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Hardships, deprivations, and unequal access to social resources show race-linked patterns from infancy onward. Differential risk factors can both reduce the chances of surviving into old age (Gee, 1989) and contribute to unfavorable economic and health status in old age.
An elderly AfricanAmerican, for example, may experience anxiety as the result of a lifetime of prejudice and discrimination, but also because of stress and deprivation in the immediate situation (Barresi, 1987).
As Jackson (1993) suggests, socioeconomic class may be the major determinant of the risk factors that have been found associated with race.
People in the lower socioeconomic brackets are at greater risk for health and other problems whatever their race. Furthermore, it is not only the differential sources of anxiety that seem to be race-linked, but there is also a tendency to focus on middle-class whites in research, educational, and clinical
contacts.
For example, an elderly African-American man of rural Southern origins was a candidate for independent living after several years in a New England geriatric facility.
He was seen by a psychologist who recognized that some of Mr. S.’s concerns were identical with those of other (white) residents who had faced the same challenge. However, Mr. S. also had a more distinctive source of anxiety.
He was alarmed at the prospect of stepping out of his life-long role as a compliant and subserviant individual.
(This anxiety first came to light when he insisted on sitting in the back of the bus when he joined a number of other residents in an outing.) Mr. S. readily accepted help in preparing himself to cope with some of the specific tasks and problems he would be encountering in the community, but he became paralyzed with anxiety whenever he sensed that he might be crossing the line to the kind of independence and privilege he associated with whites.
Mr. S.’s age itself had very little to do with this reaction, which was not seen among white residents of his age and older. It would have been a mistake to interpret this reaction as the anxiety of old age when it was the unfortunate residue of a lifetime of
mistreatment.
