New paper w Aja Antoine-Jones, James Feigenbaum, Lauren Hoehn-Velasco, and Chris Muller
"Racial Inequality in the Prime of Life: Infectious Disease Mortality in U.S. Cities, 1906–1933"
tells us two new things about the staggering racial inequity in this era
(cont'd)
#demography #sociology #history #RacialDisparities #mortality #EpidemiologicalTransition #HealthEquity #HistoricalDemography
1. In the early 20th century, there were two exceptionally important kinds of death: TB & infant deaths.
This era saw massive declines in cities' infant mortality--for both white & Black people. It saw relatively little decline in Black populations' TB.
Why? Cities made water safe. They didn't make housing safe, not for Black ppl--in fact, as more Black ppl moved to cities, they did the reverse
Result: stasis in the single most important cause of death, in era when infectious disease generally plummeted
https://doi.org/10.1017/ssh.2023.4
(same two images as last post)
2. In prior work, some of us showed that urban white mortality during the twentieth century's deadliest pandemic, the 1918 flu, was still not as bad as urban Black mortality was *every single year*
Here, we learned that analogy is deeper than we knew
Previous paper:
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-019-00789-z
What was so horrifying in 1918 was not only that so many people died. It was also that they died *so young*
We found that, because of tuberculosis, these pandemic-scale prime-of-life deaths were also the *typical experience* of Black populations in cities
The consequences were profound.
Black newspapers all over the country ran advice columns, and all over the country, those advice columns got letters asking whether it was OK for them to marry the person they wanted to marry--even though they had TB, or their intended partner did.
It matters that white TB was so much lower. These deaths were absolutely preventable. But they were the inevitable consequence of a population forced, by law and by violence, to live in unimaginably crowded, dilapidated, unsafe housing.
It was a choice.
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field
Roby Bhattacharyya