Inequality and African-American Health: How Racial Disparities Create Sickness

This book reveals how living in a highly racialized society affects health through multiple social contexts, including neighborhoods, personal and family relationships, and the medical system. Black-white disparities in health, illness, and mortality have been widely documented, but most research has focused on single factors that produce and perpetuate those disparities, such as individual health behaviors and access to medical care. Inequality and African-American Health is the first book to offer a comprehensive perspective on health and sickness among African Americans.

Starting with an examination of how race has been historically constructed in the United States generally and in its medical system specifically, it goes on to explore the resilience of these racial ideologies and practices. Shirley A. Hill shows that racial disparities in health reflect racial inequalities in living conditions, incarceration rates, family systems, and opportunities and that these racial disparities often cut across social class boundaries and have gender-specific consequences. Bringing together data from existing quantitative and qualitative research with new archival and interview research, this book marks a crucial advance in the fields of family studies, race and ethnicity studies, and medical sociology.