Dataset Information

Jim Crow and premature mortality among the US Black and White population, 1960-2009: an age-period-cohort analysis.

ABSTRACT: Scant research has analyzed the health impact of abolition of Jim Crow (ie, legal racial discrimination overturned by the US 1964 Civil Rights Act).We used hierarchical age-period-cohort models to analyze US national black and white premature mortality rates (death before 65 years of age) in 1960-2009.Within a context of declining US black and white premature mortality rates and a persistent 2-fold excess black risk of premature mortality in both the Jim Crow and non-Jim Crow states, analyses including random period, cohort, state, and county effects and fixed county income effects found that, within the black population, the largest Jim Crow-by-period interaction occurred in 1960-1964 (mortality rate ratio [MRR] = 1.15 [95% confidence interval = 1.09-1.22), yielding the largest overall period-specific Jim Crow effect MRR of 1.27, with no such interactions subsequently observed. Furthermore, the most elevated Jim Crow-by-cohort effects occurred for birth cohorts from 1901 through 1945 (MRR range = 1.05-1.11), translating to the largest overall cohort-specific Jim Crow effect MRRs for the 1921-1945 birth cohorts (MRR ~ 1.2), with no such interactions subsequently observed. No such interactions between Jim Crow and either period or cohort occurred among the white population.Together, the study results offer compelling evidence of the enduring impact of both Jim Crow and its abolition on premature mortality among the US black population, although insufficient to eliminate the persistent 2-fold black excess risk evident in both the Jim Crow and non-Jim Crow states from 1960 to 2009.

SUBMITTER: Krieger N

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4710482 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Jim Crow and premature mortality among the US Black and White population, 1960-2009: an age-period-cohort analysis.

Krieger Nancy N Chen Jarvis T JT Coull Brent A BA Beckfield Jason J Kiang Mathew V MV Waterman Pamela D PD

Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.) 20140701 4

<h4>Background</h4>Scant research has analyzed the health impact of abolition of Jim Crow (ie, legal racial discrimination overturned by the US 1964 Civil Rights Act).<h4>Methods</h4>We used hierarchical age-period-cohort models to analyze US national black and white premature mortality rates (death before 65 years of age) in 1960-2009.<h4>Results</h4>Within a context of declining US black and white premature mortality rates and a persistent 2-fold excess black risk of premature mortality in bot ...[more]

PMID: 24825344

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Project description:In the U.S., Black adults consistently have higher allostatic load – an indicator of physiological dysregulation – than White adults. Education is considered a likely mechanism given racial differences in attainment, but evidence is mixed. This may be due, in part, to data limitations that have made it difficult for scholars to account for the structurally rooted systemic racism that shaped the U.S. education system and led to large racial inequities in school term length and school attendance among older adults who grew up in the Jim Crow South. Our study addresses this limitation by linking historical data on Black and White segregated school systems in the U.S. South from 1919 to 1954 to the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to determine if a new measure of educational attainment that accounts for structural racism that led to differences in the number of school days attended by Black and White students across years and states better explains Black-White inequities in allostatic load among older adults who attended school during Jim Crow. We restrict our sample to HRS respondents racialized as White or Black, who resided in the South when they were school-aged, completed primary/secondary school between 1919 and 1954, and provided a measure of allostatic load (n = 1932). We find that our new measure of schooling – duration in school – reduced the Black-White inequity in allostatic load more so than self-reported years of schooling whether we measured allostatic load continuously (34% vs 16%) or categorically (45% vs 20%). Our findings highlight the importance of identifying and using historically informed measures of schooling that account for structurally rooted systemic racism when trying to understand how education shapes the health of individuals racialized as Black in the United States. Highlights • U.S. Black adults show greater physiological dysregulation than White adults.• Mixed evidence as to whether education explains this inequity.• May be due to unmeasured structurally rooted systematic racism in early schooling.• Our education measure accounts for race inequity in term length and days attended.• This measure explains Black-White inequity in allostatic load.

Dataset Information

Jim Crow and premature mortality among the US Black and White population, 1960-2009: an age-period-cohort analysis.

Publications

Jim Crow and premature mortality among the US Black and White population, 1960-2009: an age-period-cohort analysis.

Similar Datasets

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