There has long been interest in the relationship between discrimination and blood pressure (Williams and Neighbors 2001; Brondolo et al. 2003), as well as, cardiovascular disease more broadly (Wyatt et al. 2003). Table 1 lists eight recent studies that use laboratory experiments to expose individuals to analogues of racist events. The studies of cardiovascular reactivity find that acute experiences of stress continue to be related to increases in blood pressure reactivity in the laboratory setting. However, our understanding of the relationship between exposure to discrimination and the sustained elevation of blood pressure remains elusive. In recent studies, the patterns remain complex and unclear. While one study found a U-shaped association between discrimination and systolic blood pressure among Latinos and African Americans in New Hampshire (Ryan et al. 2006), some other studies have not found an association between perceived discrimination and blood pressure. This includes analyses of 3,300 middle-aged women in the MESA study (Brown et al. 2006). In a study of black and white adolescents, unfair treatment attributed to race was unrelated to ambulatory blood pressure, but unfair treatment due
