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BLKS 5520
Critical Health Issues in Black Communities
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Beginning with the African context and the imposition of chattel slavery, this course examines social, cultural, and historical factors affecting the health status of African Americans to the present era. It explores a variety of health-related issues including the interplay between environment, biology, and culture; folk and popular health practices; structured inequality and oppression; lifestyle, beliefs, and values; and the organization and delivery of health care.Moreover, this course moves well beyond the idea that medical care- its presence, absence, or quality- is the singular or most critical factor determining the health of a people, community, or society. It reveals the importance of social phenomena in disease resistance and health promotion. Historical shifts from the prominence of infectious to chronic diseases; the implications to health of chattel slavery, sharecropping, segregation, poverty, and structures inequality; the relationship between psychosocial factors and disease, i.e. destabilized social settings that compromise resistance to disease; environmental racism; and the health status of African Americans as it relates to the organization of work, family structure and function, religious beliefs, the organization of medical care, lifestyle, consumer manipulation, and post-industrial society are major issues addressed by the course.
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Faculty:
College of Arts & Sciences
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Department:
KA&S - General
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