Internacional: APS 24th Annual Convention

The Masquerade of Race

James Jackson’s research finds that responses to stress in life, more than race, explain health disparities among populations.

There are some considerable health disparities in American society that seem tied to race. White people, for instance, live many years longer than blacks on average. In his keynote address at the 24th APS Annual Convention on Thursday, James S. Jackson of the University of Michigan, who is black, joked that he could live seven more years just by saying he was white on a survey.

But this supposedly black-and-white matter contains a lot of grey.

While white people also have more favorable physical health outcomes, African Americans have more favorable mental health outcomes. What’s more, many of tehse disparities aren’t present in the early years of life.

The complexity of the statistics has led Jackson to challenge the “easy” idea of race as an explanation for physical and mental health disparities.

“Racial group differences that we observe are really only a masquerade — and in fact they are not really racial group differences at all,”Jackson says.

Jackson’s work over the years has shown that these differences are best explained not by race but by the types of behaviors people engage in to reduce the stressors of life. Faced with a stressful environment, people of both groups often turn to coping mechanisms like eating comfort foods, drinking, smoking, or using drugs.

These coping strategies have different effects on black and white people, Jackson and his colleagues have found. They appear to raise the probability of depression in whites, but actually seem to buffer the onset of mental health problems in blacks.

What happens with many black people, argues Jackson, is that in the face of a stressful life environment they turn to these physically damaging behaviors. That saves them mental anguish, but it comes at the expense of biodily health problems such as Type 2 diabetes.

In other words, it’s a confluence of cultural factors and psychological responses related to stress in life that determines one’s health trajectory — as opposed to race alone.

“We really believe this is about psychology,” he says. “That is, the inter-relationship between physical and mental health disparities is about the utilization of stress-coping mechanisms over the life-course.”

Jackson and his colleagues have underscored this point by manipulating the statistics to make a white profile look black, and vice versa. Doing this — essentially controlling for race — demonstrates that even as race disappears from the picture, the health disparity trends remain.

“We’re arguing that individuals become racial through their experiences over the life-course,” Jackson says. “Blacks don’t start off life as black. They end life as black.”

This news was publicized through the APS website (Association for Psychological Science)