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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums"White people cant hang: Black Americans may be more resilient to stress than white Americans"
http://www.salon.com/2016/12/19/white-people-cannot-hang-black-americans-may-be-more-resilient-to-stress-than-white-americans_partner/White Americans live on average 3.6 years longer than black Americans. If you look only at men, the difference becomes 4.4 years. As I found in a recent study, the main reason behind this disparity is that black Americans are at higher risk of most chronic medical conditions, such as hypertension, obesity, heart disease, stroke and cancer than other racial and ethnic groups. However, research suggests minority groups in the United States tend to be better off in terms of mental health than white Americans. Depression, anxiety and suicide, for instance, are more common among white Americans than among black Americans.
Research, including work I have done with my colleagues at the University of Michigan, demonstrates that although white Americans are, on average, the healthiest group, they are also, on average, far less resilient than black Americans. It seems that vulnerability is a cost of privilege, and resilience comes as a result of adversity.
What do we mean by resilience? We call a group resilient when it is healthy, given the level of exposures to a wide range of psychosocial risk factors. For instance, psychosocial adversities such as lower educational attainment are associated with increased mortality in general. But the effect is lower in some groups than in others, so we would describe the groups where the effect is lower as more resilient.
White Americans seem to be more vulnerable to certain psychosocial risk factors for a wide range of physical and mental health outcomes compared to minority groups. In other words, they are less resilient less able to successfully adapt to life tasks in the face of highly adverse conditions. Across several studies using nationally representative samples of Americans, my colleagues and I have consistently found that white Americans are more vulnerable to the effects of risk factors such as low education, anger, depression, feeling of control over owns life and other psychosocial factors on mortality.
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MFM008
(19,803 posts)I got an ulcer from this shit.
erpowers
(9,350 posts)When you have been through what black people have been through you have to be resilient. Look at what black people have been through. Slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, discrimination. When you feel you have to be 10%-20% better than the next person in order to get the same reward as that person you might become more resilient than that person. When someone says to you that you are ugly, stupid, dirty, and trashy, but you respond with I am black and I am proud, that is nothings but resilient and defiant. When someone threatens to lynch you and does lynch you in order to prevent you from voting, but you still fight for the right to vote, that is nothing but resilient. When someone beats you in order to prevent you from trying to escape your enslavement, but you try to escape again, that is nothing but resilient.
Now, it is true that this information could be nothing more than pure BS. It is also possible that white people suffer from more mental health problems because they may be more involved in the rat race than black people. It is very possible that white people spend more of their time trying to keep up with the Joneses than black people. That could lead white people to have more mental health problems because they are looking around and seeing everything they do not have and becoming upset because they do not have certain things. It is possible that black people may feel they have already lost the rat race and are less concerned with material things because they feel they will never have those things anyway.