In the United States, survey research and qualitative studies consistently find that people of color—and Blacks in particular—report substantially lower levels of trust than do whites. These racial differences in trust pervade a range of social contexts, from interpersonal relationships with friends, family, and neighbors to interactions with the health care and criminal justice systems. Scholars often attribute racial differences in trust to historical and contemporary forms of discrimination, yet few studies have assessed the relationship among race, discrimination, and trust in the context of the United States. Using the Chicago Community Adult Health Study, I examine how the experience of discrimination relates to generalized trust, trust in neighbors, and trust in community police. Findings reveal that personal experience with discrimination contributes modestly to racial differences in trust. In fact, the negative association between discrimination and generalized trust appears strongest for whites. These findings suggest that understanding distrust requires a richer conceptual framework that moves beyond personal experience with discrimination. I argue that the theory of systemic racism provides a framework for understanding distrust as a consequence of countervailing efforts to uphold and contest the racial hierarchy.
- Award ID(s):
- 1759972
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10328366
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Environment and planning
- ISSN:
- 0263-774X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 251484862211014
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
more » « less
Abstract -
Abstract Water insecurity—the lack of access to sufficient, safe water to meet all household needs—is an escalating challenge in all world regions. It is also associated with unfavorable mental health outcomes, like anxiety and depression. Often situated in the context of drought or general water scarcity, connections between water and mental health often manifest out of the unique characteristics of water—as an important economic and household resource, and one managed primarily by women. This article identifies recognized and theorized pathways between water insecurity and common mental health conditions, as mediated by broader socioeconomic systems in which households are embedded. To this end, we synthesize and connect different literature sets, including limited economic studies in a resource insecurity framework and a small but authoritative body of ethnographic literature. Our review identifies multiple proximate candidate pathways connecting water insecurity with mental health outcomes including community conflicts and/or perceived injustice around water sharing and upkeep, agricultural decline and unemployment, food insecurity or distress migration, decreased water intake, non-exposure to blue spaces, and stress around water management. The gendered role of water management is an overlapping theme across pathways, exposing women disproportionately to forms of conflict, violence, and injustice associated with the risk of common mental illness. In general, there are varied forms of marginalization that people experience within water-insecure contexts. Greater engagement between economics and other disciplines can lend additional theoretical pathways to empirically test the water and mental health connections, associated with people’s water insecurity experiences.more » « less
-
more » « less
Abstract Informed by decades of literature, water interventions increasingly deploy “gender‐sensitive” or even “gender transformative” approaches that seek to redress the disproportionate harms women face from water insecurity. These efforts recognize the role of gendered social norms and unequal power relations but often focus narrowly on the differences and dynamics between cisgender (cis) men and women. This approach renders less visible the ways that living with water insecurity can differentially affect all individuals through the dynamics of gender, sexuality, and linked intersecting identities. Here, we first share a conceptual toolkit that explains gender as fluid, negotiated, and diverse beyond the cis‐binary. Using this as a starting point, we then review what is known and can be theorized from current literature, identifying limited observations from water‐insecure communities to identify examples of contexts where gendered mechanisms (such as social norms) differentiate experiences of water insecurity, such as elevating risks of social stigma, physical harm, or psychological distress. We then apply this approach to consider expanded ways to include transgender, non‐binary, and gender and sexual diversity to deepen, nuance and expand key thematics and approaches for water insecurity research. Reconceptualizing gender in these ways widens theoretical possibilities, changes how we collect data, and imagines new possibilities for effective and just water interventions.
This article is categorized under:
Human Water > Value of Water
Engineering Water > Water, Health, and Sanitation
Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented
Human Water > Methods
-
null (Ed.)In this paper we theorize trust as emerging in different material/infrastructural and epistemic realities as part of our multidisciplinary collaboration about water, called Neighborhood Environments as Socio-Techno-Bio Systems: Water Quality, Public Trust, and Health in Mexico City (NESTSMX)”. This collaboration, led by feminist anthropologists, brings together anthropology, environmental-public health, and environmental engineering researchers to analyze how neighborhoods as “socio-techno-bio systems” shape how people trust or distrust water. Our project follows the infrastructures and social structures that move water in and out of neighborhoods, households, and bodies making them trust it more or less. At the same time our multi-disciplinary research team inhabits different epistemic research environments that creates tensions about how we make knowledge and what counts as data. Trust and distrust then shapes how we constitute both our object of inquiry and how we know it.more » « less
-
more » « less
Abstract This article puts into dialogue anthropological discussions on violence, infrastructures, food systems, and affect to argue for the importance of understanding the role of affective responses in shaping not only subjectivities or experiences of individuals but also the networks, infrastructures, and institutions in which they participate. Set in contemporary Mexico, where concern about criminal violence has become increasingly widespread, the article analyzes ethnographically how different actors in Mexico City's wholesale food market narrate and respond to contexts of violence. It argues that a cluster of affects born out of a sense of insecurity—fear, uncertainty, distrust—come to shape people's everyday (im)mobilities and that these shifting mobilities and arrangements are in fact constitutive of Mexico City's food system. Attention to the affective dimensions of infrastructure entails humanizing the study of material circulation, placing sensations, perceptions, and experiences front and center. This can help to illuminate how infrastructures that appear to be stable and continuous in fact experience internal transformations and rearrangements in new political, economic, and social contexts.
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221101459
