The Racism-Race Reification Process

Abstract

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 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 author concludes by considering how racial inequality is an artifact of the political economic reality of race and racism manifested from the neighborhood-level down.

Mapping fatal police violence across U.S. metropolitan areas: Overall rates and racial/ethnic inequities, 2013-2017

“…Theoretical frameworks from sociology may be a further instructive guide to understanding the racial/ethnic distribution of fatal police violence across MSAs. Decades of sociological scholarship suggest that the targeted policing of people of color, especially Black and Latinx people, serves to reify a racial social order and consequently widens racial/ethnic inequities in health outcomes, including police-related fatalities [39,40]. Sociologic, economic, and epidemiologic research on racism offers one lens to understand the geographic patterns of racial/ethnic inequities in fatal police violence observed in this paper.…”

Where Our Bright Star Is Cast: Religiosity, Spirituality, and Positive Black Development in Urban Landscapes

“…Stressors such as unaffordable, unstable, and overcrowded housing; limited options for safe, affordable, and high-quality childcare; and under-resourced and punitive schools create cycles of stress that can undermine the health and mental health of children, youth, and adults (Riina et al 2016). Urban contexts that have a high density of structural risks, including liquor stores, alcohol ads, and abandoned properties Theall et al (2011), hypersurveilled and carceral neighborhoods (Alexander 2010;Sewell 2016), and punitive and under-resourced schools (Dumas 2014) have particularly strong negative developmental effects (e.g., addiction, violence), particularly among economically vulnerable Black youth and adults.…”

The legacy of redlining in the effect of foreclosures on Detroit residents’ self-rated health

“…They call for a “pluralistic approach” to epidemiology (Vandenbroucke et al, 2016), which in the context of neighborhoods and health research, should aim to understand complex social processes, with an awareness of exposures at multiple levels of analysis, and their historic influences. Critical assessments of causal claims in health disparities research suggest that confounding by a history of structural racism, including discriminatory policies, may also bias estimated neighborhood effects (Bailey et al, 2017; Brown and Smith, n.d.; Krieger, 2011; Phelan et al, 2010; Sewell, 2016; VanderWeele and Robinson, 2014). The practice of redlining is just one example of these confounding factors that begins to complicate the narrative on neighborhoods and health.…”