African culture has been characterized by cultural restraints against heavy consumption: for many hundreds of years, it has not been normative to drink heavily in this cultural group (Christmon, 1995). That history has combined with the present day experience of African Americans in the United States, characterized by high levels of scrutiny by European Americans and high levels of social sanction against boisterous behavior which together have led to lower average levels of alcohol consumption for African Americans as a group (Bonilla-Silva, 1997; Herd, 1997a). Research conducted within the past two decades, based on both national randomized and community convenience samples, has documented several culturally specific protective factors within the African American community related to reduced risk for alcoholism, such as more conservative norms and attitudes towards alcohol use, higher levels of parental monitoring of youth’s substance use behaviors, and higher levels of religiosity. These factors combine with the apparent presence of a protective genetic factor (the ADH1B*3 allele), which appears to reduce risk by accelerating the rate of metabolism of alcohol for some African Americans (Ehlers et al., 2003).
