Racial Health Disparities
“One in 100 Black men and women develops heart failure before age 50, a rate that is 20 times higher than whites in the same age group.” - New England Journal of Medicine
"For most Americans, we do not care what happens to Black people. About 220 African-Americans die every day in the United States who would not die if their death rates were similar to those of white people." - David Williams, Public Health Professor at the T. H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University
“Black men are hidden in plain sight, I mean, we have the worst health profile. We have premature mortality, which means we die before the overwhelming majority of men do. We’re often in the media either being attacked by the police, or enduring other experiences from structural racism. There’s very little support that’s been given. The evidence is all in front of us, but there seems to be no particular people calling it out or moving to drive toward solutions.” - Roland Thorpe Jr, Social Epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
“Decades of research reveal no surprise that 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.” - By TaRessa Stoval
"High mortality rates among Black people have less to do with genetics than with the country’s long history of discrimination, which has undermined educational, housing, and job opportunities for generations of Black people." - Clyde Yancy, author of the study and chief of cardiology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.
“The more than 40 million African Americans who live in the U.S. carry a disproportionate share of the nation’s sickness burden. Sociologist David R. Williams, who has written extensively about the black-white health disparity, has repeatedly shown that African Americans not only have higher rates of sickness than Whites, but they also get sick earlier, have more severe diseases, and are more likely to die from their diseases (Williams and Sternthal, 2010; Williams, 2012; Williams and Mohammed, 2013). Black people have higher rates of death than Whites for 13 of the 15 leading causes of death.” – Shirley Hill
“Research has long shown that Black people live sicker lives and die younger than white people. A recent study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), casts the nation’s racial inequities in stark relief, finding that the higher mortality rate among Black Americans resulted in 1.63 million excess deaths relative to white Americans over more than two decades. Because so many Black people die young - with many years of life ahead of them - their higher mortality rate from 1999 to 2020 resulted in a cumulative loss of more than 80 million years of life compared with the white population, the study showed.” - By Liz Szabo | KFF Health News
“One in 100 Black men and women develops heart failure before age 50, a rate that is 20 times higher than whites in the same age group.” - New England Journal of Medicine
"For most Americans, we do not care what happens to Black people. About 220 African-Americans die every day in the United States who would not die if their death rates were similar to those of white people." - David Williams, Public Health Professor at the T. H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University
“Black men are hidden in plain sight, I mean, we have the worst health profile. We have premature mortality, which means we die before the overwhelming majority of men do. We’re often in the media either being attacked by the police, or enduring other experiences from structural racism. There’s very little support that’s been given. The evidence is all in front of us, but there seems to be no particular people calling it out or moving to drive toward solutions.” - Roland Thorpe Jr, Social Epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
“Decades of research reveal no surprise that 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.” - By TaRessa Stoval
"High mortality rates among Black people have less to do with genetics than with the country’s long history of discrimination, which has undermined educational, housing, and job opportunities for generations of Black people." - Clyde Yancy, author of the study and chief of cardiology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.
“The more than 40 million African Americans who live in the U.S. carry a disproportionate share of the nation’s sickness burden. Sociologist David R. Williams, who has written extensively about the black-white health disparity, has repeatedly shown that African Americans not only have higher rates of sickness than Whites, but they also get sick earlier, have more severe diseases, and are more likely to die from their diseases (Williams and Sternthal, 2010; Williams, 2012; Williams and Mohammed, 2013). Black people have higher rates of death than Whites for 13 of the 15 leading causes of death.” – Shirley Hill
“Research has long shown that Black people live sicker lives and die younger than white people. A recent study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), casts the nation’s racial inequities in stark relief, finding that the higher mortality rate among Black Americans resulted in 1.63 million excess deaths relative to white Americans over more than two decades. Because so many Black people die young - with many years of life ahead of them - their higher mortality rate from 1999 to 2020 resulted in a cumulative loss of more than 80 million years of life compared with the white population, the study showed.” - By Liz Szabo | KFF Health News