On Race and "Weathering," with Professor Arline Geronimus
OCT 2019In her CGR talk, Arline Geronimus highlighted the issue of Black women's maternal health and expounded on her theory of bio-psycho-social "weathering."
Geronimus is professor of health behavior and health education at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and Institute for Social Research.
She talked about how, until recently, the typical experience in developed nations has been for maternal mortality rates to go down. However, in the United States, the period between 1990 and 2015 has seen a gradual increase. She emphasized the fact that the death rates for Black mothers are three to four times higher than those of white mothers.
Geronimus cast doubt on the way medical authorities have focused on individual demographic, socio-economic, and behavioral factors:
"We've come to think that if you statistically control for income or education, that you've taken care of all the social differences in life experience between better-off and worse-off groups, but that's really not the case."
To account for the overall process by which structural racism affects the health of Black women--as well as men--Geronimus developed the theory of "weathering." The theory maintains that members of marginalized groups endure chronic stress from living in an unequal society. Efforts to cope with these stressors cause wear and tear on the neuroendocrine, cardiovascular, metabolic, and immune systems. This "weathering" leads to biological dysregulation, faster aging, and higher susceptibility to disease.