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John Henryism (JH) is a strategy for coping with prolonged exposure to stresses such as social discrimination by expending high levels of effort which results in accumulating physiological costs.
Contents
Origins
The term was conceived in the 1970s by African-American epidemiologist and public health researcher Sherman James while he was investigating racial health disparities between blacks and others in North Carolina.
One of the people he interviewed was a black man, who, despite being born into an impoverished sharecropper family and having only a second grade education, could read and write. The man had freed himself and his offspring from the sharecropper system, had 75 acres (30 ha) of farmed land by age 40, but by his 50s, he had hypertension, arthritis, and severe peptic ulcer disease.
His name, John Henry Martin, and his circumstances were evocative of folk hero John Henry, an African American who worked vigorously enough to compete successfully with a steam powered machine but died as a result of his effort.
Description
James developed a scale for measuring JH based on agreement with a series of statements such as these:
Effects
Men who score higher on the scale generally have higher blood pressure than men with lower scores. The effect is strongest in the poor.
Studies have found that African-Americans with high scores are less likely to be current or former smokers than African-Americans with low JH scores. African-American college students with high JH scores were less likely to have carried a weapon on campus for self-defence, more likely to have been arrested for driving under the influence, and more likely to have missed a class due to alcohol use.