In 1986, an upstart public health researcher named Arline Geronimus challenged the conventional wisdom that condemned the alarming rise of inner-city teen pregnancies. While the crisis was decried as a ghetto pathology, Geronimus contended that teenage pregnancy was a rational response to urban poverty where low-income black people have fewer healthy years before the onset of heart problems, diabetes, and other chronic conditions.
Though it got little traction then, the concept that Geronimus pioneered – “weathering” – has become a foundation for the social justice ideology now upending medicine and social policy. The term “weathering,” she says, was intended to evoke the idea of erosion and resilience.
A white professor at the University of Michigan whom The New York Times hailed last year as an “icon,” Geronimus has combined race theory with data and statistics to argue that the chronic stress of living in an oppressive, white-majority society causes damage at the cellular level and results in shorter life expectancies for blacks. In more than 130 published studies, she has expanded the weathering hypothesis into a dystopian sociological worldview that identifies the “American Creed” of hard work as the silent killer of people of color.
“Living life according to the dominant social norms of personal responsibility and virtue is not universally health‑promoting,” she wrote in a Harvard Public Health essay last year. “On the contrary: if you’re Black, working hard and playing by the rules can be part of what kills you.”
The weathering paradox – that “relatively young people can be biologically old” – is now influencing policy decisions at all levels of governance. It has provided the foundation of many of the policy decisions of the White House COVID-19 health equity task force. In New Hampshire, the governor’s COVID-19 Equity Response Team issued a report and recommendations in 2020, citing weathering (and “racial battle fatigue”) as documented and established realities of American life.
Hellbound and Down 