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Policy Briefs
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Most residential campuses today host hookup cultures that cause harm to student well-being. To enhance the student experience and protect them from harm, colleges and universities need to empower them to build healthier sexual cultures. Campuses can do so by giving students practical and theoretical knowledge, empowering marginalized populations on campus, and funding a large-scale, student-led campaign to shift the campus sexual culture.
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Medical students are often taught to associate race with disease as a method to diagnose and prescribe appropriate medical treatment. Unfortunately, this often leads to inaccurate and misleading assumptions related to race being used in medical decision-making. The role of provider bias and stereotyping in the clinical decision-making process have been extensively studied and suggested as possible contributors to racial health disparities experienced by Black men. Evidence also suggests that current cultural competency programs in medical school are non-inclusive and ineffective. In this brief, I outline a three-tiered approach to address provider bias and ensure that all students are exposed to racial bias training. Intentional efforts to address bias at the institutional level can influence the culture of medical education. Efforts by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) can serve as the model to better serve all communities.
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Fears about the future, like other types of stress, can diminish well-being and increase anxiety. Minority populations uniquely anticipate challenges and hardships based on the stigmatization of themselves or of their relationships. Policymakers should not simply react to what is known to be stressful in the moment; they should also seek deeper understandings of stress experience within life course contexts, including the stress that people anticipate. Indeed, existing data suggest there may be public health benefits associated with policy changes that reduce the impact of “stress that awaits.” For example, the legal recognition of same-sex relationships is associated with better mental health among sexual minority persons—even if they did not get married. Still, some anticipate that the legal recognition of same-sex marriage will be reversed in the future, and this possibility can be a source of stress as well. By identifying anticipatory stressors, we expand our knowledge of people’s stress universes and better account for the cumulative stress burden that can lead to greater health disparities.
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Over the last several decades, criminal and immigration laws in the United States have disproportionately burdened marginalized racial and ethnic minorities such as African Americans and Latinos. This policy brief reviews the sociological and public health research on the health effects of various criminal and immigration laws, policies, and practices. We argue that scholars and policy makers should understand the law as a fundamental cause of health disparities operating through two broad mechanisms: (1) primary effects on those who hold a stigmatized legal status; and (2) spillover effects on racial and ethnic in-group members, regardless of their own legal status. We conclude that the massive expansion of punitive legal control should be treated as a public health crisis. To address this, policy should reduce the material and stigmatic burdens of criminal and immigration statuses on those directly impacted, as well as their legally-unmarked families and communities.
