When you don’t know, its gotta be racism
Newswise — The cause of low birth weights among African-American women has more to do with racism than with race, according to a report by an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Illinois at Chicago.In a report published in the July issue of the American Journal of Public Health, Richard David says the quest for a “pre-term birth gene” that is now underway will be of no value in explaining low birth weights.
David is the report’s lead writer and co-author with James Collins Jr., professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University. David is affiliated with John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital and Collins with Children’s Memorial Hospital.
They compared birth weights of three groups of women: African American, whites and Africans who had moved to Illinois. Most African-American women are of 70 to 75 percent African descent.
“If there were such a thing as a (pre-term birth) gene, you would expect the African women to have the lowest birth weights,” David said. “But the African and white women were virtually identical,” with significantly higher birth weights than the African-American women, he said.
The researchers did a similar analysis of births to black Caribbean women immigrants to the United States and found they gave birth to infants hundreds of grams heavier than the babies of U.S.-born black women.
For black women, “something about growing up in America seems to be bad for your baby’s birth weight,” David said.
[…]
They asked the mothers if they had ever been treated unfairly because of their race when looking for a job, in an educational setting or in other situations.
Those who felt discriminated against had a twofold increase in low birth weights. And for those who experienced discrimination in three “domains,” the increase was nearly threefold. (more…)
We tend to give White folks a lot more credit and a lot more benefit of the doubt than they deserve.
I think that we can all agree that discrimination, while it does exist does have a very open-ended definition from person to person. For example, I have known many folks who felt “discriminated against” simply because someone looked at them funny or perhaps said something with an attitude. In fact, everybody discriminates from time to time when you get right down to it. Again, I am not playing discrimination down, I am just pointing out a everyday occurrence that happens to all of us in some way, shape or form that seemingly Black folks (in this case, Black women) are too weak to deal with in this day and age. In fact, we are so weak that the cell structure within the bodies of our women will deteriorate to the point where they are unable to produce healthy babies. Never mind addressing things like diet or exercise. Never mind doing a study on the drama single mothers are faced with and its effects when dealing with a man who walks out leaving her with both roles of mother and father to fulfill. Meanwhile both White women and women from Africa/Caribbean live stress free lives and have never had to deal with discrimination or stress.
Another study that portrays Blacks as a bunch of helpless weaklings.
