Abigail A Sewell

Systems of race, racism, and racial inequality are of consequence to the prevalence of illness and to racial disparities in illness prevalence. Yet a historicized understanding of how racially segregated neighborhoods are created from these systems of racial oppression is absent in neighborhood effect studies documenting the harmful effects of living in racial ghettos. Drawing on insights from the neighborhood change, place stratification, and housing discrimination literatures, this essay illustrates the ways that structural manifestations of racial oppression are implicated in the illnesses experienced via the neighborhood arrangements that arise out of institutionalized forms of racism. These illustrations are demonstrated by focusing on a system of unequal relationships created by racial oppression on the part of the mortgage lending industry. This essay explicates how the unequal distribution of resources by gatekeepers of the mortgage lending industry is implicated in the poor health outcomes of racial minorities, the deteriorated conditions of the environments in which racial minorities spend their lives, and the segregation of ethnoracially marginalized people into socially, economically, and materially deprived communities.

Background A disproportionate number of people who are killed by police each year are Black. While much attention rightly remains on victims of police brutality, there is a sparse literature on police brutality and perinatal health outcomes. We aimed to explore how Black pregnant women perceive police brutality affects them during pregnancy and might affect their children. Methods This qualitative study involved semi-structured interviews among 24 Black pregnant women in New Haven, Connecticut (January 2017 to August 2018). Interview questions explored neighborhood factors, safety, stressors during pregnancy, and anticipated stressors while parenting. Grounded theory informed the analysis. Results Participants, regardless of socioeconomic status, shared experiences with police and beliefs about anticipated police brutality, as summarized in the following themes: (1) experiences that lead to police distrust – “If this is the way that mommy’s treated [by police]”; (2) anticipating pol...

Objectives: Health studies of structural racism/discrimination have been animated through the deployment of neighborhood effects frameworks that engage institutional­ist concerns about sociopolitical resources and mobility structures. This study high­lights the acute illness risks of place-based inequalities and neighborhood-varying race-based inequalities by focusing on access to and the regulation of mortgage markets.Design: By merging neighborhood data on lending processes from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act with individual health from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, this article evalu­ates the acute childhood illness risks of four mutually inclusive, political economies using multilevel generalized linear models.Setting: Chicago, IL, USAParticipants: Youth aged 0 to 17 yearsMethods: Multilevel logistic regressionMain Outcome Measures: The prevalence of 11 acute illnesses (cold/flu, sinus trouble, sore throat/tonsils, headache, upset stom­ach, bronchi...

ABSTRACT This study identifies socioeconomic factors that contribute to wealth advantages or disadvantages across ethnoracial groups in early adulthoods during the Great Recession. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we find that current and childhood social class partially explain racial disparities in debt, assets, and assistance with housing payments but do little to account for disparities in homeownership. These results underscore the life course perspective that wealth inequality disrupts the maintenance of successful adulthood for minority racial groups. Ethnoracial disparities in homeownership are a critical lever of the wealth-race gap later in adulthood.

time. As more and more is expected of people operating on perpetually shortening timelines, this book provides essential insights into the nature of contemporary life. The Sociology of Speed should be of interest to a broad range readers with general interest in economic sociology, occupations, organizations, work, science and technology studies, sociological theory, and more. The writing is accessible enough to make it appropriate for undergraduate courses in these areas as well, but the theoretical implications are weighty enough that it will be even more valuable for graduate-level work.

Recent immigration and migration patterns have altered the ethnoracial composition of Alameda County, California. Sociopolitical leaders have struggled to adjust to these changes. In an effort to facilitate limited English speakers’ access to critical municipal services, Oakland—the largest municipal in Alameda County—passed an Equal Access to Services Ordinance on May 8, 2001, which is a groundbreaking language access legislation for the City of Oakland’s public administration. Using data from the 2000 Census and the 2005–2011 American Community Survey, this study examines the impact of bilingual employment policies on the ethnoracial segmentation of Alameda County workers. Logistic regression reveals that bilingual employment policies have reorganized both targeted (i.e., public contact) and non-targeted occupations within the local government public administration sector. Specifically, Spanish/Chinese bilingual speakers made gains in the public administration sector (the intended...

Scholars of race and racism are hungry for the nourishment that The Racial Order promises. After asserting that “there never has been a comprehensive and systematic theory of race” (p. 1) and lamenting the lack of theoretical development in sociological race studies that has handicapped race and racism scholars’ understanding of racial change (pp. 2–5), Emirbayer and Desmond lay out a theoretical framework guided by key pragmatist insights embodied in the works of Dewey, Durkheim, and Bourdieu that aims to “provide an effective language with which to think and talk about—and intelligently to address—the problems of race in today’s society” (p. 25). The framework is organized into three important parts: Reflexivity, Relationality, and Reconstruction. The first part, an indictment of the relative nonreflexivity of race scholars regarding their intellectual projects, is largely a rehash of prior published work (Emirbayer and Desmond 2012). The three tiers of unconsciousness—social, disciplinary, and scholastic— work to cloud the objectivity of social theorists in ways that paralyze race theories into circularity. This part, consisting of one chapter, defines the racial object of race in symbolic terms of reification and engages productively in the ongoing debate regarding the collapsibility of race, ethnicity, and nationality (Bonilla-Silva 1999; Brubaker 2004, 2015; Loveman 1999; Omi and Winant 2014; Wimmer 2008, 2015) by insisting that race deserves its own intellectual constructionism despite the fact that ethnic formations predate racial formations. The bulk of the manuscript is devoted to part II, which focuses on the structures (chapter 3), dynamics (chapter 4), institutions (chapter 5), and social psychology (chapter 6) of the racial order. Between chapters 3 and 4, Emirbayer and Desmond break down the false divides among structure and agency, arguing that they are two sides of the same coin (p. 180). (Racial) structures become relational processes, not things—dynamic, not static—a perspective that integrates Bourdieu’s “field” into race theory. Meanwhile, agency (or racial dynamics) becomes iterative propensities to accept the illusions created by racial projects that are necessary to navigate the racial field. Between chapters 5 and 6, the authors disappear the micro/macro divide, arguing instead for an interaction-grounded understanding of institutions (“bounded sets of practices” [p. 204]) and interstices (publics and social movements) as sites where the racial field is reproduced agnostically through routinization. Interactions animate the social psychological forces (attitudes, stereotypes, prejudices) that create a collective racial habitus, which is embodied in the individual via the body, the cognitive realm, the morality of one’s ethics, and aesthetic appreciations. Whiteness, exploitation, appropriation, universalism, and other forms of symbolic violence to dominated peoples are derivatives of these forces. The final portion of the manuscript attends to envisioning a racial future that draws on the assumptions of the prior chapters. The authors suggest that the people have three options—color-blindness, cosmopolitanism, or racial democracy—pointing to points of intervention via individuals, interactions, and institutions. Idealistic to the end, the manuscript closes with an optimistic view of race scholarship headed, of course, by its “comprehensive” theory of the racial order. The efforts of Emirbayer and Desmond are commendable; however, the project they set forth for themselves is built upon dubious claims. Rather than being the first comprehensive and systematic theory of race, The Racial Order, I would argue, provides an alluring, synthetic language of U.S. race relations that marginalizes and colonizes 707201 SREXXX10.1177/2332649217707201Sociology of Race and EthnicityBook Review research-article2017

The author makes the argument that many racial disparities in health are rooted in political economic processes that undergird racial residential segregation at the mesolevel—specifically, the neighborhood. The dual mortgage market is considered a key political economic context whereby racially marginalized people are isolated into degenerative ecological environments. A multilevel root-cause conceptual framework, the racism-race reification process ( R3p), is proposed and preliminarily tested to delineate how institutional conditions shape the health of racially marginalized individuals through the reification of race. After reviewing and critiquing the conceptual and theoretical roots of R3p, the key components of the synergistic framework are detailed and applied to clarify extant understandings of the upstream (i.e., macrolevel) factors informing racial health disparities. Using aggregated data from the 1994 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and Neighborhood Change Database merged at...

Blacks and Latinos are less likely than whites to access health insurance and utilize health care. One way to overcome some of these racial barriers to health equity may be through advances in technology that allow people to access and utilize health care in innovative ways. Yet, little research has focused on whether the racial gap that exists for health care utilization also exists for accessing health information online and through mobile technologies. Using data from the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS), we examine racial differences in obtaining health information online via mobile devices. We find that blacks and Latinos are more likely to trust online newspapers to get health information than whites. Minorities who have access to a mobile device are more likely to rely on the Internet for health information in a time of strong need. Federally insured individuals who are connected to mobile devices have the highest probability of reliance on the Internet as a ...

This article addresses a void in the literature that connects the wellness of African American boys to academic achievement. The authors call attention to ecological risk factors that impact the vulnerability of Black boys and compromise their learning even before the school bell rings. The No Child Left Behind legislation has created a culture where educational outcomes are placed before student outcomes. The authors posit that school policy, for example Coordinated School Health Programs that provide a holistic approach to addressing the academic achievement of Black Boys should be supported as innovation in education. The findings of the Breaking Barriers report as it relates to personal and emotional factors are highlighted; then the Coordinated School Health Model is outlined; and finally recommendations on how to implement Coordinated School Health Programs reflective of African American boys are offered. The relationship between academic achievement and health status has been overlooked in school reform efforts. The overemphasis on high-stakes testing results as the primary measure of accountability has crippled many school districts ability to fully educate students. Consequently, student outcomes have been sacrificed for educational outcomes. Extant literature reveals that even before the first school bell rings, African American males are vulnerable for school failure. The academic underachievement of African American males has received considerable attention in academic and popular media. While it is well-established that educational attainment is a gateway to improved socioeconomic outcomes, the educational achievement of African American adolescents should be a national priority. For African American boys the mix of school failure, fragmented families, communities that lack cohesion, and educational policy and practice that expect substandard performance have lethal consequences as evidenced by the disparities in health and life expectancy. Geographic location notwithstanding African American male students are more likely than their peers to come from fatherless homes (The Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF), 2009 [A map constructed from AECF's online database indicates that in all states with reliable data that Black children comprised more than half of those children living with single-parents. Most single-parent families are mother-only families.]; Fields, 2003), have a mother in poverty (Eggebeen & Lichter, 1991), have negative interactions with police (Brunson & Miller, 2006; Dannefer & Schutt, 1982; Hurst, Frank, & Browning, 2000), experience some form of trauma (Shakoor & Chalmers, 1991; Berton & Stabb, 1996), and suffer from chronic diseases such as asthma (Akinbami & Schoendorf, 2002; Getahun, Demissie, & Rhoads, 2005). Often ecological risk factors experienced the night before school compromise the required aptitude for learning in the morning. Education systems that ignore the realities of a community's risk and protective factors miss opportunities to educate the whole child. This has become the reality of practices following the implementation of No Child Left Behind Act mandates (NCLB, 2002). Educators have effectively been mandated to sacrifice child outcomes for educational outcomes. The overemphasis on high-stakes testing scores as the primary index for accountability has created, in many cases, an inhumane system of education where the child is fragmented in order to produce test scores. Often, very little regard is given to the conditions or context from which this child has come. African American males are vulnerable in many communities in the United States and are asked to perform in schools without consideration of these conditions. In this article, the authors intend to call attention to the responsibility of schools to address the ecological risk and protective factors confronting African American males. First, the findings of Toldson's (2008) Breaking Barriers report are used to illustrate the importance of considering the influence of personal, emotional, and health factors in educating African American male students. …

Abstract Purpose Past research indicates that blacks are less trusting of physicians than are whites; yet, researchers have not examined within group differences in physician trust by religious denomination – an effort that is complicated by the high correlated nature of race and religion. To better understand black-white differences in physician trust, this chapter examines heterogeneity in trust levels among blacks associated with religious designations that distinguish Black Protestants from other ethnoreligious groups. Methodology/approach Using data from the 2002 and 2006 General Social Surveys, this study adopts an intersectional (i.e., race x religion) typology of religious denomination to understand the black-white gap in physician trust. Weighted multivariate linear regression is employed. Findings Black-white differences in physician trust are identified only when religious affiliation is considered but not when religious affiliation is omitted. Blacks who are affiliated with Black Protestant churches are more trusting than other religious groups, including Evangelical Protestants, Mainline Protestants, and blacks who are affiliated with other faiths. Originality/value This chapter indicates that there is more heterogeneity in trust levels among blacks than between blacks and whites. Moreover, the findings suggest that religion can play an important role in bridging the trust gap between blacks and the medical sciences.

Personal liberation for queer-identified feminists requires that we become conscious about what is inhibiting our ability to combat oppression and act in congruence with our own truth (Moane, 2010). To this end, some scholars have framed feminism as a mechanism of personal liberation from gender and sexist oppression. Yet, this connection can be critiqued due to the disproportionate value traditionally placed on the needs of upper-middle class white women within feminist circles (hooks, 1999). We challenge and complicate extant assertions of personal liberation from sexism through embracing feminism by asking questions such as: Feminist liberation for whom and at whose expense? Those who interrogate the complexity of these questions can draw upon intersectionality theory (Choo & Ferree, 2010; Crenshaw, 1991), but it is still difficult for feminists who occupy intersecting marginalized identities to gain visibility within mono-focused movements (e.g., gender-based violence movement) because the resources of these movements are still often dedicated to ending only one form of oppression (e.g., sexism). We believe that feminists have been seeking ways to ‘‘do’’ intersectionality in historically mono-focused movements without direct

Since the 1930s, researchers have speculated about what role suppressing anger has on the quality and quantity of life of individuals from various social backgrounds. From ulcers and hypertension to depression and schizophrenia, the experience and expression of anger has been found to be influenced by status characteristics such as age, race, and gender. Recently, researchers have suggested that experiencing anger in social interactions is indicative of feeling dissatisfaction concerning perceptively unfair social conditions, social events, and/or social behaviors. Therefore, this study will build on the use of anger as an indirect indicator of inequality in social relationships to assess the disproportionate amounts of anger and the unhealthy anger expression styles Black Americans reportedly exhibit in the workplace. Specifically, this study seeks to answer this question: what influences the manner in which Black Americans experience and express their anger in the workplace? Qualitative in nature, the study employs semi-structured, in-depth interviews and analyzes interview data via a combination of grounded theory and qualitative comparison methods.

This article focuses on an important dimension of obesity reduction and prevention—how information can be better diffused to economically-disadvantaged neighborhoods of color, which are often isolated from sources of social capital that can improve health status and health behaviors. We argue that equitable dissemination of health information and research findings is an important ethical and social justice issue.  Individuals living in economically-disadvantaged neighborhoods face dire environmental barriers and high rates of obesity-related conditions. Using data from two surveys, we show that, while African Americans and Hispanics face significant structural and social barriers to health, they have the highest usage of mobile phone technology. This paradox creates an opportunity to help close the racial obesity gap by providing health information through technological advances in mobile phones. The article establishes a research agenda and best practices for work on health disparities using new forms of mobile phone technology.

Previous research suggests police surveillance practices confer health risks to community members. This study examines whether the public health burden of excessive or ethnoracially inequitable police use of force are amplified or buffered by ethnoracial composition. Multilevel models are used to assess data from the 2009–2012 New York City Community Health Survey merged at the United Hospital Fund level with data from the 2009–2012 New York City Stop, Question, and Frisk Database. The illness associations of ethnoracial composition are amplified by the areal density of police use of force but buffered by the disproportionate police use of force against minorities. Specifically, living in minority communities with a high concentration of use of force by police against pedestrians is associated with an increased risk of diabetes and obesity. However, living in areas with a heavy presence of whites where there are large racial differences in police use of force is associated with an increased risk of poor/fair self‐rated health, high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity. The article concludes by considering the implications of the findings for better understanding the racialized nature of police violence and the consequences of place in distributing surveillance stress and structuring legal cynicism.

Recent immigration and migration patterns have altered the ethnoracial composition of Alameda County, California. Sociopolitical leaders have struggled to adjust to these changes. In an effort to facilitate limited English speakers’ access to critical municipal services, Oakland—the largest municipal in Alameda County—passed an Equal Access to Services Ordinance on May 8, 2001, which is a groundbreaking language access legislation for the City of Oakland’s public administration. Using data from the 2000 Census and the 2005–2011 American Community Survey, this study examines the impact of bilingual employment policies on the ethnoracial segmentation of Alameda County workers. Logistic regression reveals that bilingual employment policies have reorganized both targeted (i.e., public contact) and non-targeted occupations within the local government public administration sector. Specifically, Spanish/Chinese bilingual speakers made gains in the public administration sector (the intended effects), while Black monolingual English speakers experienced losses (the unintended effects). The representation of Black monolingual English speakers in public contact jobs within the local government public administration sector declined by as much as 18 percentage points after the implementation of the nation’s first municipal-level bilingual employment policy. The impact of bilingual employment policies on the East Bay’s Black/Brown relations and African American’s hold on low-skilled jobs in service industries is examined.

A growing body of research highlights the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, including stop-and-frisk policing tactics. Living in a neighborhood with aggressive policing may affect one’s mental health, especially for men who are the primary targets of police stops. We examine whether there is an association between psychological distress and neighborhood-level aggressive policing (i.e., frisking and use of force by police) and whether that association varies by gender. The 2009-2011 New York City (NYC) Stop, Question, and Frisk Database is aggregated to the neighborhood-level (N=34) and merged with individual data from the 2012 NYC Community Health Survey (N= 8,066) via the United Hospital Fund neighborhood of respondents’ residence. Weighted multilevel generalized linear models are used to assess main and gendered associations of neighborhood exposures to aggressive police stops on psychological distress (Kessler-6 items). While the neighborhood stop rate exhibits inconsistent associations with psychological distress, neighborhood-level frisk and use of force proportions are linked to higher levels of non-specific psychological distress among men, but not women. Specifically, men exhibit more non-specific psychological distress and more severe feelings of nervousness, effort, and worthlessness in aggressively surveilled neighborhoods than do women. Male residents are affected by the escalation of stop-and-frisk policing in a neighborhood. Living in a context of aggressive policing is an important risk factor for men's mental health.

This essay makes the argument that many racial disparities in health are rooted in political economic processes that undergird racial residential segregation at the mesolevel – specifically, the neighborhood. The dual mortgage market is considered a key political economic context whereby racially marginalized people are isolated into degenerative ecological environments. A multilevel root cause conceptual framework, the racism-race reification process (R3p), is proposed and preliminarily tested to delineate how institutional conditions shape the health of racially marginalized individuals through the reification of race. After reviewing and critiquing the conceptual and theoretical roots of R3p, the key components of the synergistic framework are detailed and applied to clarify extant understandings of the upstream (i.e., macrolevel) factors informing racial health disparities. Using aggregated data from the 1994 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and Neighborhood Change Database merged at the mesolevel (i.e., the neighborhood cluster) with microlevel data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, exploratory analysis is presented that links dual mortgage market political economies to ethnoracial residential segregation at the mesolevel and to childhood health inequalities at the microlevel. The essay concludes by considering how racial inequality is an artifact of the political economic reality of race and racism manifested from the neighborhood-level down.

The health effects of police surveillance practices for the community at-large are unknown. Using microlevel health data from the 2009-2012 New York City Community Health Survey (NYC-CHS) nested within mesolevel data from the 2009-2012 NYC Stop, Question, and Frisk (NYC-SQF) dataset, this study evaluates contextual and ethnoracially-variant associations between invasive aspects of pedestrian stops and multiple dimensions of poor health. Results reveal that living in neighborhoods where pedestrian stops are more likely to become invasive is associated with worse health. Living in neighborhoods where stops are more likely to result in frisking show the most consistent negative associations. More limited deleterious effects can be attributed to living in neighborhoods where stops are more likely to involve use of force or in neighborhoods with larger ethnoracial disparities in frisking or use of force. However, the health effects of pedestrian stops vary by ethnoracial group in complex ways. For instance, minorities who live in neighborhoods with a wider racial disparity in police behavior have poorer health outcomes in most respects, but Blacks have lower odds of diabetes when they live in neighborhoods where they face a higher risk that a stop will involve use of force by police than do Whites. The findings suggest that the consequences of institutionalizing a carceral state are far-reaching.

Purpose: Past research indicates that blacks are less trusting of physicians than are whites; yet, researchers have not examined within group differences in physician trust by religious denomination – an effort that is complicated by the high correlated nature of race and religion. To better understand black-white differences in physician trust, this paper examines heterogeneity in trust levels among blacks associated with religious designations that distinguish Black Protestants from other ethnoreligious groups.
Methodology/Approach: Using data from the 2002 and 2006 General Social Surveys, this study adopts an intersectional (i.e., race X religion) typology of religious denomination to understand the black-white gap in physician trust. Weighted multivariate linear regression is employed.
Findings: Black-white differences in physician trust are identified only when religious affiliation is considered but not when religious affiliation is omitted. Blacks who are affiliated with Black Protestant churches are more trusting than other religious groups, including Evangelical Protestants, Mainline Protestants, and blacks who are affiliated with other faiths.
Originality/Value of Paper: This paper indicates that there is more heterogeneity in trust levels among blacks than between blacks and whites. Moreover, the findings suggest that religion can play an important role in bridging the trust gap between blacks and the medical sciences.

Past research yields mixed evidence regarding whether ethnoracial minorities trust physicians less than Whites. Using the 2002 and 2006 General Social Surveys, variegated ethnoracial differences in trust in physicians are identified by disaggregating a multidimensional physician trust scale. Compared to Whites, Blacks are less likely to trust the technical judgment and interpersonal competence of doctors. Latinos are less likely than Whites to trust the fiduciary ethic, technical judgment, and interpersonal competence of doctors. Black-Latino differences in physician trust are a function of ethnoracial differences in parental nativity. The ways ethnoracial hierarchies are inscribed into power-imbalanced clinical exchanges are discussed.

Systems of race, racism, and racial inequality are of consequence to the prevalence of illness and to racial disparities in illness prevalence. Yet a historicized understanding of how racially segregated neighborhoods are created from these systems of racial oppression is absent in neighborhood effect studies documenting the harmful effects of living in racial ghettos. Drawing on insights from the neighborhood change, place stratification, and housing discrimination literatures, this essay illustrates the ways that structural manifestations of racial oppression are implicated in the illnesses experienced via the neighborhood arrangements that arise out of institutionalized forms of racism. These illustrations are demonstrated by focusing on a system of unequal relationships created by racial oppression on the part of the mortgage lending industry. This essay explicates how the unequal distribution of resources by gatekeepers of the mortgage lending industry is implicated in the poor health outcomes of racial minorities, the deteriorated conditions of the environments in which racial minorities spend their lives, and the segregation of ethnoracially marginalized people into socially, economically, and materially deprived communities.

This essay makes the argument that racial disparities in health are rooted in political economic processes undergirding racial residential segregation. Mortgage financing is considered a key institutional tool whereby already marginalized people are isolated into degenerative ecological environments. A multilevel root cause conceptual framework, the racism-race reification process (R-cubed-p), is proposed to delineate how structural factors shape the health of individuals through the reification of race. After situating the conceptual roots of R-cubed-p in postcolonial theory, the key components of the conceptual framework are detailed and applied to clarify extant understandings of the distal factors informing racial inequalities in health. Exploratory analysis is presented that links political economies to ethnoracial residential segregation at the neighborhood-level. The essay concludes by considering how individual outcomes are artifacts of the structural reality of race and racism.

This essay makes the argument that racial disparities in health are rooted in political economic processes undergirding racial residential segregation. Mortgage financing is considered a key institutional tool whereby already marginalized people are isolated into degenerative ecological environments. A multilevel root cause conceptual framework, the racism-race reification process (R-cubed-p), is proposed to delineate how structural factors shape the health of individuals through the reification of race. After situating the conceptual roots of R-cubed-p in postcolonial theory, the key components of the conceptual framework are detailed and applied to clarify extant understandings of the distal factors informing racial inequalities in health. Exploratory analysis is presented that links political economies to ethnoracial residential segregation at the neighborhood-level. The essay concludes by considering how individual outcomes are artifacts of the structural reality of race and racism.