Racism and infant mortality in more detail

It's amazing - when it's a result nobody wants to hear - there have to be multiple studies of hundreds/thousands of people before anybody will listen and even then every effort is made to discredit the results - but when it's to confirm the status quo a study can include less than a hundred people, and be quoted all over the world as fact!!!

"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep."
- Saul Bellow

I know - and it's tearing me apart. Thankyou for the quote! it's awesome. :)

It's from my little collection for posting during Usenet arguments - must post it here. :)

[NODS]

A small degree of hysteresis in one's belief system is a good thing, to prevent one being "blown around by every wind of belief", as someone in the New Testament once put it (or as the atheists put it, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof").

I said a *small* degree, guys... =:o\

I think that's quite right. I don't think it's ever wrong, when confronted by a new idea, to say "I'm not convinced, give me more evidence". It's sad, though, that POC have been telling us White folk about their experiences forever, but we find them so hard to believe. Perhaps that's understandable - we almost never see the discrimination with our own eyes, and besides, who wants to live in a racist society? But we've got to de-ostrich, and I hope these figures help.

The thing is, it's NEVER wrong to question something that goes against your own direct experience.

Kate has been diligent in researching things -- and when someone says "the black characters on Doctor Who are treated differently", she digs in and finds out whether that's true. To someone who came in believing in their gut that it was true, Kate is the equivalent of the status quo folks. Whereas to someone who is looking at the new Who from a storytelling or writerly perspective, it's clearly not the case, and the numbers actually back that up.

The numbers back up the assertion that women who feel they're victims of racism are more likely to deliver a low-birth-weight baby, and that their children are more likely to die. That's sobering.

I am interested in how you might factor out all the obvious legacy of racism -- poverty, education, cultural priorities and traditions, etc. I've been told repeatedly that certain aspects of the inner city culture are "a black thing I wouldn't understand", but some of that seems pretty obvious to me, having read books like MAMA (which illustrate pretty well the lingering effects of racism and poor social policies and how they shaped many black families).

But there IS a difference between questioning the results and discrediting the studies. The whole POINT of science is to question, after all, to get at the truth.

For example, I find it likely that racism is a stressor, but wasn't sure it was quantifiable. My specific qualm remains: how do you separate the rather abstract concept of racism from the clear elements of the legacy of racism?

More than that, I'm not sure how useful a study like this is, because addressing a nebulous concept like "racism" -- and in this case, the fact that certain people feel like victims of racism -- isn't necessarily something you can build policy around. There is no indicator for how much of the perceived racism is backed up by actions or statements, and how much of it is in the victim's mind. That doesn't matter on one level because it's the perception of racism that creates the stress.

Whereas you CAN build policies around more understandable things like "the schools are broken", "there is no health clinic in this part of town", or even "the system rewards multiple births for unwed mothers seeking state support".

There is only so much that can be done on my end to not act like a racist -- I can address most of the actions and words that are likely to cause offense, for example -- but I cannot control how you choose to interpret my words or actions.

I'm not making the case here that it's the fault of the women who believe themselves to be victims -- far from it -- I'm just saying that it's probably more productive to deal with parts of racism's legacy that can be defined and addressed in more obvious ways, than it is to dwell on feelings of oppression.. In fact, addressing the more obvious problems may help reverse the harder-to-tackle stuff, if we're lucky. Education and health care are bigger factors than almost anything else, across the board, and making progress there will likely have a bigger impact.

Please note I also have a science degree - And also please note - earlier post said quantifying this phenomenon is the difficult thing - so I agree with you there completely on that one and the difficulty of getting correct results given so many variables. But there is absolutely no doubt that triple the death rate of europeans is a problem and that's often been blamed on the people who are actually doing the suffering - how many people do you know who are sick and it's somehow their fault? Anyway most of all I love the way you've got straight down to the heart of the issue - what should be done about it. It's pretty obvious something needs to be done, and given that treating this information like a fact until we know better wont stop the earth from turning and again and none of this detracts from my point- which I will state slightly differently- there's none so blind as do not want to see. But you are right when you say we should always question research, and that's particularly apparent when it's funded or conducted by someone with a vested interest - because my *blind* statement holds just as true then.

Anyway keep on questioning - the truth is out there - just don't think that you'll like it when you see it for it doesn't come with sealed certificates from god. Nor will it be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth because we poor creatures experience so little of the world, and have to interpret the rest. So for now I'm happy a little blob of yellow on my lawn is a flower, given that it's surrounded by other little blobs of yellow that definitely are flowers, but if it flies away, I'll be equally confident it's a butterfly. But that still doesn't stop the "fact" that my lawn "needs" mowing. :)

I don't really understand statistics, but the researchers are using statistical tools to correct for the influence of other factors such as poverty and education, so that what's left is just the effect of personally experiencing discrimination.

If the experiences of racism seem nebulous, then the next step is to make them seem more concrete, so I want to get hold of the questionnaires about experiences of discrimination, and also some anecdotal evidence which will help clarify what goes on. The additional studies (which I'll snag next week) should help us out there.

Of course, it's not possible to completely separate the perception of being discriminated against from more concrete phenomena such as poverty - the study which found the most stress resulted from discrimination in getting a job or at work is a good example. Perhaps these are areas where policy can be built (or improved upon), both by the government and by employers too, who after all stand to lose a lot if they don't make the best use of their human resources.

Grasp of statistics does seem weak when you're saying that "what's left is *just* the effect of..." That is the researchers intention, and most studies are pretty diligent about such things, but there have been plenty of examples where some crucial variable that could not have been or was not foreseen has turned the results of a study on its heels. That's why there's lies, damned lies and statistics. Not that I think the studies are wrong in this case, partly because you've got studies coming from different directions confirming each other, and partly because hell, it just makes sense and I'm prepared to go with an unproven H1 when the H0 makes no sense at all. Statistics are wonderful but they are also dangerous - for a start alot of research on weight "corrects" alot of the results because they don't like the answers & Drug companies are chronic for tampering with, er, "correcting" their results. but (I think I remember) this study said very openly how it did its corrections and that's usually the sign of a good study - open to peer review. Sorry pig/pedantic headedness just.. has.. to.. can't... help... myself...

As per white disbelief in the face of POC information - it's understandable to some degree -- it's easy to shake out the big stuff like actual slavery, laws written two different ways and so on. But what we are working on now has the many to one problem -- one POC will experience many examples of discrimination from many people, but each of *those* people, if they even recognize their own racism in the first place (big if) will only see their own single tree and not the forest out there.

It's a similar phenomenon online when one person feels flamed to death about something -- but *each* person responding was "only" doing so once. But the pile-on still exists.

I wish I knew what the answers were for getting everyone to understand these things. I know that my big "aha" was relating it back to my own experiences of discrimination as a deaf person & as a woman. And I had to understand and name those discriminations first, instead of somehow blaming them on myself, to learn to see the larger patterns.

Hm, and I bet self blame is operating here too, which would increase the resulting stresses from the discrimination even more. Gah.

I love your example of the tree and the forest!

Because White peeps almost never experience racial discrimination ourselves, it does helps hugely to be able to relate it to something we have experienced: bullying, ableism, flamefests. :)

Self-blame... constantly being told you suck eventually makes you believe you do suck. So yeah.

Kate, this might interest you.

http://www.slate.com/id/2198731/

Ooh ta!

"The strongest effect was seen in women in their twenties, and women with college education discrimination in finding a job or in the workplace were most closely correleated with VLBW."

Is there a word missing from this sentence? It doesn't quite parse.

That aside, thanks for posting this. Very interesting (horrifying).

Thanks - I've repaired that mangled sentence.