Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation

Late in the era of the syphilis experiment, doctors discovered that rather than bad blood, Henrietta Lacks, a poor Black tobacco farmer and mother of five, had magical cells, so hardy that they were labeled immortal. In 1951, Lacks visited Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore complaining of vaginal bleeding. While she was undergoing treatment for ce

“If you really care about these issues and want to make a difference, you must not use race as a proxy for poverty or poverty as a proxy for race. They intersect and overlap, but to really understand the health of this country, you have to be more sophisticated than assuming that only poor Blacks are affected by this crisis. Look deeper, think diff

Yes, something about being Black is creating a health crisis, and that something is racism. It is the American problem in need of an American solution.

Too often this story of inequity and disadvantage in health gets dismissed as “only” affecting the poor, or being one of class, not race. It is indisputable that poverty creates emotional disruption, inequality, and fear. Health-care facilities in lower-income communities are often underfunded and left to waste away. The poorest communities lack ac