How ‘Weathering’ Contributes to Racial Health Disparities

Alisha Haridasani Gupta, The New York Times

When Dr. Arline Geronimus first introduced the theory in 1990, her ideas were derided and largely ignored. Now, people are starting to listen.

Three decades ago, [Dr. Arline T. Geronimus] put forward an idea that was unconventional for the time: that the constant stress of living within a racist society could lead to poor health for marginalized groups.

Dr. Geronimus, then a 32-year-old public health researcher at the University of Michigan, had spent three years gathering data on more than 300,000 pregnant women, in search of an explanation for the vast racial disparities in infant mortality rates. At the time, Black babies died more than twice as often as white babies in their first year of life. It was widely assumed that high rates of teen pregnancy among Black women were to blame.

Dr. Geronimus’s research showed otherwise: The babies of Black teens were healthier than the babies of Black women in their 20s and older. These younger women, she posited, had endured fewer years of racism-induced stress, and therefore had given birth to more robust children.

She called this particular form of chronic stress “weathering,” evoking a rock being eroded by constant exposure to the elements. She first presented her findings and the outlines of her hypothesis at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1990.

The backlash was immediate, and ran the ideological gamut. The Children’s Defense Fund, a progressive organization that had knowledge about her talk ahead of time, set up a table outside to express outrage because they thought Dr. Geronimus’s conclusion was that teen pregnancy was not entirely bad. “The policy implications of her arguments are perverse,” a CDF representative told The New York Times a few weeks after her speech. A columnist at the Washington Times, a conservative paper, wrote “As Marie Antoinette might put it: Let them have babies.” Michigan alumni pressured the university’s president to fire her. She received death threats at home from anonymous callers.

Read more about Dr. Geronimus’ research here.

Learn about the effects of modern segregation, discussed in the article, in this virtual exhibit.

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