In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers at Michigan State University and Rutgers University will lead a nationally funded study that will inspect the effects of structural racism on housing, aging, and health.
According to ABC News, the funding for the project will come from an expected $3.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Aging. It will look into the impact of “racist and discriminatory” policies of the past 100 years and their effects on 800 Black and white adults in Baltimore.
As Dick Sadler, a Michigan State University College of Human Medicine associate professor and a researcher on the project, told the outlet, the project differs from past research. According to Sadler, most previous research has had an “almost singular focus” on residential segregation or redlining.
Sadler indicated that the report would examine how redlining, gentrification, predatory lending, urban renewal, freeway construction, and segregation, among other things, have had an impact on the neighborhoods, homes, schools, and stores that Black people have had the most contact with and how those markers have resulted in racial inequality.
Sadler and Danielle Beaty Moody, an associate professor at Rutgers University School of Social Work, indicated in the announcement that a need exists to catalog how Black Americans consistently receive the short end of the stick in American life.
“Collectively, our work seeks to call out and disentangle the vast array of tools used to entrench structural racism in
the neighborhood environment –- past, present, and future. One drum we have been beating is that ‘it’s not just redlining, and it’s not just segregation.’ The patterns of racist discriminatory practices in the landscape go far deeper and are more insidious than these singular practices,” the pair stated.The professors continued, “We need to comprehensively document what the full constellation of tools, tactics, and strategies look like in our urban landscapes to better contextualize why racial inequities emerge and persist across numerous health endpoints, for which all Americans ultimately suffer but for which Black Americans consistently take the largest hits.”
Per the Rutgers University School of Social Health, the individuals participating in the study have been tracked by a larger, ongoing study, Healthy Aging in Neighborhoods of Diversity,
across the lifespan.The study will access this dataset, allowing for a detailed analysis of “cumulative lifetime exposure to historical, enduring, and contemporary markers of structural racism across Baltimore neighborhoods through the development of lifetime residential histories and contemporary activity spaces.”
According to a 2022 study examining the structural racism in historical and modern United States healthcare policy, “Lack of equitable access to high-quality healthcare is in large part a result of structural racism in U.S. healthcare policy, which structures the healthcare system to advantage the white population and (to) disadvantage racial and ethnic minority populations.”
The study continued, “Although there are other aspects of U.S. healthcare policy that contribute to an
inequitable system of care, in this article we provide a comprehensive review of how structural racism, embedded in healthcare policy, results in inequitable access to high-quality care. We first examine how racism shaped early policy decisions that allowed local governments and private employers to provide inequitable access to healthcare and health insurance. We then discuss structural racism’s continued impact on modern healthcare policy in the areas of healthcare coverage, finance, and quality.”RELATED CONTENT: Justice Department, North Carolina Reach $13.5M Settlement With Bank Over Redlining Claims