New Research Shows Neighborhoods Have a Major Influence on the Health of African-American Men

July 5, 2010 UrbanMecca.com

New research funded by The California Endowment finds that African-American and Latino boys and young men are much more likely to experience poor health outcomes than white boys and young men. Most of these differences in health are directly related to the neighborhoods where they grow up.

To improve health outcomes for boys and young men, researchers suggest the need for systems-based solutions that are implemented at the community level.

"It's not just that there's a higher incidence of African-American and Latino children living in poverty," said Susan Eaton, Research Director at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute at Harvard Law School. "It's that poverty is generally harsher for African-American and Latino children."

The Houston Institute research examined how neighborhoods where African-American and Latino children live and go to school create and exacerbate the poor health outcomes they experience.

RAND Corporation examined the racial and ethnic disparities for boys and men of color. While boys and young men generally suffer worse health outcomes than girls, RAND found that health and social outcomes for boys and young men of color are far worse than they are for white boys and young men.

For instance, African-American boys and young men are 2.5 times more likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); Latino boys and young men are 4.1 times more likely to suffer from PTSD. Some of the greatest disparities in the RAND research were for African-American homicide-related death rates. Young African-American men have a homicide death rate at least 16 times greater than that of young white men; young Latino men have a homicide rate 5 times greater than that of young white men.

"Although there are odds working against boys and men of color, there is a growing body of research that identifies approaches that can improve those odds," said Dr. Lois Davis, Senior Policy Researcher at the RAND Corporation. "In other words, the unequal chances that boys and men of color face are not immutable and we know an increasing amount about how to improve their chances."

A key theme of the research is whether or not the institutions that are meant to serve the health needs of boys and young men of color are actually successful in meeting them. For instance, the Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice at Drexel University found that trauma is seldom explored by the array of systems - schools, juvenile justice, courts, health care, mental health - assigned to help boys and young men of color. Even worse, those institutions often take a punitive approach to these young men at precisely the time when they need them the most.