New Article: Health Inequities Among African Americans

Posted by on October 7, 2005

[posted from Community Based Participatory Research listserv]

This journal article may be of interest:

International Journal of Health Services
Publisher: Baywood Publishing Company
Issue: Volume 35, Number 3 / 2005
Pages: 485 – 498
http://www.baywood.com/journals/PreviewJournals.asp?Id=0020-7314

RESEARCHING HEALTH INEQUITIES AMONG AFRICAN AMERICANS: THE IMPERATIVE TO UNDERSTAND SOCIAL CLASS

M. Norman Oliver and Carles Muntaner

Abstract:
Racial and ethnic inequities in health abound in many disease categories. African-American communities suffer from an increased burden of illness, with higher incidence and mortality rates and more severe morbidity in cerebrovascular disease, heart disease, several cancers, diabetes, and many other ailments. Healthy People 2010, the federal government’s health plan, calls for eliminating health disparities by race, ethnicity, gender, education, income, disability, geographic location, or sexual orientation. Research aimed at increasing our understanding of these health disparities and designing and evaluating interventions to improve African-American health is hampered by a liberal, classless approach. The authors argue for a theoretical framework in this research that recognizes that class exploitation sets the stage for and interacts with racial discrimination to determine racial inequities in health.