美国国家公共电台 NPR Scientists Start To Tease Out The Subtler Ways Racism Hurts Health

Scientists Start To Tease Out The Subtler Ways Racism¹ Hurts Health

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Roughly a third of Latinos in America report they've experienced discrimination in their daily lives, according to a poll recently released by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. That number is important as scientists begin to learn more about how racism affects people's health and their longevity². Reporter Rae Ellen Bichell has this next story in our series You, Me and Them.

RAE ELLEN BICHELL, BYLINE³: The day Dr. Roberto Montenegro finished his Ph.D. was memorable⁴ - but not for the right reasons.

ROBERTO MONTENEGRO: I still cringe when I think about it.

BICHELL: His colleagues at UCLA had taken him and his wife out to a fancy restaurant. They were celebrating his new Ph.D. in sociology, and he was about to head to medical school. He was legit.

MONTENEGRO: We laughed, and we ate, and we were excited we didn't have to pay for this.

BICHELL: When they got in line for the valet, a really nice car pulled up to the curb⁵. A woman got out and walked past the other couples in line, Montenegro says. And...

MONTENEGRO: She gets to me, and she hands me her keys.

BICHELL: She assumed he was a valet.

MONTENEGRO: I vividly⁶ remember turning red, and I don't often turn red. And I remember my heart pounding. I remember feeling really confused and hurt and angry.

BICHELL: Five minutes later, still waiting for his car, it happened again.

MONTENEGRO: And even now, reliving that story, it's uncomfortable.

BICHELL: This was not the first or the last time he'd encounter racism. At conferences, colleagues would accidentally try to order drinks from him. As a medical student, people at the hospital would sometimes mistake him for a technician or a janitor⁷, even when he was wearing his white doctor's coat.

MONTENEGRO: That happens to me so much.

BICHELL: Montenegro's experiences might not sound like a big deal, but a group of researchers thinks that being discriminated⁸ against over and over again could actually hurt a person's health.

AMANI NURU-JETER: When you start to worry about something - whether that's race or something else - then that initiates⁹ a biological stress response.

BICHELL: That's a Amani Nuru-Jeter, a social epidemiologist at the University of California, Berkeley. She and Dr. Montenegro - who's now a fellow in child psychiatry¹⁰ at Seattle Children's Hospital - are trying to understand what discrimination can actually do to your body. That night people assumed Montenegro was a valet...

MONTENEGRO: Turning red and my heart pounding.

BICHELL: ...Those are signs his body was stressed, cranking up the levels of hormones¹¹ like adrenaline and cortisol. Those hormones can be really helpful for gearing up to fight or to flee, but it's not good if they linger.

NURU-JETER: For example, one of the things we're finding in my research is that this process of racism stress is associated with kind of chronic¹² low-grade inflammation.

BICHELL: And that, says Nuru-Jeter, could put someone at a higher risk for something like heart disease. Other studies have found associations between racist¹³ experiences and things like sleep problems or even asthma¹⁴. Researchers like Nuru-Jeter hypothesize that the stress of repeatedly being singled out as the other can be biologically damaging and might be responsible, in part, for health disparities in America, like the gap in life expectancy¹⁵ between black and white Americans.

NURU-JETER: Prolonged elevation¹⁶, circulation of these stress hormones in our bodies can be very toxic¹⁷ and compromise our body's ability to regulate key biological systems. So it just gets us really out of whack¹⁸ and leaves us susceptible¹⁹ to a bunch of poor health outcomes.

BICHELL: Now, this kind of research is really complicated. There's no thermometer for racism. And it's not like scientists can take a group of people, expose them to discrimination and then see how they do compared to everyone else. So researchers find associations, not causations.

But sometimes, they get a slightly sharper glimpse of how discrimination and poor health might be related, like on May 12, 2008, when, as the AP reported, a small army descended²⁰ onto a town in Iowa.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Federal agents raided this meatpacking plant in Iowa on Monday after...

BICHELL: Nine hundred agents with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement raided a meat processing plant. They were looking for people who are working illegally in the U.S. They reportedly handcuffed almost everyone who looked Latino and ended up arresting more than a tenth of the town's population, charging many of them with felonies for knowingly working under false Social Security numbers, even though few were reportedly guilty of that crime.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: In all, more than 300 people were loaded onto buses and taken away.

BICHELL: Arline T. Geronimus, a behavioral scientist at the University of Michigan, has studied the episode.

ARLINE T. GERONIMUS: The news of this raid and pictures were pretty frightening because there were these helicopters, and it was such a military zone. And then they had - you know, handcuffing all the employees who were assumed to be Latino.

BICHELL: It was an extremely stressful event for the people who got arrested and their families. But the event appears to have had a ripple²¹ effect throughout the state. As Geronimus and her colleagues wrote this year in the International Journal of Epidemiology, after the raid, Latina women living in Iowa started giving birth to smaller babies.

GERONIMUS: Pregnant women of Latino descent throughout the state of Iowa experienced, on average, about a 24 percent greater risk of their babies being born low birth weight than they had in that very same period of time the previous year.

BICHELL: Babies born small are at higher risk of dying in infancy²² and of having health problems later on. Before the raid, Latina women in Iowa didn't have a higher risk of low birth weight than white women did.

GERONIMUS: But there is a spike²³ that happens to be exactly when the raid was.

BICHELL: A spike in that rate that even affected²⁴ babies born to Latina moms who were U.S. citizens, people who shouldn't have been worried about being arrested or deported²⁵.

GERONIMUS: The trends are so stark²⁶.

BICHELL: Other researchers have noticed a connection between experiencing stressful events like natural disasters and babies being born pre-term or low birth weight. Geronimus thinks, in this case, it has something to do with the stress of racism. And if that's true, it means the stress of discrimination can set the stage for health problems before a person has even entered the world.

For NPR News, I'm Rae Ellen Bichell.

1 racism   

n.民族主义；种族歧视(意识)

参考例句：

• He said that racism is endemic in this country.他说种族主义在该国很普遍。
• Racism causes political instability and violence.种族主义道致政治动荡和暴力事件。

2 longevity   

n.长命；长寿

参考例句：

• Good habits promote longevity.良好的习惯能增长寿命。
• Human longevity runs in families.人类的长寿具有家族遗传性。

3 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

4 memorable   

adj.值得回忆的，难忘的，特别的，显著的

参考例句：

• This was indeed the most memorable day of my life.这的确是我一生中最值得怀念的日子。
• The veteran soldier has fought many memorable battles.这个老兵参加过许多难忘的战斗。

5 curb   

n.场外证券市场，场外交易；vt.制止，抑制

参考例句：

• I could not curb my anger.我按捺不住我的愤怒。
• You must curb your daughter when you are in church.你在教堂时必须管住你的女儿。

6 vividly   

adv.清楚地，鲜明地，生动地

参考例句：

• The speaker pictured the suffering of the poor vividly.演讲者很生动地描述了穷人的生活。
• The characters in the book are vividly presented.这本书里的人物写得栩栩如生。

7 janitor   

n.看门人，管门人

参考例句：

• The janitor wiped on the windows with his rags.看门人用褴褛的衣服擦着窗户。
• The janitor swept the floors and locked up the building every night.那个看门人每天晚上负责打扫大楼的地板和锁门。

8 discriminated   

分别，辨别，区分( discriminate的过去式和过去分词 )； 歧视，有差别地对待

参考例句：

• His great size discriminated him from his followers. 他的宽广身材使他不同于他的部下。
• Should be a person that has second liver virus discriminated against? 一个患有乙肝病毒的人是不是就应该被人歧视？

9 initiates   

v.开始( initiate的第三人称单数 )；传授；发起；接纳新成员

参考例句：

• The booklet initiates us into the problems of living abroad. 这本小册子使我们对国外的生活情况有了初步了解。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Everybody initiates and receives messages in some form or other. 每个人都以各种不同的方式发出并接收信息。 来自辞典例句

10 psychiatry   

n.精神病学，精神病疗法

参考例句：

• The study appeared in the Amercian science Journal of Psychiatry.这个研究发表在美国精神病学的杂志上。
• A physician is someone who specializes in psychiatry.精神病专家是专门从事精神病治疗的人。

11 hormones   

n. 荷尔蒙，激素 名词hormone的复数形式

参考例句：

• This hormone interacts closely with other hormones in the body. 这种荷尔蒙与体內其他荷尔蒙紧密地相互作用。
• The adrenals produce a large per cent of a man's sex hormones. 肾上腺分泌人体的大部分性激素。

12 chronic   

adj.(疾病)长期未愈的，慢性的；极坏的

参考例句：

• Famine differs from chronic malnutrition.饥荒不同于慢性营养不良。
• Chronic poisoning may lead to death from inanition.慢性中毒也可能由虚弱导致死亡。

13 racist   

n.种族主义者，种族主义分子

参考例句：

• a series of racist attacks 一连串的种族袭击行为
• His speech presented racist ideas under the guise of nationalism. 他的讲话以民族主义为幌子宣扬种族主义思想。

14 asthma   

n.气喘病，哮喘病

参考例句：

• I think he's having an asthma attack.我想他现在是哮喘病发作了。
• Its presence in allergic asthma is well known.它在过敏性气喘中的存在是大家很熟悉的。

15 expectancy   

n.期望，预期，（根据概率统计求得）预期数额

参考例句：

• Japanese people have a very high life expectancy.日本人的平均寿命非常长。
• The atomosphere of tense expectancy sobered everyone.这种期望的紧张气氛使每个人变得严肃起来。

16 elevation   

n.高度；海拔；高地；上升；提高

参考例句：

• The house is at an elevation of 2,000 metres.那幢房子位于海拔两千米的高处。
• His elevation to the position of General Manager was announced yesterday.昨天宣布他晋升总经理职位。

17 toxic   

adj.有毒的，因中毒引起的

参考例句：

• The factory had accidentally released a quantity of toxic waste into the sea.这家工厂意外泄漏大量有毒废物到海中。
• There is a risk that toxic chemicals might be blasted into the atmosphere.爆炸后有毒化学物质可能会进入大气层。

18 whack   

v.敲击，重打，瓜分；n.重击，重打，尝试，一份

参考例句：

• After years of dieting,Carol's metabolism was completely out of whack.经过数年的节食，卡罗尔的新陈代谢完全紊乱了。
• He gave me a whack on the back to wake me up.他为把我弄醒，在我背上猛拍一下。

19 susceptible   

adj.过敏的，敏感的；易动感情的，易受感动的

参考例句：

• Children are more susceptible than adults.孩子比成人易受感动。
• We are all susceptible to advertising.我们都易受广告的影响。

20 descended   

a.为...后裔的，出身于...的

参考例句：

• A mood of melancholy descended on us. 一种悲伤的情绪袭上我们的心头。
• The path descended the hill in a series of zigzags. 小路呈连续的之字形顺着山坡蜿蜒而下。

21 ripple   

n.涟波，涟漪，波纹，粗钢梳；vt.使...起涟漪，使起波纹； vi.呈波浪状，起伏前进

参考例句：

• The pebble made a ripple on the surface of the lake.石子在湖面上激起一个涟漪。
• The small ripple split upon the beach.小小的涟漪卷来，碎在沙滩上。

22 infancy   

n.婴儿期；幼年期；初期

参考例句：

• He came to England in his infancy.他幼年时期来到英国。
• Their research is only in its infancy.他们的研究处于初级阶段。

23 spike   

n.长钉，钉鞋；v.以大钉钉牢，使...失效

参考例句：

• The spike pierced the receipts and held them in order.那个钉子穿过那些收据并使之按顺序排列。
• They'll do anything to spike the guns of the opposition.他们会使出各种手段来挫败对手。

24 affected   

adj.不自然的，假装的

参考例句：

• She showed an affected interest in our subject.她假装对我们的课题感到兴趣。
• His manners are affected.他的态度不自然。

25 deported   

v.将…驱逐出境( deport的过去式和过去分词 )；举止

参考例句：

• They stripped me of my citizenship and deported me. 他们剥夺我的公民资格，将我驱逐出境。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The convicts were deported to a deserted island. 罪犯们被流放到一个荒岛。 来自《简明英汉词典》

26 stark   

adj.荒凉的；严酷的；完全的；adv.完全地

参考例句：

• The young man is faced with a stark choice.这位年轻人面临严峻的抉择。
• He gave a stark denial to the rumor.他对谣言加以完全的否认。