Californians are publicly considering the idea of black American reparations, and the state’s Reparations Task Force will make its recommendations on July 1. This initiative builds on smaller efforts such as my hometown of Evanston, Illinois, which in 2021 became the first U.S. city to pledge limited financial redress for slavery and city-sanctioned discriminatory housing policies.
Across the country, much of the talk of reparations has centered on the financial burden of slavery and subsequent racist government policies. As a direct result of these factors, the median wealth of white households in the US is now about eight times that of black households.
This racial disparity in wealth alone is a strong case for reparations. However, this must be accompanied by an equally large and often less recognized health gap: in the US, blacks live, on average, years shorter than whites. And as with the wealth gap, racism is a major culprit.
I’m an anthropologist and epidemiologist who studies health inequalities, and I began my testimony last year for the California Reparations Task Force with some stark numbers compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics: Life expectancy for black women in the US is three years less than for their white counterparts. For men, the five-year difference is considerably smaller.
This gap in the breed’s health is largely due to stress-related illnesses such as heart attacks and strokes and is not related to genetic differences. In fact, racial groups don’t exactly match our genes. Instead, they are fluid categories that societies establish in response to cultural norms defined and enforced by those in charge to maintain social control.
An example from the US is the arbitrary “one-drop rule” of the Jim Crow era, aimed at preserving the purity of the white race in some former slave-owning states. It stipulated that Americans can only be considered white if they show no evidence of previous intermarriage with people of non-European descent. This meant that an American could have a majority of European ancestry and still be considered black, and this is still true today.
Studies of human genetic diversity tell us that humans evolved in Africa and then migrated to other continents relatively recently. Consequently, all human populations outside Africa, including Europeans and Asians, are in fact only slightly modified subsets of the original African genetic diversity of the human species. While we may differ in superficial things like skin color or hair type, all humans share the vast majority of the same gene pool.
Genetics don’t explain the wide racial health gap in America. However, the experience of being black in America does. In particular, decades of public health research show that racism is a critical factor. Racism makes everyday interactions more stressful and affects many other factors that influence disease, including the quality of and access to health care, educational opportunities, and neighborhood characteristics such as air quality, exposure to industrial pollution, and access to healthy food.
Or consider the prevalence of cardiovascular disease among black Americans, which contributes more to the black-white death gap than any other cause of death. A 2015 review in the American Journal of Epidemiology examining relevant studies found that the evidence for genes driving these differences is “essentially zero.” Instead, research links this gap to social inequalities. For example, a 2020 analysis of the Jackson Heart Study, which followed the health of thousands of people over 25 years, found that lifetime discrimination significantly increased the risk of heart disease among black participants. A separate 2021 study found that black participants had higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which affects conditions such as blood pressure and heart disease, on days when they reported experiencing racial discrimination.
The health gap looms as soon as black babies are born in the US. Black Americans are more likely to have low birth weight, which can lead to health problems in children and higher rates of high blood pressure, stroke, and heart disease later in life. A landmark 1997 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that African immigrants to Illinois gave birth to babies with birth weights close to that of white mothers — but later research found that after a generation or two in the U.S., they parted part of that community experience began. lower birth weight compared to African Americans whose families have lived here for generations.
These mothers’ lower birth weights had nothing to do with genetics, but everything to do with the cumulative stress of being black in America.
While my testimony to the California Reparations Task Force began with dismal statistics, it ended on a note of hope: Since the Racial Health Gap is not genetic, we can reverse it. Health improves when we reduce stressors – and when families have access to appropriate resources. In a study in the Chicago area, upward economic mobility reduced the likelihood of black mothers giving birth to a child too small for pregnancy. Initial studies of pilot minimum income programs indicate improvements in mental health, including depression, for affected communities.
Economists can calculate the wealth gap between black and white families created by centuries of racist politics in the US. The vast health disparities caused by systemic racism are harder to quantify in dollars, but it’s another historical injustice that deserves story. Material resources provided through recovery programs will also help close the health gap. And the lost years of black lives matter.
Christopher Kuzawa is a professor of anthropology and a fellow of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University and an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Source: LA Times