Public Health

ACCESS TO HEALTHY ENVIRONMENTS

People of color disproportionately live in environments that lack the resources necessary to generate and sustain health. It has been shown, for example, that segregated African American neighborhoods are subjected to higher levels of substandard housing, abandoned buildings, and inadequate municipal services and amenities, including police and fire protection. Where you live can also limit your access to healthy foods. Many large commercial enterprises avoid segregated urban areas; as a result, the available services are typically fewer in quantity, poorer in quality, and often higher in price than those available in less segregated urban and suburban areas.  Additionally, racial segregation increases the chances of discrimination, which has been proven to be detrimental to health.  

Differential access to quality heathcare and public health creates racial disparities in health outcomes, such as the shocking statistics that are shown below. 

According to the 2011 report from the U.S Dept. of Health and Human Services:

  • People of color are more likely to live in communities with air pollutants that can damage one’s health
  • Black men and women are much more likely to die of heart disease and stroke than their white counterparts, which accounts for the largest proportion of inequality in life expectancy between whites and blacks
  • There are large racial/ethnic disparities in preventable hospitalizations, with blacks experiencing a rate more than double that of whites
  • People of color experience disproportionately higher rates of new HIV diagnoses than whites.  During 2008, the relative percentage difference in the HIV diagnosis rate among blacks compared with whites was 799%
  • Hypertension is by far most prevalent among blacks (42%) than whites (28.8%)
  • The highest infant mortality rate was for black women (13.35), with a rate 2.4 times that for white women (5.58)
  • Among adults 65 and over, blacks consistently had the lowest influenza vaccination coverage every year from 2000 to 2010
  • During 2005-2008 there was a higher prevalence of obesity among black women aged 2–19 years (24%) compared with white women aged 2–19 years (14%)
  • The 2007 preterm birth rate for black infants was 59% higher than the rate for white infants (11.5%) and 49% higher than the rate for Hispanic infants (12.3%)
 
 

Health Report

ERASE Racism teamed up with researchers from the Department of Sociology at Hofstra University to conduct an exploratory investigation involving the 3,017 individuals who participate in the Housing Choice Voucher Program (Section 8) in Nassau County, NY.  The initial analysis from respondents, all of whom are very poor, to a self-administered questionnaire showed that African American and to a lesser extent Latino respondents lived in different communities than white Section 8 recipients.  Furthermore, the white renters overwhelmingly lived in a community with a significantly more favorable rating on the quality of life scale than the African American residents.  This is important because, a large body of research has emerged documenting relationships between health behaviors and health status and community characteristics.   In addition, the communities where the highest number of black renters gained housing do not provide access to high quality schools, different from the white Section 8 renters. 

Click for report on Housing Choice Voucher Program Participants in Nassau County