Systemic injustice takes a physical, too often deadly, toll on Black, brown, working class and poor communities, and any group who experiences systemic cultural oppression or economic exploitation. In Weathering, Dr Arline T. Geronimus argues that health and aging have more to do with how society treats us than how well we take care of ourselves.
Arline Geronimus has spent the last 40 years researching racial and class injustice in the US. Her first non-academic book is the culmination of a life’s groundbreaking work ... She presents a staggering accumulation of evidence to show how daily discrimination grinds people down ... Weathering offers hopeful solutions to health inequities. It is crisp, backed with evidence and rather heroic in spirit.
Assembl[es] insights from a nearly forty-year career researching the adverse health effects of racism and poverty. She recruits a range of sources ... There is a missing middle in her book between the structural and the anecdotal that is, at heart, a conceptual problem. The structural forces of oppression exert an intuitive yet ill-defined pressure on a person’s immediate circumstances. They are everywhere, and yet they remain hard to pin down ... The book has another rhetorical problem, one endemic to recent populist explainers of social issues. There is a preponderance of what I think of as trade-book baby talk ... The proposals Geronimus offers are as friendly and unchallenging as her prose ... The power of Geronimus’s project remains the attempt to provide a conceptual framework for patterns that medical institutions, in their convenient recourse to individual failings, have yet to fully recognize.
A persuasive hypothesis, enlightening biopsychosocial study of health inequities fostered by racism and classism, and an urgent call for compassion and social justice.
