Urban Health and Society: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Research and Practice - Part 16. This book provides the most current frameworks, research, and approaches for understanding how unique features of the urban physical and social environments that shape the health of over half of the world's population that is already residing in large cities. Its interdisciplinary research and practice focus is a welcome innovation. | Racialized Ideologies 131 American and other urban communities and assess the role of policy in creating and perpetuating these differences. By drawing on a broad range of disciplinary approaches we demonstrate the value of examining health inequities from a variety of perspectives including biological sociological psychological and political. At least since 1971 when William Ryan coined the phrase blaming the victim 12 a raft of literature has criticized public policies that concentrate on encouraging individuals to change their behavior instead of on creating structural changes in the social More recently Bruce Link and Jo Phelan21 22 have argued that failures to eliminate disparities in health result from undue emphasis on ameliorative approaches that target the risk factors linking socioeconomic position to health in a particular context but not on altering the context itself. From this fundamental cause perspective the only effective way to reduce or eliminate differentials in health is to address the underlying social inequalities that so reliably produce them. 22 This is a formidable challenge that requires going beyond the usual health policy discourse. Toward this end we start by noting that racial inequalities in health are the predictable manifestation of linkages among prevailing racialized ideologies political and economic structural inequalities that follow the personal and social coping mechanisms adopted to manage dominant ideologies and structural inequalities and the physiological effects of these coping efforts. Thus before classifying policies according to their emphasis on individual behavioral change or on political-economic structural change we ask whether premises that undergird both perspectives misinterpret black health problems and whether they are harmful to black health. We illustrate below that current policy ideas and proposals rely on specific social and moral viewpoints that are racially biased toward white norms .
