By TaRessa Stovall

Decades of research reveal that—no surprise—the stress of living in a racist society causes African Americans to age faster, experience greater health problems and die sooner than their white counterparts.

The article, “Racism’s Hidden Toll,” in the latest issue of Miller-McCune magazine profiles scholar Arline T. Geronimus, a woman who has spent decades investigating the social and biological mechanisms related to racial health disparities. Geronimus, a professor in the University of Michigan School of Public Health, has won both acclaim and criticism for her in-depth research into the reasons behind popular assumptions around race, stress, disease and longevity.

“Racism’s Hidden Toll” shares a few of Geronimus’ key findings, including:

• In impoverished urban areas like Harlem, one-third of black girls and two-thirds of boys who reach their 15th birthdays don’t reach their 65th. That’s almost triple the rate of early death among average Americans.

• Blacks now die at a rate comparable to the death rate for whites of 30 years ago.

• Every year, 100,000 more African Americans die than would be the case if black and white death rates were the same. For many diseases, the situation is worsening: In 1950, blacks had a slightly lower cancer death rate than whites. By 2000, the rate was 30 percent higher among blacks.

Hurricane Katrina victim

Despite “a panoply of interventions,” including getting blacks to eat better and exercise more; giving them better health care; and getting blacks higher education and jobs, “the numbers have barely budged.” Geronimus’ research suggests reasons why the disparities persist even when blacks have improved educational opportunities and earn higher incomes.

The magazine story also details the attacks Geronimus has suffered as a result of her determination to convince people to focus on the larger, underlying causes of poverty and poor health. The University of Michigan’s public relations staff was deluged with calls and letters demanding she be fired. Colleagues advised students not to take her classes, and some stopped wanting to work with her on research projects. Neighbors shunned her and she received death threats at work and home, telling her she should be shot.

“The more results Geronimus produced, and the more she read, the more she began to agree with the radical notion that it wasn’t anything inherent to their race that made black people sick—it was being black in a racist society,” the magazine story says.

Other research supports her findings. The article, “Black-White Health Gap as Large as in 1950,” on Medscape.com, stated that, “The gap in death rates between blacks and white was as large 5 years ago as it was 50 years ago, according to a Univeristy of Michigan study published in the current issue of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

“In 1950, the death rate for blacks was 1.6 times higher than the rate for whites—identical to what it was in 1995,” says the author of the study, David R. Williams, a professor at the Harvard University School of Public Health.

While different economic status contributes to the black-white health gap, with higher-income earners of both races having better health, Williams notes that “At the same time, at every level of income, blacks tend to have higher death rates than whites. This could reflect the added effect of racism and discrimination, he maintains.

“’Racism can affect health indirectly through institutional policies that reduce employment and educational opportunities for minorities,’ says Williams. In addition, racism can also affect health directly in multiple ways,” from living in poor neighborhoods, racial discrimination in health and medical care, and the stress of experiencing discrimination.

TaRessa Stovall is Managing Editor of TheDefendersOnline and Web Content Manager for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.