Engaging the World on Health Equity Through ReadingMain MenuIntroductionWhy these books?Ailing in Place: Environmental Inequities and Health Disparities in AppalachiaMichele MorroneAmerican Health Crisis: One Hundred Years of Panic, Planning, and PoliticsMartin HalliwellAmerica’s Arab Refugees: Vulnerability and Health on the MarginsMarcia C. InhornBedlam: An Intimate Journey into America's Mental Health CrisisKenneth Paul RosenbergBlack Death at the Golden Gate: The Race to Save America from the Bubonic PlagueDavid K RandallChanging Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do about ItPaul R. Epstein (Author), Dan Ferber (Author), Jeffrey Sachs (Foreword)CherryNico WalkerDelugeLelia ChattiDying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and HealthKeith WailooA Family History of Illness: Memory as MedicineBrett L. WalkerThe Family Roe: An American StoryJoshua PragerFit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939Natalia MolinaHaiti: After the EarthquakePaul FarmerHow the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in AmericaPriya Fielding-Singh, PhDMad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally IllRobert WhitakerNot Invisible: A Collection of Poems about Chronic IllnessTiffany MoharPushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol CigaretteKeith WailooSince the House is BurningTale of Two PlanetsJohn Freeman (editor)Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our NationLinda VillarosaUnwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made WorldElinor CleghornWhat Happens Is NeitherAngela Narciso TorresWhat the Eyes Don't See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American CityMona Hanna-AttishaWhich Country Has the World's Best Health Care?Ezekiel J. EmanuelAbout the curatorAcknowledgementsVesper North9c258319e12f98ebd7884dfac94793204ec38858Chapman University
Cover art for "Under the Skin"
1media/Under the Skin_thumb.jpeg2023-08-09T18:15:24+00:00Vesper North9c258319e12f98ebd7884dfac94793204ec388583101Image courtesy of Penguin Random Houseplain2023-08-09T18:15:24+00:00Vesper North9c258319e12f98ebd7884dfac94793204ec38858
keywords: African American health, inadequacies in healthcare, United States, reproductive health, women's health
In 2018, Linda Villarosa’s New York Times Magazine article on maternal and infant mortality among black mothers and babies in America caused an awakening. Hundreds of studies had previously established a link between racial discrimination and the health of Black Americans, with little progress toward solutions. But Villarosa’s article exposing that a Black woman with a college education is as likely to die or nearly die in childbirth as a white woman with an eighth grade education made racial disparities in health care impossible to ignore.
Now, in Under the Skin, Linda Villarosa lays bare the forces in the American health-care system and in American society that cause Black people to “live sicker and die quicker” compared to their white counterparts. Today’s medical texts and instruments still carry fallacious slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies. Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment and outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism and neglect from all levels of government. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes the new understanding that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely. Anchored by unforgettable human stories and offering incontrovertible proof, Under the Skin is dramatic, tragic, and necessary reading.