Material Insecurity, Racial Capitalism, and Public Health

Abstract

In the influential 1995 article “Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Disease,” Bruce Link and Jo Phelan described social and political factors as “fundamental causes” of death and disease. Whitney Pirtle has recently declared racial capitalism another such fundamental cause. Using the case of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, she has argued that racial capitalism's role in that situation meets each of the criteria Link and Phelan's article outlines: racial capitalism influenced multiple disease outcomes, affected disease outcomes through multiple risk factors, involved access to flexible resources that can be used to minimize both risks and the consequences of disease, and was reproduced over time through the continual replacement of intervening mechanisms. We argue for Pirtle's conclusion using the extensive literature on racial capitalism and case studies concerning housing in the United States and Brazil and what Naomi Klein has termed “corona capitalism” in India. If races correspond to hierarchies of material security, as suggested by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, then these hierarchies and their causal effects are fundamental determinants of public health.

“I'm sick of being called a hero – I want to get paid like one”: Filipino American frontline workers' health under conditions of COVID-19 and racial capitalism

“…As articulated by Bright et al ( 21 ): “The theory of racial capitalism proposes an origin story for how it is that the global economy came to be racially stratified and (in the main) organized along capitalist lines” (p. 1). Given legacies of colonialism and imperialism that have depended on the extraction and exploitation of labor, land, and resources of Indigenous people, enslaved Africans, and other racialized peoples, racial capitalism is a relevant framework across racially minoritized workers ( 22 , 23 ), and offers a historical lineage and context for understanding the interdependence of racism and class oppression as a fundamental cause of disease ( 24 ) and form of structural violence influencing health ( 25 ).…”

The interactive effects of oral health literacy and acculturation on dental care use among Hispanic adults

“…Past work indicates that proxy measures are insufficient in addressing heterogeneity within the Hispanic population [16] and that multidimensional scales are more appropriate in modeling acculturation [9]. Furthermore, the null main effects findings introduce the possibility that other factors related to acculturation, including discrimination, structural racism, and access to resources, may be more important determinants of dental care use for Hispanic adults [27,28]. Future research should continue to study these factors with an emphasis on refining conceptual models that include appropriate measures of acculturation, if relevant, to inform clinical intervention development.…”

The Political Economy of Health: Bringing Political Science In

“…Finally, recent public health scholarship has hypothesized a deleterious effect of capitalism itself on health and health equity (Flynn 2021, Harvey 2021, Sell & Williams 2020, Taiwo et al 2021. Class position and class relations, too, have been examined as causes of health (Eisenberg-Guyot & Prins 2020, Kokkinen et al 2020, Muntaner et al 2010.…”