Psychologist’s Study says Racism is Literally Toxic to Black People & Raises the Risk of Chronic Illness

From [HERE] and [HERE] A new paper says that racist experiences increase inflammation in African American individuals, raising their risk of chronic illness and providing more evidence that creates physical health outcomes, states a paper led by April Thames, Ph.D., associate professor at the University of Southern California Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

"I looked at it as a chronic stressor. Our results showed that racial discrimination appears to trigger an inflammatory response among African Americans at the cellular level," states Thames.

Inflammation protects organisms from a health threat but chronic inflammation is linked to negative health outcomes, such as cancer and heart disease. Co-author Steve Cole, psychology professor at UCLA, has previously written that inflammatory responses are heightened among people in socially-marginalized, isolated groups. "We've seen this before in chronic loneliness, poverty, PTSD, and other types of adversity," he says. "But until now, nobody had looked at the effects of discrimination."

The study is too small to be meaningful, 71 subjects, two-thirds African American and one third European American, but its exploratory nature will get lost in corporate media outlets, as well as the confounder that 38 of the participants were positive for HIV. They believe that is a feature and not a bug and gave psychologists a chance to study the effects of racism independently from the effects of the disease.

It is not clear how the study defines racism. According to FUNKTIONARY:

Racism White Supremacy - psychopathic degeneracy. 2) "The local and global power system and dynamic, structured and maintained by persons who classify themselves as white, whether consciously or subconsciously determined, which consists of patterns of perception, logic, symbol formation, thought, speech, action and emotional response, as conducted simultaneously in all areas of people activity (economics, education, entertainment, labour, law, politics, religion, sex and war); for the ultimate purpose of white genetic survival and to prevent white genetic annihilation on planet earth—a planet upon which the vast majority of people are classified as non-white (Black, Brown, Red and Yellow) by white skinned people, and all of the nonwhite people are genetically dominant (in terms of skin coloration) compared to the genetic recessive white skin people." -Dr. Francis Cress Welsing. [MORE]