Lecture 8: Race, Ethnicity, and Nativity

Question 1

essentialist perspective of race

Answer 1

• Emphasized genetic distinctiveness
• Race is immutable (unchangeable)
• A way for the scientific community to justify racial exploitation and discrimination
• Scientists argued that 2 diseases only afflicted Black people, and thus, race is a biological construct.

Question 1

evidence against the essentialist perspective

Answer 1

• Evidence does not support the essentialist perspective
  Human Genome Project: demonstrated that there is more genetic variation within races than between groups
• Within-group heterogeneity

Question 2

the social construction of race

Answer 2

defined through and by social interactions across historical time that categorize individuals according to arbitrary phenotypic characteristics

Question 3

ethnicity

Answer 3

• Social categorization of people into groups based on common attitudes, beliefs, religion, language, and/or cultural lifestyle
• Groupings based on shared geographic birthplace or national heritage

Question 4

nativity

Answer 4

• Being born in or outside of a country
• Differential processes of assimilation and acculturation

Question 5

distirbution of mental health in Canada by race

Answer 5

• Changes to “race” categories on the Canadian census
• A lot of conflating between race and ethnicity
• The wording of the question has not changed since 1996
• “Visible minority” and “population group” categories
• Since 2001, two separate circles for Arab and West Asian

Question 6

mental health paradox

Answer 6

• Blacks & Hispanics/Latinos generally experience higher rates of psychological distress, and depressive and anxiety symptoms than Whites.
• Hispanics, Blacks, & Asians all have lower rates of lifetime & past-year psychiatric disorders than Whites.
• When Blacks and Hispanics/Latinos experience mental illness, their episodes tend to be more severe, persistent, and debilitating than other racial/ethnic groups.

Question 7

possible explanations for the mental health paradox

Answer 7

• There is more stigma surrounding mental illness in racialized groups
• Racialized people tend to be dismissed in healthcare settings
• Racialized people may not have the resources to access psychiatric diagnoses
• Cross-cultural differences in the manifestations of mental illness
• Tools may work better in some populations

Question 8

ethnicity and mental health in canada example

Answer 8

• Francophones in Manitoba had worse self-reported mental health, but equal or lower rates of diagnosed disorder.
• Explanation: Francophones might have different health-seeking behaviours than non-Francophones

Question 9

racism

Answer 9

• An organized system that is premised on the categorization and ranking of societal groups into races. The dominant group devalues, disempowers, and differentially allocates desirable societal opportunities and resources to radical groups categorized as inferior.
• Proxy for economic exploitation, political marginalized, and social stigma

Question 10

xenophobia

Answer 10

• Attitudes, prejudices and behaviour that reject, exclude and often vilify persons, based on the perception that they are outsiders or foreigners to the community, society or national identity.
• In social systems, xenophobic reactions additionally reflect a fear of loss. This fear concerns social status, the inscription of rights and privileges as well as the allocation and access of scarce resources.

Question 11

3 levels of stress that result from racism & xenophobia

Answer 11

• Institutional: racism within institutions
• Interpersonal: racism between people
• Internalized: self-stigma

Question 12

institutional racism & mental health

Answer 12

• Black people are more likely to lose close family members and friends
• This can have negative health implications
• The prison industrial complex negatively impacts the families and communities of inmates.
• Mass incarceration worsened kids’ mental health by 25-45%
• Aggressive policing: living in a neighbourhood where one was frequently stopped resulted in increased symptoms of PTS and anxiety
• Witnessing violence, even through the media, can be detrimental to mental health

Question 13

anxiety & depression in Black and Asian Americans after the death of George Floyd

Answer 13

• There was a significant increase in anxiety and depression for Black and Asian Americans following the video of George Floyd’s killing began to spread.
• This occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic when anti-Asian hate was prevalent.
• This may explain the increase in anxiety and depression in Asian Americans as well.

Question 14

police killings and mental health study

Answer 14

• Exposure to police killings of unarmed Black Americans was linked to poor mental health for black Americans, not White Americans.
• Points to a fear in Black Americans of the institution of policing

Question 15

discrimination is positively assocaited with

Answer 15

• Increased anxiety symptoms, psychological distress, lifetime mood, and anxiety disorders in Black, Latino, and Asian adults
• Worse mental health (ex. Anxiety and depression symptoms) and inversely associated with positive mental health (ex. Resilience, self-worth, self-esteem) in children

Question 16

impacts of vicarious (second-hand) discrimination

Answer 16

vicarious discrimination has the same negative effects as interpersonal discrimination

Question 17

cultural racism & mental health

Answer 17

• Negative racial stereotyping triggers unconscious bias with negative implications for health and healthcare
• Across virtually every type of medical intervention, from the most simple to the most sophisticated, blacks and other minorities receive fewer procedures and poorer quality medical care than whites (Smedley, Stith, and Nelson 2003).

Question 18

internalized racism & menta health

Answer 18

• “Internalized racism (or internalized stigma or self-stereotyping) is another pathway by which cultural racism can harm mental health.” (Williams, 2018, p. 474)
• The rejection of positive stereotypes and the endorsement of negative stereotypes were associated with lower levels of self-esteem.

Question 19

healthy migrant effect

Answer 19

• the health of immigrants tends to be better than the native population in the first-generation
• As immigrants spend time in a country, their health converges with that of the native population.
• The children of immigrants tend to have health habits that are more similar to the native population than their country of origin.

Question 20

hispanic paradox

Answer 20

the healthy migrant effect for Hispanic immigrants in the U.S.

Question 21

explaning the healthy migrant effect

Answer 21

• selection effect
• salmon bias

Question 22

selection effect

Answer 22

immigrants who come to a new country tend to be healthier and heartier

Question 23

salmon bias hypothesis

Answer 23

people appear to be healthier because they go home to their neighbourhood to die. This means their death isn’t registered in the place where they died.

Question 24

mental health of immigrants

Answer 24

• Immigrants tend to have lower rates of psychiatric disorders
• Immigrants from the U.S., Latin America, and the Caribbean are more likely than Canadian-born respondents to have high SRMH
• Immigrants from the Middle East, East Asia, and Western Asia were less likely to have high SRMH
• Recent immigrant health was better than the mental health of immigrants who have been in Canada for several years and Canadian-born respondents
• Evidence of the healthy immigrant effect

Question 25

mechanisms for the mental health of immigrants

Answer 25

• Acculturation and assimilation processes
• Cultural beliefs

Question 26

issues in race & mental health research

Answer 26

• Coverage of diverse populations
• Measurements of mental health across social groups
• Culturally bound construction of disorders
• Interpretation of rates
• Within- and between-group heterogeneity