If something systemic feels bad and wrong and unfair—so bad that it makes your body react by coping with constant stress—it should follow that it's not great for your long-term health, right?
Science would seem to agree with this common sense. As reported by NPR, overall life-expectancy trends in the U.S. and research into a phenomenon called "weathering" are supporting the idea that people of color are more likely to have worse health outcomes and shorter lives due to racism and poverty.
The research leans on figures from 2020, when life expectancy dropped 1.5 years in the U.S., but even more for Native Americans (a 4.5-year drop) and Blacks and Hispanics, who lost three years of life expectancy. How did White people fare? They were below the average, losing only 1.2 years. Must be nice!
Related: Here’s Another Effect of Racism: Black Americans’ Brains Age Faster
The article points out that Black and Hispanic people, as well as those living in poverty in the U.S., are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, have higher rates of diabetes, and suffer more instances than the general population of maternal and infant mortality. Add to that the idea of "weathering," which University of Michigan public health researcher Arline Geronimus has been exploring for decades. Geronimus says public health data about diet, genetics, and other factors don't explain the gap in these health outcomes.
"Instead," the article says, "she makes the case that marginalized people suffer nearly constant stress from living with poverty and discrimination, which damages the bodies at the cellular level and leads to increasingly serious health problems over time."
The idea, NPR says, was criticized in the 1990s, but has come to be more accepted as an explanation for all the skewed health data. In her interview with NPR, Geronimus shares some pretty incredible insights into how the body responds to this kind of stress, why immigrants are particularly vulnerable to weathering, and why upward mobility and higher income isn't a cure-all for erasing this type of stress. You can read even more about it in her book, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society.
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