This is part of the Salud America! Achieving a Cohesive Culture for Health Equity in Latino and All Communities: A Research Review»
Latino Families Are More Likely to Live in Poverty
Child poverty rates are more than twice as high for black children than white children (38% vs 14%, 2019 data)10 and Latino children than white children (23.7% vs 8.9%, 2018 data) across the United States,5 according to data published in the 2019 County Health Rankings and Roadmaps Report10 and the 2018 U.S. Census Bureau Current Population Report.5 The Institute for Policy Studies found that between 1983 and 2013 there was a 51% decline in the wealth of the median Latino household (from $4,100 to $2,000); during this same period, wealth of the median white household increased by 14% from $105,300 to ...
This is part of the Salud America! Achieving a Cohesive Culture for Health Equity in Latino and All Communities: A Research Review»
Moral Disengagement Is a Key Mechanism People Use to Excuse Discrimination among People of Color, Those in Poverty
Moral disengagement is the cognitive process of decoupling one’s internal moral standards from one’s actions, thus allowing oneself to conduct unethical behavior without feelings of guilt or distress.65 In simpler terms, it is the psychological process of rationalizing bad decisions, by convincing oneself that ethical standards do not apply within a particular context or situation. Moral disengagement has been studied in relation to cruelty to animals, support for the death penalty, or in cases where victims are said to have “brought ...
This is part of the Salud America! Achieving a Cohesive Culture for Health Equity in Latino and All Communities: A Research Review»
The Benefits of Peer Modeling
Liebkind and McAlister77 designed an intervention to determine whether moral engagement and tolerance of other groups could be improved through peer modeling based on the extended contact hypothesis, which supposes that positive intergroup attitudes can be promoted via the knowledge that an in-group member has a close relationship with an out-group member. The in-group friendship partner becomes a positive peer model that demonstrates tolerance in interacting with the outgroup, while the outgroup friendship partner becomes a positive example that repudiates the negative beliefs or stereotypes about the outgroup.77 In the ...
The United States is one of the world’s financial powerhouses, but COVID-19 is causing economic unrest and uncovering a growing wealth divide. In fact, half of households are experiencing monetary problems amid the COVID-19 outbreak in the nation’s four largest cities, all of which have large Latino populations—New York City (29.1% Latino), Los Angeles (48.6%), Chicago (29%), and Houston (44.8%)—according to a recent study from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). These new data reveal the problem is mainly impacting Latinos and other individuals facing disadvantage, according to Dr. Robert Blendon, professor of Public Health and Political Analysis at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “These communities remain so vulnerable and in some serious ...
U.S. leaders have "failed miserably" in planning and executing a cohesive national response to COVID-19, which has killed over 170,000 people here, according to a new report. The report is Public Health Law Watch's Assessing Legal Responses to COVID-19. It features 50 top national experts evaluating the policy response to the pandemic. The experts blame neither resources nor individual courage, but rather "a failure of leadership and the implementation of an effective response." COVID-19 revealed weaknesses in the nation’s health care and public health systems. It also worsened existing health inequities for Latinos and other people of color—even creating new disparities. Still, the report offers 100+ recommendations on how federal, state, and local leaders can better ...
Helping families recover from the economic impact of COVID-19 requires far more than a paycheck, particularly when already underfunded social services and transit agencies face budget cuts. To build resilience after COVID-19, cities need to invest in people and in places. More specifically, cities need to build a community-based workforce to ramp up social services, and cities need to invest in affordable transportation options.
Cities Face More Than COVID-19 Economic Devastation
The economic fallout from COVID-19 is real for cities and families, particularly for Latinos, who were already drastically underpaid compared to white workers. Beyond unequal pay, Latino and low-income families face a legacy of discriminatory policies and practices that have resulted in unaffordable ...
When COVID-19 struck, it impacted Latinos more than others. That is why Salud America!, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded national program at UT Health San Antonio, immediately applied its digital content curation model to create equitable, culturally relevant information and action opportunities to address pandemic effects on Latinos. The result? Record spikes in program website traffic and confirmation of the curation model's capacity to increase people's exposure to culturally relevant and action-oriented information for a novel topic like COVID-19, according to a new study published in the journal Health Promotion Practice. "We have shown that digital content curation is an effective, measurable public health promotion tool to disseminate awareness-raising and ...
Too many social support tasks fall to armed police officers. As local leaders discuss COVID-19 recovery plans, they need to consider how to address these social support issues in tandem with economic issues. Many cities are exploring how to reform or reimagine police. This often includes partnering with community-based social, behavioral, and mental health services. However, community partners may lack capacity for city-wide change. That’s why cities need to build a community-based workforce to coordinate community development, help families recover from the pandemic’s economic fallout, and reform police, simultaneously.
Expensive Spending on Traditional Policing
Public safety is a major city expense. Of the 50 largest cities, spending on police accounts for the ...
Researchers are finding that population density is not associated with higher death rates from COVID-19. Unfortunately, some people still blame compact housing and transit for pandemic spikes, and use that misinformation to promote sprawling residential development and disinvestment in transit in the name of health. These are the same poor practices that have segregated neighborhoods and contributed to drastic disparities in health and wealth for a century. As city leaders respond to concerns about COVID transmission and develop economic recovery plans, they must challenge the discriminatory status quo, consider transportation expenses, and shift toward equitable, compact (not overcrowded) housing development. “Restoring urban transit networks to full force, expanding their ...
