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 and 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 of the previous research has had an “almost singular focus” on residential segregation or redlining.
Sadler indicated that the report will 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 there exists a need 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 life span.
The study will have access this dataset, which allows for detailed study 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 health care policy, “Lack of equitable access to high-quality health care is in large part a result of structural racism in US health care policy, which structures the health care 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. health care policy that contribute to an inequitable system of care, in this article we provide a comprehensive review of how structural racism, embedded in health care 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 health care and health insurance. We then discuss structural racism’s continued impact on modern health care policy in the areas of health care coverage, finance, and quality.”
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