Dr. Henrie M. Treadwell
Part II of II
"What is the effect of that?" Judge Mathis asked. "Well, the effect, as it relates to health is: One, we have poverty, disproportionate poverty, single-family homes. And then, of course, and this might be somewhat controversial, but it’s true, we have a higher rate of HIV and AIDS because in the prisons men engage - many of them, very many of them, in homosexual activity."
Judge Mathis also noted that because only two states dispense condoms in prisons - Vermont and Mississippi - inmates have a high rate of HIV and AIDS, and then are released into communities across the country where they spread the disease.
Moreover, Dr. John A. Powell, who is with the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University, lamented that over the last 20 years inequities affecting people of color have worsened significantly after a period of improvement.
"The United States has greater inequality than it’s had since the 1920’s. Inequality is expanding at a rapid rate, and the inequality that we experience today actually started in the 1980’s," said Dr. Powell, a nationally recognized authority in the area of civil rights, civil liberties and issues related to race, poverty and the law. "From 1965 to 1980, inequality in the United States actually became compressed… There were all these programs like the War on Poverty. Something was happening in the country that was moving people closer together, and that’s actually a very positive thing in terms of health outcome."
But Dr. Powell noted that in 1980 inequality began expanding. "It’s also racially coded," he said. "Now, if you look at our life expectancy compared to the rest of the world, in 1980 we were Number 14. In 2007 we’re Number 29, so in the same period that we see rapid inequality growing in the United States, we see a rapid decline in terms of our health status as a country. In our infant mortality rate, we’re down to Number 31, behind countries that have fewer resources than we do as a country."
Noting the racial disparities, Dr. Powell said an African-American woman with a college degree is more likely to have a child that’s either low weight or dies in infancy than a white woman who doesn’t even graduate from high school.
Meanwhile, Angela Glover Blackwell, CEO and Founder of PolicyLink, emphasized how much "place matters" in our society, and that many of the social problems for people of color are related to their unhealthy surroundings.
"We have an epidemic of childhood obesity in this country, and we are blaming mothers and fathers and the children themselves," she said. "Behavioral choices are a huge part of what impacts health. But it’s not as if people are just going out and choosing the wrong things. It’s not that children are choosing not to be involved with Little League. It’s not that they are choosing not to play on the streets, as many of you probably had the occasion to do when you were growing up. They’re not choosing not to go to parks. They’re not choosing to eat unhealthy diets in a vacuum."
The problem, Ms. Blackwell said, is that we have a society that has not paid attention to making sure that the healthy choices are the easy choices.
Now, moreover, as the public agenda is being set during the presidential campaign, we must ensure that the public policies being debated are the right policies for communities of color.
