How prejudice can harm your health

How we treat one another, and how our institutions treat us, affects how long and how well we live

Long before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King declared health inequity the most shocking and inhumane form of injustice, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that “the Negro death rate and sickness are largely matters of condition and not due to racial traits and tendencies.” Before Du Bois made his case, James McCune Smith — the nation’s first black doctor — carefully detailed the health consequences of freedom and oppression.

These men grasped an insight that modern researchers and policy makers often fail to make explicit: Discrimination, especially when chronic, harms the body and the mind. How we treat one another, and how