Forty years ago, the public was indignant. It seemed that there was a wave of teenage girls, especially black teenage girls, getting pregnant. “It was a new idea, this new deviant class of people, and it was represented in these terms which were really not exact: babies with babies,” said Arline Geronimus.
Geronimus was at the time a graduate student. The dominant wisdom was that high levels of infant mortality in the black community were because women had children when they were too young. “I worked in a school for pregnant teenagers. And nothing I heard, and I had made sense myself, that was what I saw,” she said.
Geronimus looked at the figures and found that in fact, younger mothers had more successful pregnancies. She said: “For black women, the most risky ages were adolescence and at the end of adolescents. And then they went directly, so that in the 1920s, and certainly from the middle at the end From the years 20, there was much risk of infant mortality if you had a baby, compared to if you were 18 or 19 years old.
How did people react to what she found? “Not very good!” Geronimus said. “People thought I was promoting adolescent procreation. The newspapers wrote columns where they called her things like:” The research queen says they have babies. “I received death threats.”
Geronimus has become a teacher at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, where she teaches to date. She lowered her profile, but also widened her point of view, examining indicators like The lower life expectancy of black Americans (72.8 years) compared to white Americans (77.5).
She has developed a theory: that stress caused by racism and other societal pressures contributes to poor health. She called him “bad weather”.
“The idea of alteration was somehow knowing how a rock, for example, would be altered by hundreds of years of rain and wind,” she said. “It will affect him (and) carry it absolutely. I like the word that goes up in particular, because it also has another meaning, it is that you roam the storm.”
The theory of alteration deals not only with the duration of life, but of the quality of life. For example, while in average, black women survive white men (76.5 years against 75.1), Geronimus found that black women were confronted active Life expectancy (59) that white men (64)-that is to say that black women become disabled at previous ages.
After decades of work on theory, she gathered everything in a book entitled, “Weatring: the extraordinary stress of ordinary life in an unjust society” (Small brown spark). It defines alteration as how structural racism makes life very difficult. But there are a lot of different factors. “Is it not something that simply affects people of color; it can also be a class problem?” I asked.
Little brown spark
Geronimus said: “It can be a class problem, it can be a stigmatized group problem; any human person is able to fade, and will expect to some extent, s ‘They are also oppressed or marginalized or suffering from endless stress, whether they are environmental or material difficulties or hunger, or whether you are not asserted or valued, and You must ask yourself where you belong, and what is sure to do or say in different situations.
The Dr. Kimberlydawn Wisdom has spent a large part of her career to put into practice the theories of Geronimus, trying to overcome the impacts of the alteration: “She endured a lot for this work. And we just have to applaud it. Her courage is remarkable. “
Wisdom is the Vice-President Director of Community Health and Equity Health at Henry Ford Health in Detroit. She was also the first general surgeon of Michigan.
She notes how daily stress really changes the body to the cellular level, leading to premature aging. “The body maintains the score,” she said. “So take diabetes, take hypertension, take cardiovascular disease, infant mortality, maternal mortality – simply multiply the bad result by two or three, and that’s what you see in colored populations. So, it is as if the population of white breed could catch a cold, but the colored populations actually develop pneumonia.
For example, the latest studies show Infant mortality rate for black Americans who are more than double those of white Americans (10.9 against 4.52).
To take up the challenge, Dr. Wisdom founded the Win network, which represents the neighborhood network inspired by women. Pregnant women receive health care, advice and support during pregnancy and beyond, which led to the decline in maternal and infantile death and birth weights.
Courtney Anderson said the experience of having his third child, Kalani, through victory, was great. “He’s a happy baby. The happiest baby I had,” said Anderson.
Anderson had her first child, Kamrine, before she was in the winning network. He was followed a year later by his brother, Kristian. “With my first child … I had full hands, sort of stressed. A little disappointed. Postpartum depression.” But she says that the support she received thanks to victory was a major improvement, increasing her happiness, which had a positive impact on her children. “It will affect them very well to find out that their mother is happy,” said Anderson. “When mom is happy, they understand and they have much more.”
I asked wisdom: “What would I say to people who might may have exploded and say:” Everyone has stress, everyone has things to manage, what is the problem ? health’?”
“Yes, people should eat healthy, have healthy behaviors, but yet we see the bad weather, when we look through the objective of what is really going on in a society,” said Wisdom. “You can do all these things and have a bad result. You see, the typical story is that you eat healthy, you go to school, you get a university diploma, you have a good life and you live at 80 or 90. This occurs with a population.
When asked if the concept of “weathering” could be considered another way of doing black people or building in another stereotype, Geronimus said: “It could not be further from the truth . Even if you go back to slavery, no one worked harder or was more.
At the end of the day, it made me think of my own family. My parents died in the 1970s. Two brothers and sisters died in the early 1960s … All too early. There were certain diseases – diabetes, cancer, hypertension – which were almost expected, or which comes in a way with the territory. And wisdom says it should not Come with the territory – or that the reason he came with the territory was due to the alteration.
Wisdom said: “Many people of color, families say:” Oh, we all have diabetes. We all have cancer. I mean, that is part of the natural course of life. This is the life course. ” It is not The life course. “”
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History produced by Alan Golds. Publisher: Ed Givnish.
