The discrimination paradox

Different rates of mental illness have been reported in ethnic groups in the UK (Nazroo, 1997). Early work was criticised because of methodological flaws but more rigorous studies have confirmed high community prevalence rates of depression in both South Asian and African-Caribbean populations (Nazroo, 1997), high incidence and prevalence rates of psychosis in African-Caribbean groups (see Bhugra & Cochrane, 2001, for review), and higher rates of suicide in some South Asian groups (Neelemanet al, 1997) compared with the White British population. Similarly high rates have not been reported in the countries of origin of these groups (Hickling & Rodgers-Johnson, 1995; Patel & Gaw, 1996), which has led to a search for possible causes within the UK.

A recent review concluded that the weight of available evidence contradicts a hypothesis of widespread overt racial discrimination in sentencing in the United States. Yet brief summaries of this body of research, found in textbooks, monographs, and the literature review sections of journal articles, commonly conveyed the opposite impression, sustaining an image of extensive support for the hypothesis. These summaries are examined to determine how this misleading impression was conveyed. Five common practices are identified: 1. Selective Citation: A biased selection of studies were reviewed or cited. 2. Letting the Evidence Speak for Itself: Overrepresentation of blacks in prison or among the executed relative to their share of the population was noted, with readers left to draw their own conclusions. 3. The Mixed Bag: Impressive lists of studies supposedly supporting a discrimination hypothesis were padded, by lumping together studies concerning a variety of criminal justice processes besides sentencing, and various legally irrelevant defendant traits besides race. 4. Research Democracy-All Studies are Created Equal: Equal weight was implicitly given to all studies regardless of methodological rigor, in a field where it was the least rigorous studies which were most likely to support the discrimination hypothesis. 5. Magnanimous Neutrality: The available evidence was described as mixed or ambiguous, which, while technically accurate, was a misleading description of evidence which largely contradicted the discrimination hypothesis.

This paper reviews the available scientific evidence that relates racism to the elevated rates of hypertension for African Americans. Societal racism can indirectly affect the risk of hypertension by limiting socioeconomic opportunities and mobility for African Americans. Racism can also affect hypertension by 1) restricting access to desirable goods and services in society, including medical care; and 2) creating a stigma of inferiority and experiences of discrimination. This paper evaluates the available evidence for perceptions of discrimination. African Americans frequently experience discrimination and these experiences are perceived as stressful. Several lines of evidence suggest that stressors are positively related to hypertension risk. Exposure to racial stressors under laboratory conditions reliably predicts cardiovascular reactivity and such responses have been associated with longer-term cardiovascular risk. Few population-based studies have examined the association between exposure to racial discrimination and hypertension, and the findings, though suggestive of a positive association between racial bias and blood pressure, are neither consistent nor clear. However, the existing literature identifies important new directions for the comprehensive measurement of discrimination and the design of rigorous empirical studies that can evaluate theoretically derived ideas about the association between discrimination and hypertension.

India's Imperial Formations explores the ways in which empire building occurs and consolidates through the Indian and diasporic cultural landscape where a collusion with whiteness, Hindu fundamentalism, casteism, and religious and racial bigotry are rampant, and create hegemonic imaginaries of an India that denies a democratic space of multiple Indias to coexist together. India is not only home to the world’s largest film industry but also has one of the oldest media ecosystems today with a prolific output in television, radio, print, and digital media. These systems shape hearts and minds in the large nation and also have significant impact in the region as well as in the world due to India’s vast diaspora population. This book argues that Indian culture industries are a crucial site to investigate constructions of Islamophobia, casteism, sinophobia, sexism, colorism and anti-Blackness. Within the work, the authorshighlight the urgent need to evaluate the complicity of Indian and diasporic cultural production in perpetuating a casual and sometimes even aggressive normalization of bigotry and discrimination towards minoritized communities. This polemical book is written by three scholars of culture, gender and postcolonial studies providing an accessible yet rigorous study of these issues.

Unequal treatment: report of the institute of medicine on racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare

This is an extraordinary and timely study of both the history and contemporary circumstances concerning the African oil palm in Brazil, where enslaved Africans and their descendants applied ancestral knowledges of dendê (the Afro-Brazilian term for palm oil) to create Bahia's agroecologies of resistance, subsistence economies, and distinct cultures. In Palm Oil Diaspora, Case Watkins makes novel theoretical and empirical contributions to the rich historical scholarship on the circulation of plants, peoples, and African knowledge systems in the making of the Atlantic World. He demonstrates how the transatlantic transfer of African oil palm marked not simply the movement of an important crop across the Atlantic and the relocation of cultures, but also led to the growth of sustainable agroforest landscapes and a subaltern Afro-Brazilian dendê economy that still exists today.Watkins's innovative methodology draws on archival materials, ethnographic sources, geospatial mapping, and statistical data to analyze the complex relationships between Black communities, socio-environments, and power. He also bridges literatures on Black geographies, Afro-Brazilian and Atlantic studies, political ecology, and decolonial theory and praxis to examine the power and potential of Bahia's Afro-Brazilian dendê economy. The author interprets Brazilian landscapes to bring to light very human stories of Afro-descendant ingenuity and resilience. One of the most intriguing of these stories is that of Benta, a woman born into Brazilian slavery in the eighteenth century. By cultivating African oil palm with other food crops on provision grounds, Benta improved her conditions and participated in socioecological resistance or cultural-environmental change—that is, patterning polyculture landscapes to counter colonial monoculture plantations.As the title suggests, Watkins argues that the Bahian oil palm landscapes and economies are largely the result of Afro-Brazilian agency, creativity, and resistance. Enslaved Africans and their descendants are recognized here as environmental agents responsible for the proliferation of dendezeiros or African palm groves, contrary to the colonial canon that disparages the agricultural skills of Afro-descendants. For centuries, they transferred, adapted, and blended botanical species to create biodiverse palm groves, which were illegible to authorities. They also carved out an economy of subsistence—a complex system of cultural, ecological, and economic reproduction. Even in the 1960s, when the military dictatorship backed hybrid oil palm plantations that threatened to replace African oil palm landscapes and displace the dendê economy, Afro-Brazilian smallholders adopted new technologies to transform their production processes in ways that defied the predictions of state agronomists. They continued to produce dendê for the culinary and cultural markets, both of which became central to Afro-Bahian identities. Despite the economic potential of these markets, Watkins argues that governments have consistently refused to invest in the Afro-Brazilian dendê economy because they prefer plantation-style monocultures as the model for modern agricultural development and because of anti-Black racism that has long permeated state institutions.The book is clearly written, very well structured, and consists of seven chapters plus an epilogue. The introductory chapter outlines the book's arguments and positions them in relation to broad debates, before introducing key concepts and the Bahia case study. The rest of the chapters are arranged chronologically. In chapter 2 through chapter 4, Watkins analyzes the entangled history of landscapes, cultures, and economies linking Africa and its diaspora in Brazil. He traces palm oil from its emergence in western Africa to biodiverse groves and cultures in northeast Brazil. During the transition from slavery to legitimate trade, the Bahian capital Salvador became the Atlantic hub for the transshipments of African palm oil in the South Atlantic as chapter 5 lays out. Chapter 6 examines how those transatlantic exchanges intensified demand for domestically produced dendê and led to the expansion of dendezeiros in nineteenth-century Bahia. By the early twentieth century, the government had recognized the profitability of palm oil production and imposed a top-down modernist agroindustrial campaign. Chapter 7 is an insightful account of the public-private collaborative development of dendê monoculture plantations, resulting in the downgrading of the Afro-Brazilian dendê economy by the mid-twentieth century.One of the key strengths of Palm Oil Diaspora is how Watkins carefully interprets recent national agrarian censuses to illustrate the continuing invisibility of Afro-Brazilian dendê production. He argues that the exclusion of Bahia's small-scale dendê producers from official datasets is by design, denying their economic value and agricultural contributions. As long as they are invisible in public datasets, they are also barred from most forms of public support. However, a curious omission in the book is an account of the economic importance of the dendê economy to Afro-Bahian livelihoods and Black communities today. In the epilogue, Watkins suggests that dendê production is economically significant for these communities, but provides no data to support that position. This omission notwithstanding, Palm Oil Diaspora is a rich and rigorous study that offers fresh perspectives on how we understand dendê landscapes, the role of Afro-Brazilian agency, and agrarian development in Brazil.