蜜桃传媒

Numerous studies over the years have laid bare the gap in health outcomes between minority groups and white Americans.

African Americans have a lower than white people. They are more likely to suffer and die from chronic conditions like , ,听补苍诲 .

Black children are more likely to endure and have more severe symptoms than white children. The infant mortality rate is more than for black children than for white children 鈥� a disparity that鈥檚 , when the majority of African Americans were enslaved, and one that is not related to the economic or educational status of the mother.

These persistent disparities in health outcomes are not due to genetic or biological differences between the races but to entrenched racism in American society.

Discrimination in American health care is well documented. African Americans, in fact, have been subjected to racist understandings of biology and cruel medical experimentation .聽In the mid-1800s, for example, the physician J. Marion Sims performed torturous experiments on enslaved women without anesthesia. In the infamous experiment of the 1930s, doctors collaborating with the U.S. Public Health Service studied the deadly symptoms of syphilis on hundreds of black men without treating them or even telling them they were infected.

African-American women, in particular, have been subjected to , including bearing the brunt of a eugenics movement in the 20th century that sought to control black population growth. Not only were oral contraceptives deliberately but African-American, as well as Native women have been subjected to

In 1973, , who were 12 and 14 and lived in public housing with their mother when doctors working for the U.S. government surgically sterilized them without consent. Their mother, who was illiterate, signed an 鈥淴鈥� on a document after being told her daughters, who both had mental disabilities, would be receiving birth control shots. The 蜜桃传媒鈥檚 legal action exposed a program under which tens of thousands of black women had been coerced into undergoing sterilization.

The legacy of these injustices is still with us. Perhaps no other group of people in America experiences worse health outcomes than black women.

Black women have for nearly all cancers than white women and are . These health disparities manifest most severely, however, in maternal death rates 鈥� the rates at which women die during pregnancy or up to after a year after childbirth.

This phenomenon has puzzled researchers for decades. A recent study released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that maternal death rates among black women are than for whites. In a separate examining the five major conditions linked to maternal death, researchers found that black women did not have a significantly higher prevalence of these conditions but were two to three times more likely to die from them.

Ever since researchers confirmed this stark disparity, they've been trying to understand its causes. One could partly attribute it to the black women experience when trying to access health care due to generations of discrimination and segregation. In fact, many of the health disparities between black and white Americans can be directly linked to

are more likely to live in poverty and to live in neighborhoods where it is difficult to get quality health care. They鈥檙e also more likely to have limited access to transportation, to work in jobs with inflexible hours or聽inadequate benefits with little sick leave, and to be uninsured.

Despite the barrage of evidence that these barriers necessarily affect health outcomes, researchers cannot rule out the 鈥� implicit or explicit bias 鈥� plays in interpersonal interactions between health care professionals and women of color.

鈥� economic status, educational background, and access to health care 鈥� maternal death rates for black women are still higher compared to white women. Public health researcher Arline Geronimus has posited that black women鈥檚 health is affected by a process she calls 鈥�.鈥澛燯nder this hypothesis, the cumulative throughout one's life can induce the kind of chronic stress that makes African-American women particularly susceptible to chronic health conditions that lead to otherwise preventable deaths.

Even the wealthiest black women in America aren鈥檛 immune from these problems. Tennis star , worth an estimated $180 million, nearly died from post-birth complications in 2017. This week, that she has invested in a start-up company that鈥檚 working to end the maternal mortality crisis among black women.

At the 蜜桃传媒, we鈥檙e fighting against both structural and explicit racism that contributes to this extraordinary health disparity.

We鈥檙e working to defend access to health care by the misguided some states are adopting as a way to strip low-income people of their coverage under Medicaid. These requirements particularly threaten low-income women of color who as well as during and after them. Many, of course, live in states that have refused to expand Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act.聽

We鈥檙e also fighting racism by providing聽聽and social justice teaching resources to our nation's schools so that all children may have access聽to safe聽and non-stressful learning environments聽where they can thrive. And, we鈥檙e working to dismantle the聽that keep women of color impoverished from generation to generation.聽

The evidence is glaringly clear: Racism is lethal, and we cannot hope to achieve racial equity without acknowledging that this underlying factor causes an untold number of premature deaths among black Americans.

The Editors

P.S. Here are some other pieces we think are valuable this week:

• 听蹿谤辞尘 ProPublica
• 听蹿谤辞尘 The New York Times
• from The Hill
• 听蹿谤辞尘 USA Today
• from The Washington Post

蜜桃传媒's Weekend Reads are a weekly summary of the most important reporting and commentary from around the country on civil rights, economic and racial inequity, and hate and extremism.聽Sign up to receive Weekend Reads every Saturday morning.

Photo by聽Jose Luis Pelaez Inc