NPR report on research into the chronic stress of racism and the effects on health. Excellent article, well worth checking out. An excerpt:
But research suggests bad things happen when your body has to gear up for threats too often, consistently washing itself in stress hormones.
“Prolonged elevation [and] circulation of the stress hormones in our bodies can be very toxic and compromise our body’s ability to regulate key biological systems like our cardiovascular system, our inflammatory system, our neuroendocrine system,” Nuru-Jeter says. “It just gets us really out of whack and leaves us susceptible to a bunch of poor health outcomes.”
A number of small studies have documented similar stress reactions in response to racism, and even in response to the mere expectation of a racist encounter.