Heart Health

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Black people are more likely to have high blood pressure than white people, and Black women are 60% more likely to have high blood pressure when compared to white women. See “Heart Disease and African Americans,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health.

Racism and “structural racism” are believed to create a significant sources of stress and trauma that increase the risk of hypertension for us. In fact, some researchers have identified structural racism and high blood pressure as “two of the biggest factors responsible for the gap in poor heart and brain health between Black and white adults in the United States” — affecting Black adults more seriously and at an earlier age than white people. Research reveals that by age 55, 75% of Black adults have already developed hypertension compared with 40% of white women and half of white men. See “The link between structural racism, high blood pressure, and Black people’s health”.

Added to the chronic stress of frequent instances of racial discrimination, “Structural Racism” has been described as all the:

“ways in which societies foster racial discrimination through mutually reinforcing systems of housing, education, employment, wages, benefits, credit, media, health care and criminal justice.”….” These patterns and practices … create the physical and social environments that make it easier for white families to grow up healthy and harder for Black families to do so. For example, decades of discriminatory lending, called redlining, have kept Black families segregated in neighborhoods with fewer resources and greater chronic exposure to environmental hazards, such as unclean drinking water and noise and air pollution, quoting Chanda Jackson of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Id.

Heart Health Information Center