This review exploits the concepts of race and racism and defines particularities for the health profile of individuals or groups subject to discrimination or racial prejudice. In addition, we intend to seek evidences of the relationship between racism and health from the studies on stress. It presents social inequality as a powerful factor in the causality of health inequalities, which generates disparities in the stress prevalence. Racism is a creator and sustainer element of stressors in the context of social relations, and it explains how racial discrimination provokes fundamental limitations in the individuals' life, which impacts broadly on the amount of stress experienced. We tried to systematize knowledge about the relationship between race and health, investigating the deleterious impact of racism on the principle of social distribution of stress.
health; racial identity; racial prejudice; racism; stress