Posts tagged race
Embracing All Shades: The Protective Role of Skin Tone Satisfaction Amidst Gendered Racial Microaggressions

In recent years, Black women’s everyday experiences with unique oppression based on the intersections of race and gender have been understood through the concept of gendered racial microaggressions. Experiencing gendered racial microaggressions has been associated with a variety of mental health outcomes, including depression, anxiety, psychological distress, and traumatic stress.

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The Skin We’re In: How Race might Influence Disease Recognition

TSC is a rare genetic condition, known for skin brain and skin lesions; therefore, it is classified as a neurocutaneous disorder. As I began caring for patients with TSC, I noticed that not many of my patients were Black. I looked to the literature and asked people in the community, but no one seemed to have answer for this possible disparity.

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Learning to listen: Storytelling infused with stigma

Stigma is a troubling barrier to good research. It presents a double challenge to the researcher: an ethical one (research might subject stigmatised individuals and groups to harm) and an epistemological one (stigma creates silences, making it hard to gather data). In my PhD research with African migrant women living in Ireland, I wanted to explore life experiences of gender-based violence, and particularly the stigma that surrounds those experiences. How could I ensure that my research participants were not inadvertently exposed to more stigma because of my inquiry? And how I could practice ethical research, but still interrogate the most private and taboo topics, including violence, rape, and personal and collective feelings of shame?

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The DNA damage repair landscape in Black women with breast cancer

Black people have the highest cancer mortality rate of any racial or ethnic group. Among Black women, breast cancer makes up about a third of all cancer diagnoses, with ER+ breast cancer being the most common. Black women with ER+ breast cancer are 42% more likely to die of the disease than white women.

This study examined gene expression in breast tumor and normal samples from 185 Black patients and compared them to samples from white women, revealing significant molecular differences in DNA repair in breast tissue that could help explain why more Black women die from ER+ breast cancer. The work suggests that addressing the disparity could be as simple as changing the timing of existing breast cancer treatments for Black women.

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Race and the Probability of Becoming a Head Coach for the National Football League

I’ve never had good timing. I buy stocks before a crash, I start binging a new TV series just as it’s erased from public consciousness, but, for once, my timing was impeccable. On February 1st, my coauthors (Josh Pitts and John Johnson) and I published a paper in The Review of Black Political Economy. The paper aimed to determine if there is racial bias in the hiring process of NFL Head Coaches. That same day, former Miami Dolphins Head Coach, Brian Flores, filed a lawsuit against the NFL and three NFL franchises alleging racial discrimination in the hiring process of NFL head coaches. Talk about good timing…

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Equality Smatters

The number of African American linguists is growing, albeit gradually. Very few of us share my legacy as a Black baby boomer whose life began in poverty, yet I will soon assume the presidency of the Linguistic Society of America. My life reflects a special brand of American exceptionalism that defies easy classification, and my former Stanford student, Professor Tracy Conner, has been kind enough to discuss my journey from Brooklyn, through inner-city Philadelphia as a child and college student.

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When data doesn’t see race

Since the Covid-19 vaccination programme began in the UK, it has hardly been possible to discuss vaccine confidence without referring to the variation between different ethnic groups. When we at RSPH polled the public in December 2020, we found a significant disparity in acceptance of the Covid-19 vaccine, with 57% of respondents from ethnic minority backgrounds saying they were likely to receive the vaccine if advised to by their GP or healthcare professional, compared to 79% of white respondents.

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