Race and ethnicity are not primary determinants in utilizing veterinary services in underserved communities in the United States

A retrospective database analysis (2011–2015) evaluated associations between race and ethnicity and veterinary service utilization by sampling 83,260 companion animals whose guardians (owners) self-identified as White, Black, or Latino/a from 39 Humane Society of the United States Pets for Life (PFL) sites across the United States. Controlling for socioeconomic status, the percentage of nonhuman animals sterilized through PFL whose owners were Latino/a or Black was substantially higher than in previously reported findings. While Latinos/as had the highest mean number of days from first contact with the program to consent, they also had the highest percentage of owners accepting the voucher during initial contact. Logistic regression models suggested that although meaningful, race and ethnicity were not primary determinants of veterinary service utilization. When veterinary and animal welfare organizations deliberately remove structural barriers embedded with racial inequalities, individuals, regardless of race and ethnicity, proceed with companion-animal sterilization. Therefore, service providers must use unbiased, informed, and culturally competent practices to improve companion-animal welfare through the optimization of veterinary services, including spay and neuter.     

What to Do with Race? Changing Notions of Race in the Social Sciences

The Supplement to the Surgeon General's Report on Mental Health documents that race, ethnicity, and culture are linked to the use of mental health services and the receipt of quality mental health care. The Supplement provides an elaborate discussion on how culture affects mental health care without a corresponding level of discourse on race. How race is handled in the Supplement suggests that it is still a sensitive topic and one that is difficult to address in a public report. This sensitivity parallels the difficulties that the social sciences have had in investigating issues of race. In this paper, we highlight some perspectives that have influenced the way race has been studied in the past and how these views reflect the general political climates of the eras that produced them.     

Race/ethnicity and telomere length in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis

Telomere length has emerged as a marker of exposure to oxidative stress and aging. Race/ethnic differences in telomere length have been infrequently investigated. Leukocyte telomere length (LTL) was assessed 981 white, black and Hispanic men and women aged 45–84 years participating in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis. Direct measurement and questionnaire were used to assess covariates. Linear regression was used to estimate associations of LTL with race/ethnicity and age after adjustment for sex, income, education, smoking, physical activity, diet and body mass index. On average blacks and Hispanics had shorter telomeres than whites [adjusted mean differences (standard error) in T/S ratio compared to whites: −0.041 (0.018) for blacks and −0.044 (0.018) for Hispanics]. Blacks and Hispanics showed greater differences in telomere length associated with age than whites (adjusted mean differences in T / S ratio per 1 year increase in age −0.0018, −0.0047 and −0.0055 in whites, blacks and Hispanics respectively). Differences in age associations were more pronounced and only statistically significant in women. Race/ethnic differences in LTL may reflect the cumulative burden of differential exposure to oxidative stress (and its predictors) over the lifecourse.     

Whose chosenness counts? The always-already racialized discourse of trans – response to Rogers Brubaker

The Jenner/Dolezal moment, while it appears to provide a neat comparative experiment in gender and racial classifications, is itself the artefact of an invisible, already racialized gender system. If we take this question at the heart of Rogers Brubaker’s provocative new book on its own terms, we find, like Brubaker, that very different rules, and indeed, different institutional architectures, govern the two categorical systems. Closer inspection reveals the ways claims to gender legitimacy are always strained through the mesh of racial legitimacy. What is more, the social forces at work in trans “recognition” politics may underwrite some of the most pernicious forms of racialized violence in the contemporary United States.     

Defining difference,forging unity: The co‐construction of race,ethnicity and nation in Belize

This article examines competing nationalist projects which compete to constitute a Belizean nation: pluralist nationalism constructs the nation as ethnically diverse; synthetic nationalism attempts to submerge ethnic or racial difference into a shared national identity; hegemonic nationalism works to attach preferentially a single racial identity to the nation and exclude other identities. Within these projects, the homogenizing processes which construct national sameness are integrally related to the individualizing processes which constitute subnational difference: both national sameness and subnational differences are constituted in terms of race, ethnicity, or a conflation of the two. The article explores how the essentialization of racial, ethnic and national identities facilitates their assimilation of one another.     

Racial/Ethnic and Gender Differences in Concern with Weight and in Bulimic Behaviors Among Adolescents

FIELD, ALISON E, GRAHAM A COLDITZ, KAREN E PETERSON. Racial/ethnic and gender differences in concern with weight and in bulimic behaviors among adolescents. This study examined cross-sectional gender and racial/ethnic differences in bulimic behaviors among adolescents. Subjects were 704 male and 621 female students at a large urban public high school in the Northeast. Approximately 61% of the girls and 43% of the boys reported trying to lose weight or maintain their current weight; 2.0% of the students reported using laxatives or vomiting to control their weight. The use of these behaviors to control weight was only slightly more common among girls than boys (2.7% vs. 1.4%,p=0.1). Although more black than white girls used laxatives or vomiting to control weight (odds ratio [OR]=11.9, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.5–95.3), there were no racial/ethnic differences in these behaviors among boys. However, Hispanic boys were twice as likely as white boys to binge eat at least monthly (OR=2.0, 95% CI 1.1–3.6). Our results suggest that bulimic behaviors affect male and female adolescents from a variety of racial/ethnic backgrounds. In addition, in contrast to the large gender differences in the prevalence of dieting and binge eating, more modest differences were documented in the prevalence of using vomiting and laxatives to control weight.     

Mestizaje and Law Making in Indigenous Identity Formation in Northeastern Brazil: "After the Conflict Came the History"

In this article, I explore issues of authenticity, legal discourse, and local requirements of belonging by considering the recent surge of indigenous recognitions in northeastern Brazil. I investigate how race and ethnicity are implicated in the recognition process in Brazil on the basis of an analysis of a successful struggle for indigenous identity and access to land by a group of mixed-race, visibly, African-descended rural workers. I propose that the debate over mestizaje (ethnoracial and cultural mixing) in the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America can be reconfigured and clarified by broadening it to include such Brazilian experiences. I argue that the interaction between two processes—law making and indigenous identity formation—is crucial to understanding how the notion of "mixed heritage" is both reinforced and disentangled. As such, this article is an illustration of the role of legal discourse in the constitution of indigenous identities and it introduces northeastern Brazil into the global discussion of law, indigenous rights, and claims to citizenship.     

Introduction to the special issue: intersectionality and entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT

We briefly review the ethnic entrepreneurship paradigm, identifying the problems associated with an approach that emphasizes the salience of one social group, ethnicity, to the exclusion or downplaying of others, such as race, class, and gender. We introduce an intersectional approach to the study of (ethnic) enterprise, reviewing the literature and using the articles in this special issue to demonstrate the utility of this perspective. We close by encouraging the use of this approach in future research.     

Collecting ethnic statistics in Europe: a review

Abstract

Statistics on ethnicity, if not on ‘race’, are common in a large number of countries around the world, but not in the western part of Europe. This divergence can be explained by legal prohibitions attached to data protection provisions and by a political reluctance to recognize and emphasize ethnic diversity in official statistics. Following different traditions of political framing, northern, central and eastern European countries have implemented different ways of collecting ‘ethnic statistics’. This article provides a review of the heterogeneity of methodologies used for converting ethnicity into statistics and discusses their limitations for any potential standardization. As part of the enforcement of anti-discrimination policies, European human rights institutions are urging a reconsideration of the choice of ‘colour-blind’ statistics. Counting or not counting by ethnicity raises epistemological and methodological dilemmas which this article attempts to identify.