Fusing science and social justice, renowned public health
researcher Dr. Arline T. Geronimus offers an urgent, "monumental"
book (Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped
from the Beginning) exploring the ways in which systemic
injustice erodes the health of marginalized people.
America
has woken up to what many of its citizens have known for centuries
and to what public health statistics have evidenced for decades:
systemic injustice takes a physical, too often deadly, toll on Black,
brown, working class and poor communities, and any group who
experiences systemic cultural oppression or economic exploitation.
Marginalized Americans are disproportionately more likely to suffer
from chronic diseases and to die at much younger ages than their
middle- and upper-class white counterparts. Black mothers die during
childbirth at a rate three times higher than white mothers. White
kids in high-poverty Appalachian regions have a healthy life
expectancy of 50 years old, while the vast majority of US youth can
expect to both survive and be able-bodied at 50, with decades of
healthy life expectancy ahead of them. In the face of such clear
inequity, we must ask ourselves why this is, and what we can we do.
Dr.
Arline T. Geronimus coined the term “weathering” to describe the
effects of systemic oppression—including racism and classism—on
the body. In Weathering, based on more than 30 years of
research, she argues that health and aging have more to do with how
society treats us than how well we take care of ourselves. She
explains what happens to human bodies as they attempt to withstand
and overcome the challenges and insults that society leverages at
them, and details how this process ravages their health. And she
proposes solutions.
Until
now, there has been little discussion about the insidious effects of
social injustice on the body. Weathering shifts the paradigm, shining
a light on the topic and offering a roadmap for hope.