Sublime

Weathering doesn’t start in middle age.

It begins in the womb. Cortisol released into a pregnant person’s bloodstream crosses the placenta, which helps explain why a disproportionate number of babies born to parents who live in impoverished communities or who experience the constant scorn of discrimination are preterm and too small

“I don’t think most people understand weathering stress. Stress is such a vague term,” Geronimus said. “But it still gives us a leverage point to get in there and see a more complex and more frightening picture of what it does to people’s bodies and whose bodies it does it to.”

With few material resources, impoverished Black women and other women of color were most vulnerable to the exploitations of state agencies that worked to uphold racism and white supremacy.68 The birth control movement of the

boundaries of an antiblack world might, in other words, remain virtual (that is, immanent or imagined), yet one's paranoia is still a correct measure of

poverty collides with community-level poverty. This is a big reason why the life expectancy of poor Black men in America is similar to that of men in Pakistan and Mongolia.[21]

I was struck by how the deprivations that people experience can lead to eccentric kinds of compensation—like the hoarding syndrome of some of the poor.

Life brings an accumulation of unremitting stress, especially for those subjected to inequity — and not just from immediate and chronic threats. Even the anticipation of those menaces causes persistent damage.