Perceived racial or ethnic discrimination is one aspect of racism that is increasingly receiving empirical attention as a class of stressors that could have consequences for health and for understanding disparities in health. This is consistent with broader interest in the role of stress as a determinant of social disparities in health (Pearlin et al. 2005). Stress appears to accelerate cellular aging (Epel et al. 2006) and the chronic stressors triggered by multiple environmental assaults can lead to wear and tear on the body that can dysregulate multiple biological systems and lead to premature illness and mortality (Seeman et al. 2004). A word about terminology—in this paper, we use the terms discrimination, perceived discrimination, interpersonal discrimination and self reported discrimination interchangeably. We also use the term racial discrimination to refer to both racial and ethnic discrimination.
