Empowering Black Men's Health
How poverty and racism 'weather' the body, accelerating aging and disease
By Dave Davies
In 2020, the overall life expectancy in the U.S. dropped by 1.5 years, largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But the reduction wasn't shared equally among the general population; Native American people lost an average of 4.5 years of life expectancy; Black and Hispanic people lost, on average, 3 years, while white people lost only 1.2 years.
This figure tracks with other health trends: In general, Black and Hispanic people and those living in poverty in the U.S. have worse health outcomes — more high blood pressure, higher rates of diabetes and increased maternal and infant mortality — than the overall population.
Public health researcher Arline Geronimus from the University of Michigan says the traditional belief that the disparities are due to genetics, diet and exercise don't explain data that's accumulated over the years. Instead, she makes the case that marginalized people suffer nearly constant stress from living with poverty and discrimination, which damages their bodies at the cellular level and leads to increasingly serious health problems over time.
Geronimus coined a term for this chronic stress — she calls it "weathering," which, she says, "literally wears down your heart, your arteries, your neuroendocrine systems, ... all your body systems so that in effect, you become chronologically old at a young age." She writes about the phenomenon in her new book, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society.
Geronimus' theories drew criticism when she first promoted them in the 1990s. But in recent years, her work has generated a wealth of support. She says weathering helps explain why Black women who give birth in their 20s have more complications than those who become mothers in their teens. The older women had endured the stress of their difficult living conditions longer, she says, and thus had suffered more damage to their health.
"It's not that every Black person has more damage than every white person," she says. "It's really about how much stress versus social support you get in your everyday life. ... Because African Americans and low-income Americans are more likely to suffer more of these stressors, they are more likely to be weathered, weathered severely and weathered at younger ages."