The myth of health inequities: changing the narrative around racism in health
Written by Black Hot Fire Network on September 15, 2022
As an editor at Essence, a lifestyle magazine for Black women, in the 1980s and 1990s, Linda Villarosa set out to educate Black people about how to best take care of themselves. She blamed socioeconomic hardship and lack of education for the high rates of chronic illness in the African American community and hoped that encouraging healthy habits would change those bad outcomes.
That is, until she began to dig deeper into the maternal mortality rates and disparities in the United States and discovered that Black women with college degrees were more likely to experience . . .
