Inheriting Racist Disparities in Health: Epigenetics and the Transgenerational Effects of White Racism

Abstract

The article explores how people of color may biologically inherit the negative effects of white racism.
It uses epigenetics to show how racial disparities can manifest physiologically, influencing the body's chemicals, hormones, cells, and fibers.
Epigenetics helps demonstrate the lasting effects of white racism on individuals and their offspring.
The article emphasizes that interventions against white racism need to address biological aspects in addition to economic, geographical, social, and psychological factors.

Introduction

Racism can cause physical reactions, such as stomach tightness, as described by Kim Anderson, an African American lawyer and mother.
The article examines how the physiological effects of white supremacy can extend across generations.
Racial disparities in wealth are well-documented, with white people in the U.S. having significantly more net worth than African Americans. For Example:
- Late 1980s: White people had twelve times the net worth of African Americans.
- 2010: White American families had twenty-two times the median net household worth of black American families ( $110,729$ compared to $4,955$ ).
Economic racial disparities stem from historical injustices like slavery and the denial of promised land to freed slaves.
Discussions about economic transgenerational inheritance often avoid mentioning race or historical white domination.
Transgenerational inheritance is often relegated to tax codes related to estate and inheritance taxes.
Besides economic disparities, there are also transgenerational health disparities, such as preterm birth rates.
The article advocates for broader prenatal care for African American women, including addressing racial justice.

Racial Disparities in Health

Significant health differences exist between white and nonwhite Americans.
African Americans, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders have higher rates of diseases like coronary artery disease, diabetes, stroke, HIV/AIDS, and infant mortality.
African Americans under fifty are twenty times more likely to experience heart failure than white Americans in the same age group.
They also have higher rates of high blood pressure, obesity, kidney disease, and low levels of LDL cholesterol.
These health differences persist even after adjusting for socioeconomic status.
The article argues that these should be considered racist disparities, not just racial disparities.
Some scientists are focusing on the effects of white racism on health, while others are looking for genetic causes of racial differences.
Understanding the biological inheritance of racism's effects requires recognizing how social factors become physiological.
The American Nurses Association asks how race influences physiology if it isn't biological.
Health disparities are due to the effects of racism, not innate biological or genetic differences.
Racism can cause physiological changes that harm physical and psychological health.
Social phenomena can become biological, affecting the body's composition.
Epigenetics helps explain how social influences become embodied, impacting health disparities.
Epigenetics demonstrates the lasting effects of white racism on individuals and their offspring.
Interventions against racism should address biological aspects of human existence.
The article emphasizes that while the biological durability of racism is extensive, it is not permanent.
Confronting the physiological and biological effects of racism is crucial for improving the chances of success in challenging it.

Weathering

A major health disparity is preterm birth rates, with African American women being 1.6 times more likely to give birth prematurely and 2.9 times more likely to give birth very prematurely.
African American babies are more than twice as likely to die in their first year compared to white American babies.
This gap has widened despite efforts to increase access to prenatal care.
The Centers for Disease Control acknowledge that the reasons for these differences are unknown and are an area of intense research.
Some research wrongly assumes that biology is synonymous with genetics and searches for a "preterm birth gene."
Alternative approaches like epigenetics and weathering offer a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between the biological and the social.
Weathering refers to the gradual wearing down of the body by stressors over time.
Stressors can be chemical, physical, social, or interpersonal.
Allostatic load explains how environmental stressors have detrimental biological effects.
- Allostasis maintains internal stability during challenges, while homeostasis maintains stability in ordinary life.
- Ongoing stress leads to high allostatic load, weathering the body's systems and causing health problems like cardiovascular disease and accelerated aging.
Weathering demonstrates how racial health disparities are racist health disparities.
African Americans face the stressor of racial oppression and discrimination, leading to excessive weathering.
Black women at ages forty-nine to fifty-five are estimated to be biologically 7.5 years older than white women in the same age group, based on telomere differences.
The ongoing struggle against white domination means African Americans' allostatic systems rarely get a break.
Weathering explains the "paradox of the well-off black mother," where educated, health-conscious black women still experience preterm births.
Higher socioeconomic status does not reduce preterm birth rates for African American women as it does for white women.
The rate of infant mortality for African Americans with college degrees is about three times higher than that of white women with the same education level.
African immigrant women have similar preterm birth rates to white American women, but their rates climb to those of African American women within one generation of living in the U.S.

Stress and Pregnancy

Stress hormones are a normal part of pregnancy but abnormally high levels can limit fetal growth and trigger premature labor.
The amount of stress experienced before pregnancy is also relevant.
Black women in white-dominated cultures experience chronic stress, regardless of socioeconomic status.
Weathered by racism and sexism, they often begin pregnancy with a high allostatic load, increasing the risk of preterm birth.
Racial stress experienced by African American women has a life-long impact on African American families.
Experiences of racism cause surges of adrenaline and stress hormones in African American women.
Children indirectly undergo these experiences through the bodily effects on their health in the womb.

Epigenetics

Epigenetics explains how racism's biological dimensions can replicate across generations.
Weathering affects mothers and fetuses, but epigenetics can cause genuine biological replication across generations.
The term epigenetic was initially used to oppose preformationism, arguing that development is a gradual process influenced by the environment.
Preformationism dismissed the environment's importance, while epigenetics acknowledges its role.
Modern genetics often views genes as the already-formed kernel of a human being, with development relatively independent of the environment.
Epigenetics rejects this notion and acknowledges the formative role of various environments in cellular activity.
Epigenetic refers to somatically heritable states of gene expression without alterations in the DNA sequence.
Genes are rarely naked; they are chemically attached to organic molecules that regulate their activity.
Methylation, the attachment of methyl groups, can turn genes down or off.
Environmental factors, such as diet, can influence methylation.
Social exchanges and interactions, like competitive experiences or psychological trauma, can also affect gene expression.
Epigenetic processes occur at the interface of our environment and our genes.
Epigenetic modifications to genes can occur within a single being's lifetime and can be passed from one generation to another.
There are three forms of epigenetic transgenerational inheritance:
- Repetition of similar environments, such as the maternal environment, can trigger alterations of genes.
- Genomic imprinting involves the reestablishment of epigenetic attachments during sperm and egg development.
- Direct transmission of methylated genes from one generation to another.
Transmission of stress hormones from mother to fetus through the placenta impact fetal development.
Something similar occurred in the case of German children whose mothers were pregnant during the Holocaust and American children whose mothers were pregnant during the September 11 World Trade center attacks.
A good chance exists that this pattern will repeat itself in the third generation, at least absent social, medical, or other interventions to change a person’s stress response.
Offspring with hypersensitive stress axes can become parents who create environments for their offspring that will elevate their children’s (the grandchildren’s) cortisol levels in turn.
An overtaxed stress axis also can affect parenting styles.
Pup-rearing methods of methylated mice show mice with a hyperresponsive stress axis do not lick their babies as much as parents with a healthy stress axis do, affecting nerve growth factors (NGFI-A) and glutocoticoid receptors (GR)
Biases exist in epigenetics, such as a male-privileging bias in studies of pup-rearing, the job of caring for offspring is properly the work of the females of the species.
Interrogating racist stereotypes of non- white people that could influence both epigenetic research and its subsequent interpretations are also needed.

Genomic Imprinting and Direct Epigenetic Inheritance

Genomic imprinting happens during the development of sperm and eggs.
Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and bisphenol A, used in the production of clear durable plastics, and weed killers and fungicides, used in many lawn care products, can produce kidney disease and immune system problems and, in males, prostate cancer, abnormal testes, defective sperm, and low fertility.
Chemicals can alter the imprinting process during sperm development and this imprinting pattern survived epigenetic reprogramming for at least four generations of male offspring
Direct epigenetic inheritance is much more common for plants than for mammals, the epigenetic reprogramming in plants is far less extensive or effective than it is in mammals
The folic acid that the mother mice consumed not only changed their pups’ appearance and health via their experience in the womb.
The grandchildren’s relevant genes was an effect of their own consumption of methyl donors while in the womb. The folic acid consumed by the mother mouse had a direct effect on the composition and activity of the genomes of both her children and her grandchildren.
A study on a Swedish population that kept accurate calorie consumption records showed that grandsons of men exposed to famine before adolescence experienced less cardiovascular disease.
There is a general epigenetic mechanism for transmitting information about the ancestral environment down the male line because men’s sperm matures during adolescence.
The same general point could be made for other instances of epigenetic inheritance, indirect and direct alike. Epigenetic attachments can be thought of as biological memories of past environments
Epigenetic memories influence health.
Epigenetics gives striking new meaning to William Faulkner’s (1951, 81) famous comment that “the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”
The persistence of white racism means its health effects persist in the biochemistry of African American people, their children, and grandchildren.
Ongoing racism and the racist past contribute to high rates of infant mortality and cardiovascular disease among African Americans.

Conclusion

Human beings are composed through our transactions with our environments; the fresh insight provided by epigenetics is that those environments are not just contemporary but also historical ones
The fight against white racism thus needs to be waged on biological and medical levels, as well as economic, political, aesthetic, and other social levels.
the medical already is implicated in political struggles against white domination. By illuminating the transgenerational scope of white racism, epigenetics can be a useful ally in that fight.
Critical philosophers of race fall into a vicious trap when we assume or endorse a dichotomy between “‘race as biological’ (now out of favor) and ‘race as merely a social construction’”
Social and political world is literally incorporated into the muscles, hormones, fluids, tissues, and chemicals of human bodies.
The social-versus-biological trap is not neutral or innocent. It manifests an ideological position, popular with conservative foundations in the United States, that tends to be unsupportive of social justice movements.
We no longer can simply criticize the concept of “race as bad biology” (Gravlee 2009, 48). We should acknowledge that race is biological—not in the pre-critical sense of a static, essential category but in the critical, dynamic way in which “race becomes biology” through the embodiment of racial inequalities
Racial differences are physiologically, biologically real in that white racism has fundamentally impacted the physical health and functioning of African American and other non-white people
-Critical philosophy of race should be also a critical physiology of race.