Forty years ago, the public was outraged. It seemed there was a wave of teenage girls, particularly Black teenage girls, getting pregnant. “This was a new idea, this new deviant class of people, and it was portrayed in these terms that were really not accurate: babies having babies,” said Arline Geronimus.
Geronimus was at the time a graduate student. The prevailing wisdom was that high rates of infant mortality in the Black community were because women were having children when they were too young. “I had worked in a school for pregnant teens. And none of what I was hearing, and had taken as common sense myself, was what I was seeing,” she said.
Geronimus looked at the numbers and found that, actually, younger mothers were having more successful pregnancies. She said, “For the Black women, the lowest risk ages were in the teens and the late teens. And then they went straight up, so that by the 20s, and certainly by the mid-to-late 20s, there was substantially more risk of infant mortality if you had a baby, compared to if you were 18 or 19. And by 35, things were off the charts.”
How did people react to what she found? “Not very well!” Geronimus said. “People thought I was promoting teen childbearing. The papers wrote columns where they called it things like, ‘Research Queen Says Let Them Have Babies.’ I got death threats.”
Geronimus became a professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan, where she teaches to this day. She lowered her profile, but also widened her perspective, examining indicators like the lower life expectancy of Black Americans (72.8 years) compared to white Americans (77.5).
She developed a theory: that stress caused by racism and other societal pressures contributes to poor health. She named it “Weathering.”
“The idea of weathering was connoting sort of how a rock, for example, would be weathered by hundreds of years of rain and wind,” she said. “It’s gonna affect it [and] absolutely wear it down. I like the word weathering in particular, because it also has another meaning, which is that you weather the storm.”
The weathering theory deals with not just length of life, but quality of life. For example, while on average Black women outlive white men (76.5 years versus 75.1), Geronimus found that Black women faced shorter active life expectancies (59 years) than white men (64) – that is, Black women become disabled at earlier ages.
After decades of working on the theory, she pulled it all together in a book called, “Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society” (Little, Brown Spark). She defines weathering as the way that structural racism makes life very hard. But there are a lot of different factors. “This is not something that just affects people of color; it can be a class issue as well?” I asked.
Little, Brown Spark
Geronimus said, “It can be a class issue, it can be a stigmatized group issue; anybody who’s human is capable of becoming weathered, and will become weathered to some degree, if they’re also oppressed or marginalized or suffering endless stressors, whether it’s environmental or material hardships or hunger, or whether it’s the fact that you’re not affirmed or valued, and you have to question where you belong, and what it’s safe to do or say in different situations.”
Dr. Kimberlydawn Wisdom has spent much of her career putting Geronimus’ theories into practice, trying to overcome the impacts of weathering: “She endured a lot for this work. And we just have to applaud her. Her courage is remarkable.”
Wisdom is the senior vice president of community health and equity at Henry Ford Health in Detroit. She also served as Michigan’s first surgeon general.
She notes how day-to-day stress actually changes the body down to the cellular level, leading to premature aging. “The body keeps score,” she said. “So, take diabetes, take hypertension, take cardiovascular disease, infant mortality, maternal mortality – just multiply the poor outcome by two or by three, and that’s what you see in the populations of color. So, it’s like the Caucasian population can catch a cold, but populations of color actually develop pneumonia.”
For example, the latest studies show infant mortality rates for Black Americans that are more than double those of white Americans (10.9 versus 4.52).
To take on the challenge, Dr. Wisdom founded the WIN Network, which stands for the Women-Inspired Neighborhood Network. Expectant mothers are given health care, guidance and support through pregnancy and beyond, which has led to maternal and infant deaths falling, and birthweights rising.
Courtney Anderson said the experience of having her third child, Kalani, through WIN was great. “She’s a happy baby. Most happiest baby I got,” Anderson said.
Anderson had her first child, Kamrine, before she was in the WIN Network. He was followed a year later by his brother, Kristian. “With my first child … I had my hands full, kind of stressed. Kind of bummed out. Post-partum depression.” But she says the support she received through WIN was a major improvement, increasing her happiness, which in turn has impacted her children positively. “It’s going to affect them really well to know that their mom’s happy,” Anderson said. “When mom is happy, they get it, and they have a lot more.”
I asked Wisdom, “What would you say to people who would kind of maybe blow this off and say, ‘Everybody has stress, everybody has things to deal with, what’s the big deal? Take care of it yourself. Be responsible for your own health’?”
“Yes, people should eat healthy, have healthy behaviors, but yet we see the weathering, when we look through the lens of what’s really happening in a society,” Wisdom replied. “You can do all those things and have a poor outcome. See, the typical narrative is you eat healthy, you go to school, you get a college degree, you have a good life and you live to 80 or 90. That happens with one population. When you find another population that eats healthy, goes to college, gets an education, gets her Ph.D., and dies of maternal mortality, something is wrong.”
When asked if the concept of “weathering” could be seen as another way of making Black people into victims, or building in another stereotype, Geronimus said, “That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Even if you go back to slavery, no one was working harder, or doing more. But the people who pronounce on ‘Black people’s poverty is self-inflicted ’cause they’re too lazy or too irresponsible,’ they’re just wrong.”
At the end of the day, it got me thinking about my own family. My parents died in their 70s. Two siblings died in their early 60s … all of them much too soon. There were certain ailments – diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure – that were expected almost, or that just kind of comes with the territory. And Wisdom says it shouldn’t come with the territory – or that the reason it came with the territory was due to weathering.
Wisdom said, “Many people of color, families say that, ‘Oh, we all get diabetes. We all get cancer. I mean, that’s part of the natural course of life. That’s the life course.’ That is not the life course.”
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Story produced by Alan Golds. Editor: Ed Givnish.
