Skin color matters when it comes to Canadians’ health: UBC study
A new University of British Columbia study finds that Black Canadians with darker skin are more likely to report poorer health than Black Canadians with lighter skin. The study also suggests that a mismatched racial identity can negatively affect health.
The study, published online in the current issue of Social Science & Medicine journal, provides the first Canadian evidence of the health effects of “colourism,” discrimination targeted more strongly at darker-skinned than lighter-skinned people of colour, says the author.
Researchers surveyed the self-reported racial identities - Asian, Black, South Asian and White - of nearly 1,500 participants from Vancouver and Toronto across four key health indicators: high blood pressure, depression, mental health and overall health.
While some findings support existing research - that Black Canadians are more likely than others to report high blood pressure and that Asian Canadians are most likely to report poorer mental health - the study found that Black Canadians with darker skin were as much as four times more likely than Black Canadians with lighter skin to report poor overall health.
Although U.S. scholars have researched the wide-ranging effects of colourism for African Americans, including effects on health, the UBC study’s author Prof. Gerry Veenstra, Dept. of Sociology, says this is the first study to suggest that colourism can affect the health of Canadians as well.
“The findings indicate that, for Black Canadians, levels of discrimination can depend on the relative darkness or lightness of their skin,” says Veenstra. “For health researchers and policymakers, this means that the broad racial classifications typically used by health researchers may actually underestimate the magnitude of racial health inequalities in this country.”
Canadian doctors and nutritionists are urging dark-skinned immigrants coming to Canada to supplement with vitamin D in order to stay healthy. Many Canadian immigrants have relocated from countries with warmer, sunnier climates, and are exposed to far less natural sunshine in Canada than in their native lands. As a result, many of them have become deficient in vitamin D.
Immigrants come to Canada to work, to go to school, and simply to live, but few realize that the change in climate conditions could have devastating effects on their health. Darker-skinned people who come from places that receive more sunlight and are warmer for more months out of the year often have trouble maintaining healthy vitamin D levels in places like Canada that are colder and get less overall sunlight.
According to Dr. Kevin Pottie, nearly all of the immigrant and refugee patients he tests have low vitamin D levels, especially during the wintertime when the angle of the sun is at its lowest and the fewest ultraviolet-B (UVB) rays make their way to people’s skin.
“This is a first step to understanding colourism’s manifestations in Canada and the degree to which and for whom it affects health and well-being,” adds Veenstra, who plans to study whether colourism affects other Canadian racial identities.
The study also finds that mistaking an individual’s racial identity can have significant negative physical or mental impacts. Participants who reported higher levels of racial identity mismatches were found to be at greater risk of high blood pressure, poorer self-rated mental health and poorer self-rated overall health.
“For instance, people who considered themselves to be White but believed others tend to think they are something else - perhaps that they were of mixed race, for example - were at a higher risk of high blood pressure and poor mental health,” Veenstra says.
While the study did not investigate the causes of this phenomenon, Veenstra says previous studies have suggested that people experience stress when the cues provided by others do not match their conceptions of themselves, a stress that can be strong enough to elicit adverse health outcomes.
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Basil Waugh
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604-822-2048
University of British Columbia