Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
There is a chilling article in New York Times Magazine that examines the difference in infant mortality between black and white women. Black women have lower birth weight babies when compared with white women. The initial response was to blame low education and poverty for the decreased birth weights and increased infant mortality. This theory fell apart when low birth weights were found in well-educated black women in the United States. The birth weights of Caribbean and African women are higher than those of blacks living in the United States. When African and Caribbean women migrate to the United States, they give birth to low-weight infants.For black women, stresses associated with life in the United States gives rise to low weight infants. The article notes that institutional racism within the medical community is an important factor
Experts wondered if the high rates of infant death in black women, understood to be related to small, preterm babies, had a genetic component. Were black women passing along a defect that was affecting their offspring? But science has refuted that theory too: A 1997 study published by two Chicago neonatologists, Richard David and James Collins, in The New England Journal of Medicine found that babies born to new immigrants from impoverished West African nations weighed more than their black American-born counterparts and were similar in size to white babies. In other words, they were more likely to be born full term, which lowers the risk of death. In 2002, the same researchers made a further discovery: The daughters of African and Caribbean immigrants who grew up in the United States went on to have babies who were smaller than their mothers had been at birth. while the grandchildren of white European women actually weighed more than their mothers had at birth. It took just one generation for the American black-white disparity to manifest.
Blacks focus on race because our lives depend on it. There are racial stresses associated with life in the United States. We cannot afford to pretend that progress has been made in areas where there has not been progress. Trying to retrain the medical community to address racial disparities will take years.