The CDC releases a slew of inequality trends.
Many people will find the new report from the Centers from Disease Control very helpful. It’s called CDC Health Disparities and Inequalities Report — United States, 2011, and it covers everything from inadequate and unhealthy housing to preterm birth by race/ethnicity:
I previously reported national comparisons showing the U.S. bringing up the rear on this health indicator, and discussed the evidence for the role of obesity. This table was nice because it broke out the Latino groups, which we often don’t get (next step, Asians).
Anyway, very nice to see CDC putting resources into the collection and dissemination of inequality indicators. This report should be especially useful to teachers who want to include health in their discussion of inequality, but aren’t specialists in health outcomes (like me).
Family Inequality 
The previous post, on why ‘stress’ might be the possible primary factor in health outcomes as contrasted with the more easily measurable factors such as class/race (in the US), ethnicity, or culture, demonstrates again how difficult it is to do good research in sociology. One thing that always strikes me is the weird granularity of the official ethnic categories also mentioned on in this post: splitting out the Latinos, with the suggestion to do the Asians next. But, what about the ‘non-hispanic whites’? Isn’t there an enormous variation in this majority group too? ‘Whites’ encompasses traditional enemies with disparate cultures on the one hand, (Jews/Arabs, English/Irish, Germans/Poles, and even Dutch/Belgians 😉 ), with as possibly present but certainly future majority the mixed-blood offspring that can only be called Americans. Likewise, ‘Black, non-Hispanic’ hides different shades of color in US-born Blacks, evidence of sexual activity that may still be too painful to acknowledge openly, but also recent African immigrants who have their own divisions
(Ethiopians/Nigerians).
I realize the statistics aren’t there to take all these distinctions into account, but it would be really nice if one could.
LikeLike