This document by California Newsreel provides an overview of how social concerns such as income, jobs, education, housing, and racism relate to health outcomes and inequities. The short pieces in this document are taken from the topic introductions in the Health Equity database on the UNNATURAL CAUSES Web site.

Dr. Donald Warne talks about how cultural loss impacts the health of Native American tribes in Arizona. The damming of rivers plunged local tribes into poverty, dependence and ultimately poor health. Deprived of their language, land, livelihood and traditions, many Native Americans have developed a fatalistic view about  diseases like diabetes.

The U.S. government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past 40 years trying to uncover a biological explanation for why the Pima Indians of southern Arizona have one of the highest rates of diabetes in the world. But as Dr. Donald Warne tells us, diabetes was extremely rare here 100 years ago. What's changed? Not biology but environment.

Since 1950, dramatic advances in human genetics have occurred, racial disparities in infant mortality have widened, and the United States' international ranking in infant mortality has deteriorated. The quest for a "preterm birth gene" to explain racial differences is now under way. Scores of papers linking polymorphisms to preterm birth have appeared in the past few years. Is this strategy likely to reduce racial disparities? A review of broad epidemiological patterns contradicts the genetic theory of race and points toward social mechanisms.
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O’odham Indians, living on reservations in southern Arizona, have perhaps the highest rates of Type 2 diabetes in the world. Forty years of poking and prodding by medical researchers have yielded few improvements, as disease rates continue to rise. But the O’odham and other Native communities are taking matters into their own hands – finding hope for their health by strengthening ties to traditional culture, fighting for their rights, and trying to regain control over their destinies.

Troy Duster, Jay Kaufman and Pilar Ossorio answer questions from Web site visitors on how biology and genetics impact health and our ideas about race.

On June 23, 2005, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) formally approved the heart failure drug BiDil to treat heart failure in self-identified black patients. The drug itself is not actually new; it is merely a combination of two generic drugs that have been used to treat heart failure for over a decade. BiDil's newness derives primarily from its public presentation as the world's first ethnic drug.

This analysis begins with a consideration of the race-specific clinical trials that preceded the FDA approval and then moves on to elaborate upon some of the broader implications of BiDil in the context of genomic medicine and the politics of heath care. It briefly relates the story of how law and commerce played a central role in the emergence of BiDil as an ethnic drug. Then it explores the strategic reification of race as genetic in the context of BiDil and connects the drug to larger issues concerning genetics and the politics of difference in health care and perhaps beyond.

The Center on the Developing Child was founded in 2006 on the belief that the vitality and sustainability of any society depend on the extent to which it provides opportunities early in life for all children to achieve their full potential and engage in responsible and productive citizenship. We view healthy child development as the foundation of economic prosperity, strong communities, and a just society, and our mission is to advance that vision by leveraging science to enhance child well-being.

Jennifer Poudrier, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Saskatchewan, is one of many scholars to argue that the "thrifty gene" theory allows society to curl up with the notion that biology shoulders most of the blame for the ill health of native people. She dismisses it as “a colonial lens put on aboriginal history,” promoting the myth that indigenous people all have the same genes that make their diabetes “a special problem” beyond the reach of public-health initiatives.

Our eyes tell us that people look different. But how different are we beneath the skin? Geneticists, anthropologists, and biologists are unlocking human variation and the evolution of our species. Let's see what they're finding out:

Test what you know about human diversity, and learn why race isn't biological.

This publication from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America lists 691 medicines in development specifically for the African American population

Like a game of whack-a-mole, the "slavery hypothesis" of hypertension keeps popping up in the media, popular culture and even medical texts no matter how many times it is slammed down. It has come to symbolize the incessant way in which unfounded biological theories of racial difference continue to thrive despite significant evidence to the contrary.

What is this thing we call 'race'? Where did the idea come from? What are the patterns of human variation? And if race isn't biological, what is it? How do our social institutions 'make' race? Used widely in classrooms and community spaces, This acclaimed three-part series compels viewers to scrutinize some of their most fundamental beliefs.

Also see the extensive companion Web site, with games, interactivities, and additional information.

This film is part of the Structural Racism sub-category of California Newsreel's African American Perspectives Collection.

This paper, prepared by staff at The Opportunity Agenda and California Newsreel, provides background, statistics, and theoretical frameworks to help the reader better understand the role that "race" plays in health inequities. Evidence is presented that discounts popularly accepted genetic explanations and supports theories of socially-based factors.

Several writers have recently claimed that new genomics findings demonstrate that race is biologically real after all, perhaps most notably Armand Marie Leroi's New York Times op-ed of March 14, 2005. This excellent article by Robert Wallace disputes that assertion.

How easy is it to group people into “races” based on appearance? What about using individual traits? Does everybody classify the same way?

Try your hand at "sorting" individuals and see if it matches how people think of themselves. Or explore how we might sort people by physical traits.

This article, co-authored by 14 highly respected geneticists, sociologists, and anthropologists, presents some of the unintended consequences of the boom in genetic ancestry testing. They explain how these tests "have significant scientific limitations" yet may be "serious matters for many test-takers."

According to a new study in Molecular Psychiatry, violence leaves long-term scars on children's bodies, altering their DNA and causing changes that are equivalent to seven to 10 years of premature aging. Scientists measured this cellular aging by studying the ends of children's chromosomes, called telomeres.

We all know that people look different. Anyone can tell a Czech from a Chinese. But are these differences racial? What does race mean? Find the answers to these and other questions by exploring different interactivities within this site.

There's less - and more - to race than meets the eye.

Report on a new study that indicate that where a child lives, including factors such as the neighborhood's walkability, proximity to higher quality parks, and access to healthy food, has an important effect on obesity rates.