199 research outputs found
The Social and Cultural Context of Coping with Sickle Cell Disease: I. A Review of Biomedical and Psychosocial Issues
Sickle cell disease (SCD) is widely conceived in the United States as a group of blood disorders that principally affect African Americans. Although pain is its principal feature, strokes, lung problems, sepsis, anxiety, depression, impaired social functioning, and maladjustment at work are frequent concomitants. This article selectively reviews biomedical and psychosocial aspects of SCD related to pain assessment, medical treatment, genetic counseling, education, and employment. The strongest support exists for claims of social deficits among adolescents and depression and work-related problems among adults. The social context of SCD, including issues related to socioeconomic status (SES), urbanicity, ethnicity, cultural values, and racial stigmatization, are important to include in empirical assessments and theoretical analyses of the effects of SCD on children and their families. The adverse psychosocial functioning often described as an effect of SCD might indeed be a consequence of these factors acting alone or in concert with the strains of SCD.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67048/2/10.1177_0095798499025003002.pd
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'A foundation-hatched black elite’: Obama, the US establishment and foreign policy
US foreign policy has a largely unacknowledged racial dimension due to the racial characteristics of the US foreign policy establishment, and in shared mindsets in a soon-to-be ‘majority-minority’ nation. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) racial-ethnic and class factors produce managed change through socialisation in an attenuated meritocratic order, adapting to challenges to elite dominance by incorporating rising talent, without altering broader patterns of power.
The greatest success of such a system would be the assimilation of the most elite minority individuals, even as the bulk of those groups’ members continue to experience discrimination. Such success would be compounded by election to the highest office of a minority US president extolling the virtues of post-racial politics. President Barack Obama represents a ‘Wasp-ified’ black elite, assimilated into the extant structures of power that remain wedded to a more secular, non-biologically-racial, version of Anglo-Saxonism or, more broadly, liberal internationalism. Hence, it should occasion little surprise that there has been so little change in US foreign policies during Obama’s two-term presidency
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