There are neighborhoods in Baltimore in which the life expectancy is 19 years less than other neighborhoods in the same city. Residents of the Downtown/Seaton Hill neighborhood have a life expectancy lower than 229 other nations, exceeded only by Yemen. According to the Washington Post, 15 neighborhoods in Baltimore have a lower life expectancy than North Korea. (emphasis added)
North Korea.
And while those figures represent some of the most dramatic disparities in the life expectancy of black Americans as opposed to whites, a recent study of the health impacts of racism in America reveals that racist attitudes may cause up to 30,000 early deaths every year.
The study, Association between an Internet-Based Measure of Area Racism and Black Mortality, has just been published in PLOS ONE and has mapped out the most racist areas in the United States. As illustrated above, they are mostly located in the rural Northeast and down along the Appalachian Mountains into the South. How they did it and what it may mean are below the fold.
We already know about the racism that led to Jim Crow, […]
Grim as this article is, it doesn’t represent the whole picture of how working people are oppressed, exploited, and killed early, after their most productive years are used up. This happens with working people of all ethnicities. On the Pine Ridge Reservation, for example, which the map indicates is in a less racist region, Indians have a life span 20 to 25 years lower than the national average. The national average tells us nothing, since life span increases with affluence.