"Racism makes people physically ill"

 

Reading this revealing interview; may have found a name for a certain form of pain...

Guardian Interview

Extraordinarily stressed and vigilant? How racism makes people physically ill

Arline Geronimus was once called the biggest threat to youth in the US. But her theory of how injustice affects our health is more influential than ever

by Nesrine Malik, a Guardian columnist and the author of We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent

Extract:

After decades of research into public health, Geronimus is an expert in what she calls “weathering”, a term she coined: “the physiological effects of living in communities that bear the brunt of racial, ethnic, religious and class discrimination”.

Read the entire interview here: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/04/extraordinarily-stressed-and-vigilant-how-racism-makes-people-physically-ill

Weathering, she adds, “is critical to understanding and eliminating population health inequity” and involves not just the physical and environmental stressors of being marginalised, but the “psychosocial” ones as well – high stress, constant vigilance, a lack of trust that things will be OK.

The process, she has observed in her research, leads to premature ageing, chronic conditions and early death.

In her new book, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress on the Body of an Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society, the pandemic seems to vindicate her thesis.

It wasn’t just a person’s age that made them vulnerable to the virus, it was also their weathering.

It was already established that Covid killed people in racialised communities at a much higher rate than white ones, but that, according to Geronimus’s research, was because they had higher rates of heart diseases, diabetes and inflammation; all risk factors that made Covid more deadly.

Even before the pandemic, people in these communities scored high on the “allostatic load score” – the presence of stress hormones such as cortisol along with inflammation, their belly fat distribution linked to stress, and high blood pressure – leading her to conclude that “if you have a weathered body, you’re more likely to die of infection at a younger age”. That, tragically, has turned out to be consistent with the patterns of death in the pandemic.

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Geronimus has always faced fierce resistance. “That’s why I wrote the book,” she says. “Earlier in my career, people were very cold. There were headlines in books and newspapers like: ‘Research queen says: let them have babies’. This was the early 90s, the height of neoliberalism and underclass rhetoric. I had no constituency. It wasn’t just that I ran up against more rightwing or neoliberal people. In the popular press, I was a heretic. I got death threats. It was all ideological.”

(...)

She doesn’t receive nearly as much vitriol as she used to, but she still thinks that we’re not there yet. People are so brainwashed by the myths of the American dream, social mobility and self-improvement that they are led to believe that one way or another it’s minorities’ own fault for not thriving.

In the US, Gerominus says, the belief is that “black Americans are not working hard enough” or are fatalistic and “stress-eating, lying on the couch”. The truth she has seen is that they are in fact constantly resourceful, pulling together as a community and “solving the unsolvable” in the face of daily, structural challenges.

To this day, only “part of the idea” of weathering has been incorporated into mainstream public-health consciousness. “There’s language to talk about it that we didn’t have 30 years ago, of structural racism or systemic racism, social determinants of health – everybody’s now conversant in these concepts.” This covers the part “where your body is eroded by the corrosive effects of being a part of an exploited, oppressed group”.

But the other part of weathering is still not widely grasped: the coping part, the part where the people being weathered “stand up, try to be resilient, and try to withstand all the structural barricades and the exposure or the exhaustion. Weathering means both things – it is both shelter and storm.”

This second part is often ignored, reducing community or group-based dynamics and demands to identity politics positions in a culture war. “What we misread as selfish competitive identity politics is about social identities that have been imposed on groups. But many of the hardships and adversities they face are because they’ve been racialised.”

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Her biggest hope is that people start to think about things in terms of weathering and that it leads them in different directions, away from the same old failed policies. She hopes that solutions are offered for public-health crises outside the usual ones relating to urban development and lifestyle improvements.

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“We tend to think of social mobility as moving up to something better,” she says. “But whatever moves you to opportunity also moves you away from things that give your life purpose and meaning, and people who validate your view of the world and don’t just assume what your moral fibre is or your intellectual abilities are just because of what social identity has been imposed on you.” There are, she says, “real minuses to social mobility and even the pluses don’t get you out of weathering. If we really think that being socially mobile is a sign of good character then we need to make sure that persistence and tenaciousness and sacrifice doesn’t make you sick or disabled or die young. We shouldn’t stand for that.”

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Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of an Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society is published by Little, Brown (£25)