African/American Black Culture
Culture has an essential role in shaping health behaviors. All cultures have systems of beliefs, values, practices, and lifestyle beliefs that can have a profound effect on health care and health providers. The Black American culture has the potential for these effects, given its specific beliefs and practices. The culture faces a literacy crisis that often results in adverse health outcomes, makes pain, death, grief, and burial more comprehensible, and has some similarities and differences to my Sierra Leone African culture.
Despite the fight against racial and ethnic inequalities in the US, African Americans are still disproportionally affected by the literacy crisis, resulting in poverty and negative impacts on health. Research shows that African Americans from low-income families have the highest risk of dropping out of high school to search for menial jobs to support their families when compared with other groups (Berger). With low academic achievements, their economic prospects later in life are minimized; hence, a cycle of poverty affecting each of their new generations is maintained. With low incomes, it means that African Americans of low education attainment can only afford to reside in the low-income region where resources for health are not available. Such areas are mostly economically marginalized and possess high risks for health. Concerning economic marginalization, low-income neighborhoods have limited access to outlets of healthy food as investors avoid such areas for revenue uncertainties, which leads to an oversupply for fast food restaurants that promote poor health. Also, the regions suffer from a shortage of primary health care providers, which negatively impact the accessibility of health care for African American residents. The reason is that the health care facilities in those areas are often low resourced, hence have more considerable difficulties offering attractive salaries for health care providers. Risk factors for health in the low-income neighborhoods of African Americans include high crime rates and high levels of toxins. With low income and fewer jobs, economic hardships exacerbate crimes, exposing African Americans to the stress of having to live insecure conditions, injuries, and death from criminal violence. A study in the national academy of sciences shows that low-income areas of African Americans have the highest levels of toxins, such as hazardous waste, water, and air pollution, and industrial chemicals (Manduca & Sampson 7776). These toxins are attributable to cancers and respiratory complications.
African Americans have unique approaches to pain, death, grief, and burial. Pain is a multi-billion health concern, but African Americans are not as likely as Whites to discuss pain concerns. This tendency is related to their cultural perception that talking about paint increases its power and intensity in one’s life. As a result, Black Americans have a reduced willingness to self-report pain, even if the pain is intense. With this knowledge, culturally competent health care providers can proactively ask their black patients about pain in a manner that conveys respect. African Americans acknowledge that dying and death is a natural, universal, and an inescapable fact of life. According to their belief system, life does not end at death but continues in the spiritual realm. Thus, dying persons tend to accept the dying process more and have fewer attempts to fight death through the utilization of advanced care directives (Huang 150). As a result, the dying receives social support from their families until the end. African Americans deal with grief through religion, which provides them with emotional resources for overcoming grief. Therefore, this spirituality creates a foundation for coping with the loss of a loved one by extending the misery to a consoling God. Moreover, religion offers other benefits such as social networks from church members provide mutual support the grieving families. Burial is an essential occasion in African American culture because it marks the transition into the spiritual realm. While gestures of condolence are crucial, there is a social obligation to attend the burial of a loved one as it allows people to pay their respect to their dead. Americans tend to invest considerable resources in the execution of funerals and are given the care with planning.
The Sierra Leone cultural beliefs and practices have some similarities and differences to those of Black Americans. The first similarity is that, in both cultures, there are enlarged kinship attachments with grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles. Thus, family members automatically become primary caregivers for sick relatives. In both the Sierra Leone African culture and the African American cultures, mothers are more likely to expose their babies to sudden infant death syndrome. Mothers in these cultures are likely to share beds with babies and place the babies to sleep on the stomach and the side. Such sleeping conditions making breathing difficult for infants leading to death. Concerning the differences, in the Sierra Leone culture, most people attribute sickness to supernatural forces. So, they don’t appreciate western medicine as they often make their traditional medicine from herbs. On the contrary, African Americans believe the cause of diseases to be an inherent scientific occurrence. So, it promotes medical treatments that fight disease-causing microorganisms and the use of advanced technologies in the identification and treatment of ill health.
Another difference is that Sierra Leone culture a lot of respect for authority. Therefore, conflicting with the health care plans made by health care providers is avoided leading to high levels of medication compliance in the patients. In contrast, the African American culture views the US administrative system with a degree of mistrust that often results in reduced regard for authority. Thus, African Americans are most likely to disagree with recommendations made by health care providers leading to noncompliance with treatment.
Works Cited
Berger, Rakota. “The problem with dropping out and why students leave school before graduating.” International Journal of Psychological Research and Reviews, 2019, doi: 10.28933/ijprr-2019-01-1005.
Huang, Ivy A., et al. “Racial and ethnic differences in advance directive possession: Role of demographic factors, religious affiliation, and personal health values in a national survey of older adults.” Journal of Palliative Medicine, vol. 19, no. 2, 2017, pp. 149–156., doi:10.1089/jpm.2015.0326.
Manduca, Robert, and Robert J. Sampson. “Punishing and toxic neighborhood environments independently predict the intergenerational social mobility of black and white children.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 116, no. 16, Jan. 2019, pp. 7772–7777., doi:10.1073/pnas.1820464116.