had been diagnosed, and disease had been passed to 19 children at birth. In one study, researchers found medical professionals perceive black patients to be less susceptible to pain than their white patients. White patients are given better treatment and access than black patients. As a result, black patients are more vulnerable to disease than white counterparts. Demographic changes can have broad effects on the health of ethnic groups. Cities in the United States have undergone major social transitions during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Notable factors in these shifts have been sustained rates of black poverty and intensified racial segregation, often as a result of redlining. Indications of the effect of these social forces on black-white differentials in health status have begun to surface in the research literature. Race has played a decisive role in shaping systems of medical care in the United States. The divided health system persists, in spite of federal efforts to end segregation, health care remains, at best widely segregated both exacerbating and distorting racial disparities. Furthermore, the risks for many diseases are elevated for socially, economically, and politically disadvantaged groups in the United States, suggesting to some that environmental factors and not genetics are the causes of most of the differences. Racism Racial differences in health often persist even at equivalent socioeconomic levels. Individual and institutional discrimination, along with the stigma of inferiority, can adversely affect health. Racism can also directly affect health in multiple ways. Residence in poor neighborhoods, racial bias in medical care, the stress of experiences of discrimination and the acceptance of the societal stigma of inferiority can have deleterious consequences for health. Racism is a key determinant of socioeconomic status (SES) in the United States, and SES, in turn, is a fundamental cause of racial inequities in health. Using The Schedule of Racist Events (SRE), an 18-item self-report inventory that assesses the frequency of racist discrimination. Hope Landrine and Elizabeth A. Klonoff found that racist discrimination was frequent in the lives of African Americans and is strongly correlated to psychiatric symptoms. A study on racist events in the lives of African American women found that lifetime racism was positively correlated to lifetime history of both physical disease and frequency of recent common colds. These relationships were largely unaccounted for by other variables. Demographic variables such as income and education were not related to experiences of racism. The results suggest that