Esther Cepeda: The complexities of race and ethnicity

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Work, United States on 2015-10-18 14:20Z by Steven

Esther Cepeda: The complexities of race and ethnicity

GazetteXtra
Janesville, Wisconsin
2015-10-17

Esther Cepeda, Columnist
Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO

Our society gives a lot of lip service to the importance of diversity in fields such as science, medicine and technology because multicultural people bring unique viewpoints, varied life experiences and new ideas.

Rarely do we come upon an ideal example of how this plays out in real life.

Karen M. Tabb Dina, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recently published a paper in the journal Ethnicity and Health that found that adults who identified as one race when they were young but now identify as multiracial report being healthier compared with those who continue to identify as monoracial.

The idea for this study came 10 years ago when Tabb Dina was a health policy researcher in low-income communities studying how race and ethnicity impact long-term health. She noticed that the way some of her patients identified racially didn’t always match the way their medical records categorized them.

Identity is a complex and often thorny issue. There are many reasons—including education level, geographic location and gender—why someone with a multiracial background would choose to identify as a single race or multiracial, and why that could change throughout a lifetime…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , ,