By H. Patricia Hynes
Health inequalities remain as intransigently rooted and malevolent today as in previous decades. Why? Professor of Public Health Arline T. Geronimus, who has studied this discrimination for decades, responds as lucidly and convincingly as any public health researcher in the United States in her new book, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society.
After 40 years of research into racial and class inequalities, Geronimus has concluded that a process she calls weathering, a wearing out of well-being — is centrally at work in people bearing the brunt of “racial, ethnic, religious and class discrimination,” with racial inequalities persisting no matter what economic class.
“Our preoccupation with genetics and individual health behaviors” (smoking, drinking, nutrition, diet, exercise, etc.) she states emphatically “have blocked our view of other possibilities.”