In his keynote remarks at the 80th annual St. Louis County NAACP Freedom Fund Leadership Dinner in St. Louis on June 23, it resonated how often health effects came up in Newark, New Jersey Mayor Ras Baraka’s message about tackling violence, poverty and issues of urban blight his city. The problems he described were not unlike that is occurring in other cities across America.
“The issues in Newark affect us all,” Baraka said. “I know that sometimes we feel like we have come so far and we’ve garnered so much success, there is so much that we have accomplished, but if you really looked at the state of affairs, we have come a long way – we just haven’t come far enough.”
In a telling recollection, Baraka spoke about the National Black Political convention held in 1972 in Gary Indiana, where 10,000 people from all walks of life advocated for what was needed in American communities.
At its reunion in Gary just a few weeks ago, Baraka said, “What bothered me was, some of the things that they talked about at the convention in 1972 still are the problems today. One of the things they asked for was – get this – free health care. They said that we need public health clinics in our neighborhoods.
“But what did they know? They knew that we were dying of every major disease that existed in this country; that our kids couldn’t even survive asthma; that we had upper respiratory illnesses and were dying of conjunctive heart failure. And diseases that were curable, we were still dying from because we did not have access to health care in our communities. And now as hospitals close, we still use the emergency room as our primary care health physician because we don’t have access to real health care.
Baraka also talked about the proliferation of automatic assault weapons and ensuing violence that cuts short too many lives, and the unwillingness of elected leaders to ban them; police killings of unarmed black men; disinvestment in certain areas in communities, and called for an “urban Marshall Plan” to invest and rebuild America’s cities.
“There is a crisis of “will’ in America; a crisis of democracy and a crisis of inequality,” Baraka said.
A paper published last year in the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology is one of a growing body of research indicating that racial discrimination affects mental and physical health. Conclusions in “Self-reported Experiences of discrimination and Health: Scientific Advances, Ongoing Controversies, and Emerging Issues,” authors from Emory, Columbia and Harvard universities noted that discrimination based on race or ethnicity continues to be a persistent experience for people of color in the United States across numerous domains, including housing, community policing, and health care treatment.
UCLA researchers have examined what public health can do to improve the mental health status of persons who experience discrimination. In a recent Fielding School of Public Health magazine, Professor Dr. Vickie Mays stated,
“We now have decades of research showing that when people are chronically treated differently, unfairly, or badly, it can have effects ranging from low self-esteem to a higher risk for developing stress-related disorders such as anxiety and depression.”
Additionally, Mays suggests using electronic screening data for greater understanding of patient experience with discrimination, and the possible need for selecting health providers they may feel more comfortable with.
