Arline Geronimus has spent the last 40 years researching racial and class injustice in the US. Her first non-academic book is the culmination of a life’s groundbreaking work. The term “weathering”, which she coined decades ago, is today widely recognised in public health, and refers to the process of chronic social and psychological stress that activates harmful biological processes among people in marginalised communities, ageing their bodies prematurely. She presents a staggering accumulation of evidence to show how daily discrimination grinds people down and all too often leads to debilitating illness and early death.
While the impact of weathering is starkest and most shocking in the health outcomes of Black Americans compared to other communities, the phenomenon transcends race. Only 50% of impoverished white people in Kentucky – from the social group sometimes stereotyped as “hillbillies” – are expected to reach the age of 50 without a “health-induced disability”. It’s a statistic mirrored among Black people living in deprived areas of Chicago. For both, the leading causes of excess deaths are not opioids and gun crime, as the respective cliches might suggest but, rather, chronic issues of the kind associated with weathering: cardiovascular disease and cancer. What these two groups have in common is not simply poverty: it is the fact that they are both viewed with “contempt, fear or resentment” by those around them.
