The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is celebrating pedestrians by designating October as the first-ever Pedestrian Safety Month and creating a playbook with social media materials to raise awareness. This is good, because pedestrians deserve safety on a road, parking lot, or crosswalk. But it’s not all good. NHTSA is mostly focused on individual pedestrian safety, as opposed to systemic policy changes. This is a form of pedestrian-blaming. By blaming the pedestrian, like in victim-blaming or justifying inequities, Pedestrian Safety Month actually distracts from efforts to address the very transportation systems that endanger pedestrians in the first place. We are excited to see that Transportation for America’s Twitter thread that modified NHTSA ...
Children across the Lone Star State have returned to school — still, some learners are adjusting to the new way of learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic better than others. As educators rely on web-based teaching more each day, the students who lack sufficient internet access face significant hardship. In Texas, 1.8 million K-12 public school students, many of whom come from disadvantaged groups, including Latinos, find themselves among those struggling to learn. “Families that are suffering from the digital divide are dealing with a lot,” Carlotta Garcia, a Central Texas Interfaith organizer, told The Texas Observer. “These are families dealing with life and death. Right now, they’re dealing with food, medicine, sickness, and the threat of displacement.”
Lack of ...
Do you notice how much some of your neighbors are suffering? A widening socioeconomic gap, racism, and discrimination contribute to inequitable distribution of healthcare and mental and physical health disparities among Latinos and other people of color and those in poverty, especially amid COVID-19. But it doesn’t have to be this way. A cohesive culture for health equity is one where everyone works individually and as a group to ensure that each person has a fair, just opportunity for health and wealth, as well as equitable access to basic resources required for these goals. To achieve a more cohesive culture, we must help people understand and overcome the mechanisms─implicit bias, system justification, moral disengagement─they use to discriminate against people of ...
This is part of the Salud America! Achieving a Cohesive Culture for Health Equity in Latino and All Communities: A Research Review»
Abstract
Health inequities are persistent in the United States. A widening socioeconomic gap, extensive poverty, and multi-level racism, discrimination, and segregation contribute to inequitable distribution of healthcare, resources, and a significant disparity in mental and physical health outcomes among Latino and other population groups. In a society characterized by income segregation and information “bubbles,” it is easy for those who are more fortunate and/or whose hard work has been amply rewarded to fail to perceive the degree of suffering that is experienced by those who do not share their affluence. There is growing evidence that the ...
This is part of the Salud America! Achieving a Cohesive Culture for Health Equity in Latino and All Communities: A Research Review»
Implicit Bias Training Programs
Mitigating implicit bias and promoting inclusivity “is a long-term goal requiring constant attention and repetition and a combination of general strategies that can have a positive influence across all groups of people affected by bias,” and can overlap between domains, according to Marcelin et al. and other researchers (see figure).43,74 Implicit bias training programs, such as those designed by the Kirwan Institute of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University, also aim to improve intergroup attitudes and relations, by “rewiring” subconscious associations. The Kirwan Institute has made the first set of ...
This is part of the Salud America! Achieving a Cohesive Culture for Health Equity in Latino and All Communities: A Research Review»
Why Social Cohesion is Important
The far-reaching effects of poverty have been well documented; the material hardships associated with poverty, including food insecurity and difficulty meeting basic medical and housing needs, lead to worse health outcomes.86 An inability to provide for family members leads to parental stress, which compromises marital and parent-child relationships due to a reduced capacity for warm and responsive interactions. The chaotic home lives and the community conditions characteristic of low SES areas — such as community violence and substandard housing — are linked to worse socioemotional outcomes for children. Poorer ...
This is part of the Salud America! Achieving a Cohesive Culture for Health Equity in Latino and All Communities: A Research Review»
More Research is Needed on a Cohesive Culture
It is important to research the relationship between socioeconomic status and education to identify and reduce the risk factors through the improvement of school systems and the development of intervention programs.5,10 Additional studies are also needed to examine the relationships between implicit bias and health care outcomes. This will provide vital information for the development of interventions that target these implicit biases, which have been shown to contribute to disparities in health care between whites and minority groups such as Latinos. This implicit bias influences individuals’ behavior ...
This is part of the Salud America! Achieving a Cohesive Culture for Health Equity in Latino and All Communities: A Research Review»
System Justification Is a Key Mechanism People Use to Excuse Discrimination among People of Color, Those in Poverty
System justification is the label for a social psychology theory asserting that people will rationalize the status quo, as they believe that the social, economic, and political systems must be fair and advantageous, otherwise they would not be in place.55 In other words, the theory states that there is a general subjective motive justifying the existing socioeconomic order; that motive is partially responsible for creating and maintaining the inferiority of racial/ethnic and other minority groups and is largely implicit; and the motive may ...
This is part of the Salud America! Achieving a Cohesive Culture for Health Equity in Latino and All Communities: A Research Review»
Intergroup Contact Theory
At the individual level, the contact hypothesis of social psychology, also called the intergroup contact theory, proposes that members of one group, having incomplete or inaccurate ideas about members of another group, can positively change their beliefs and attitudes toward that group via contact, whether face-to-face or through other interactive methods such as computer-mediated communication.75
Using Intergroup Contact to Address Compassion for Immigrants
Joyce and Harwood75 recruited students from communications classes at a large university in Arizona to participate in an intergroup contact study. Of the 147 participants, ...
