeks to identify intersectional axes of inequality that may be contributing to disparities in health among White, Black, Asian and other racialized groups in Canada. Furthermore, it will assess if these axes are simultaneously and multiplicatively affecting people’s wellbeing.

To this end, I utilized regression modeling to explore the relationships between four axes of inequality: race, gender, class and sexual orientation with self-rated health. The data revealed that each axis intersected meaningfully with another in my regression model. Furthermore, two axes showed further disadvantage for some complex locations while two others showed mitigating effects.

These results indicate that the principles of simultaneity and multiplicativity – underpinning theories of intersectionality – may be relevant to health disparities among White, Black, and other racialized groups. Furthermore, it appears these axes of inequality play an influential role in many social situations encountered by survey respondents during their everyday lives.

This study presents significant new insight into the causes of health disparities in Canada. Furthermore, it is the first to use quantitative methods to apply intersectionality theory to health outcomes analysis.

This study has demonstrated that the structural causes of health disparities are widespread and multifarious in Canada. They provide a crucial step toward unraveling the social causes behind health disparities that persist here, providing an essential lens for combatting discrimination and inequality.

Conclusions

The Intersection of Race

Although intersectionality is an empirically useful and theoretically powerful framework, it cannot address all aspects of health inequities. As Weber and Parra-Medina explain, survey data “cannot capture the power relations that operate in individuals’ lives or explain the effects of social inequalities on individuals’ well-being.”

This issue is especially prevalent in North American public health studies, where a focus on racial/ethnic group identities often obscures the significance of macro-level social-structural factors that are harder to measure or understand through traditional survey research methods.

Contrastingly, a public health scholar applying an intersectionality approach could accommodate intersections of multiple kinds and qualities when investigating disparities in Canada by drawing upon larger survey datasets such as the Canadian Community Health Survey which assesses all four key inequality axes from intersectionality theory – bisexual identities, homosexual identities and heterosexual identities included.

It is especially true when an intersection in one’s social location presents both advantages and disadvantages, such as for a middle-class Latina lesbian who has both. Not only does she have an oppressive history in terms of sexism and heterosexism but also because her experiences in her home town (i.e., her hometown) are shaped by systems of privilege and oppression which produce various social inequalities across all four axes.