A recent study, the SWAN Project (Study of Women's Health Across the Nation), has, like many studies, turned up peripheral evidence that is in its way more interest-ing than the study's major thrust about the overall health of women in today's America.
One of the byproducts of the SWAN study that caught my eye was the debated fact that subtle acts of covert discrimination, as they build up, can hurt a person's health.
In a review of this aspect of the study, the Washington Post said: "Some medical researchers have begun to suspect that repeated examples of subtle discrimination take a physical toll and may play a role in why black people tend to have poorer health than white people."
The study concerned small, repeated acts of white-on-black racism - not lynchings or beatings, but rudeness, white clerks waiting on white people (even latecomers) first, clutching purses at the mere sight of black folks, dirty looks and other trivialities - that may be harmful to the recipient's health as they pile up over time.
The SWAN study may be mainly talking black and white, but I don't think it stops there. I believe being a minority in a hostile landscape any-where is often a painful experience.
Of course, there are naysayers.
The Washington Post quotes a woman named Sally Satel, described as a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (whatever that is), who said: "If someone is rude to you, you don't know if it's discrimination or your perception. People who are already highstrung and hypervigilant may bring that kind of interpretation to the situation and are probably the kind of people who would be at high risk for heart problems."
Spoken like a person who doesn't have to ride the bus, wait in long thrift-store lines or seek medical care at a crowded clinic.
Sally's comment is basically a back-door version of put-on-a-happy-face.
If someone gives you lemons, make lemonade.
And there is no question that attitude is important.
Yet and still, if, after the fifth act of possible discrimination, a minority person starts looking for rudeness, condescension and other, gentler foibles of the urban condition, he or she will find them.
But what Sally's really doing by blaming the victim is avoiding the question itself.
Is it harmful to a person's health to be treated not quite as well as other folks simply because of the way they look, the color of their skin, or their gender?
From personal experience, I can tell you that I definitely believe the answer is yes.
I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, a place that has always been deeply divided by race.
Since the time of my birth, circa 1950, Cincinnati has always been about 65 percent white, 30 to 35 percent black.
But seldom do the twain meet.
I return to Ohio every two years or so.
I check in with my family, good German-Irish ethnics.
I also check in with my black friends, guys I played hoop with 30 years ago, and women I dated; the tales of the overt discrimination I faced from both races when squiring black women around Cincinnati in the '70s could fill this space for weeks - literally.
Cincinnati recently suffered a downtown boycott, brought on after city police shot and killed an unarmed black man who was running away from a traffic stop. Cincinnati police have shot more than one unarmed black man to death in the past decade. Their reputation in the minority community is the worst of any police department in any city I've ever lived in.
And yet not one white person I talked to mentioned the boycott unless I suggested doing something downtown. They just dealt around it, and ate, shopped and played in the suburbs.
Not one black person I hung out with failed to talk about the boycott unbidden, almost immediately. They wanted me to understand what it was "really" about: the cops and their perceived long history of violence against Cincinnati's black community.
Many blacks I knew in Cincinnati were thrilled, literally, when they first met a white person willing to engage in a conversation - cool or heated - about these issues.
The pain in their faces - justified or self-created, as old Sally Satel would have it - was too real to ignore. I knew that the slights they endured daily, large and small, had affected them negatively. You couldn't miss it if your eyes were open.
And once I married a black woman and started having beige babies, I got to see all the little cruelties for myself.
The waiters who took us to the table farthest from the window even if no one else was in the restaurant. The teacher who put my daughter, a reader at 4, in the non-reader group in first grade without the benefit of a test. The black traffic cop who kept pulling my wife and me over and trying to goad me into something he could arrest me for, until I indulged my position as a cops reporter against him and used my friendship with one of his bosses to force him to publicly apologize to me. The grocery store manager in our neighborhood who would wait on three or four customers and then stand with his back to my ex-wife and me, and talk to checkers for minutes at a time.
After three or four years of living in a biracial couple, in a racist city where very few other couples looked like us, I developed a hair-trigger temper. After only three years. I was, as Sally would have it, hypersensitive, which is not my nature.
That condition ebbed some after I got divorced and moved West. But it never went totally away, and when I single-parented my two daughters through their teens out here, I amped up my antenna and kept it up until I realized nothing much was happening in good old Seattle. Or not enough to warrant my copping an attitude.
Don't misunderstand me, I am not saying that the minority person is always right. And I make no special exception in my personal life for people of any color if they are loud and acting ignorant or treating me uncivilly.
But that's a different matter and a different issue.
People of all races, if they are acting respectfully, should be treated with the same amount of friendliness and respect.
Not only do kindness, politeness and a ready smile, if it's genuine, ease the social wheel; despite the Sally Satels of the world, I'm convinced kindness, politeness and that ready smile can also help other folks live longer.
Not to mention yourself.
Real smiling has already been proven to be very good for the smiler. I'm not talking about one of those fake, to-the-bone, customer-service jobbies. I mean a real, hey-there smile.
Try it, you'll live longer - and you might even take somebody else along with you for the longer ride.[[In-content Ad]]
