Racism is a public health issue

Geography Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in The Golden Gulag offers a novel definition of racism:

the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.

What I find helpful about this definition is that it’s systemic: it descrbes the effects of a system without delving into the muddy waters of intent. It avoids getting bogged down in questions of whether any paticular doctor or public health official harbors racist tendencies (which they will almost always deny). If a system or society exposes some group of people to above-average chance of premature death—as ours clearly does—then that system or society is racist. And there are any number of things we can do to address that systemically, well apart from the red herring of identifying “bad apples”.

This definition also puts the costs of racism in stark relief: racism is killing people. The problem of racism isn’t that some people have mean ideas. It’s that other people are dying when they shouldn’t be.

“Weathering”

Public health researcher Arline Geronimus in an interview with NPR:

what I’ve seen over the years of my research and lifetime is that the stressors that impact people of color are chronic and repeated through their whole life course, and in fact may even be at their height in the young adult-through-middle-adult ages rather than in early life. And that increases a general health vulnerability — which is what weathering is.