Overview
What does the evidence tell us about ethnic disparities in health on a global basis?
What is ‘race’? What does a racist explanation of, or approach to, ethnic disparities in health involve?
What does it mean to say that ethnicity and ethnic division are social processes? What role does institutional racism play in these?
How does ethnicity work in the production of ethnic disparities in health?
New York City, approximately 1890
The homes of the Hebrew quarter are its workshops also … You are made fully aware of it before you have travelled the length of a single block in any of these East Side streets, by the whir of a thousand sewing-machines, worked at high pressure from earliest dawn till mind and muscle give out together. Every member of the family, from the youngest to the oldest, bears a hand, shut in the qualmy rooms, where meals are cooked and clothing washed and dried besides, the livelong day. It is not unusual to find a dozen persons – men, women, and children – at work in a single small room … Typhus fever and smallpox are bred here … Filthy diseases both, they sprout naturally among the hordes that bring the germs with them from across the sea … The health officers are on constant and sharp lookout for hidden fever-nests. Considering that half of the ready-made clothes that are sold in the big stores, if not a good deal more than half, are made in these tenement rooms, this is not excessive caution. It has happened more than once that a child recovering from small-pox, and in the most contagious stage of the disease, has been found crawling among heaps of half-finished clothing that the next day would be offered for sale on the counter of a Broadway store; or that a typhus fever patient has been discovered in a room whence perhaps a hundred coats had been sent home that week, each one with the wearer’s death-warrant, unseen and unsuspected, basted in the lining (Riis 1890).