Replies

How often do you think about your race?

Would you say never, once a year, once a month, once a week, once a day, once an hour, or constantly? This question has already been included on the “Reactions to Race” module that was piloted on the 2002 BRFSS. It has also been included on two large postal surveys, the 1995 Nurses’ Health Study II (NHS II with 93,681 respondents, Walter Willett, Principal Investigator) and the 1997 Black Women’s Health Study (BWHS with 53,269 respondents, Lynn Rosenberg and Lucile Adams-Campbell, Principal Investigators).

------------------------------------------------------------

...the distribution of frequency of thinking about one’s “race” is almost identical between the black women responding to the 1997 BWHS and the black women responding to the 1995 NHS II, even though these are entirely different groups of women who were queried two years apart. Further note that the distribution of “race”-consciousness for the white women responding to the NHS II differed markedly from the distribution for the black women in NHS II, even though both groups were nurses and they were surveyed at the same time. More than 50% of the white women in NHS II reported that they never think about their “race”, and only 0.3% reported thinking about their “race” constantly. On the other hand, 21% of the black women in NHS II and 22% of the black women responding to BWHS reported thinking about their “race” constantly, and roughly 50% of the black women in both groups reported thinking about their “race” once a day or more frequently. The distribution of frequency of thinking about one’s “race” for Asian and Hispanic respondents to NHS II was intermediate between the black and white distributions.

My crap citing

The elimination of racial and ethnic disparities in health care emerged as a prominent concern in segments of the health policy community in 1998. That year, President Bill Clinton and his Surgeon General, Dr. David Satcher, articulated as a goal eliminating disparities in six health categories by 2010. The willingness of President George W. Bush to continue this initiative has given it bipartisan credibility, as has the public support of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. Substantial, unprecedented attention is
being devoted to this issue by many policymakers, public officials, health professionals, health services researchers, and community organizations. National organizations, such as the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the American Public Health
Association, have made this issue a priority. The Institute of Medicine’s release of Unequal Treatment in 2001 authoritatively validated the issue’s importance.

Clinton legacy:
Saturday, February 21, 1998
WHITE HOUSE FACT SHEET

Includes Over $400 Million to Develop New Approaches and to Build on Existing Successes to Address Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities.

Bush legacy:
Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2002
HRSA Press Office

The fiscal year 2003 budget request for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) contains nearly $3 billion in funds to research health disparity issues, an increase of $600 million in just two fiscal years. This includes $187 million for NIH’s National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities, the federal focal point for biomedical minority research activities.