Walsemann Katrina M, Pearson Jay, Abbruzzi Emily
University of Maryland, School of Public Policy & Maryland Population Research Center, United States.
Duke University, Sanford School of Public Policy, United States.
SSM Popul Health. 2022 Sep 6;19:101224. doi: 10.1016/j.ssmph.2022.101224. eCollection 2022 Sep.
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.
在美国，成年黑人的累积生理负荷（一种生理失调指标）一直高于成年白人。鉴于在受教育程度方面存在种族差异，教育被认为是一个可能的影响机制，但相关证据并不一致。这可能部分归因于数据限制，这些限制使得学者们难以考虑到结构性根源的系统性种族主义，这种种族主义塑造了美国教育体系，并导致在吉姆·克劳法盛行的南方长大的老年人在学期长度和上学出勤率方面存在巨大的种族不平等。我们的研究通过将1919年至1954年美国南方黑人和白人隔离学校系统的历史数据与健康与退休研究（HRS）相联系，来解决这一限制，以确定一种新的受教育程度衡量标准，该标准考虑到导致不同年份和州的黑人和白人学生上学天数差异的结构性种族主义，是否能更好地解释在吉姆·克劳法时期上学的老年人中黑人和白人在累积生理负荷方面的不平等。我们将样本限制为在HRS中被归类为白人或黑人的受访者，他们在学龄期居住在南方，在1919年至1954年期间完成了小学/中学学业，并提供了累积生理负荷的测量值（n = 1932）。我们发现，无论我们是连续测量累积生理负荷（34%对16%）还是分类测量（45%对20%），我们新的上学时长衡量标准比自我报告的上学年限更能减少黑人和白人在累积生理负荷方面的不平等。我们的研究结果强调了在试图理解教育如何影响在美国被归类为黑人的个体健康时，识别和使用考虑到结构性根源的系统性种族主义的历史知情上学衡量标准的重要性。
