Why Black People Die Sooner: What Medicine Gets Wrong about Race and How to Fix It

There is a persistent gap in life expectancy between Black people and their white counterparts in the United States. It is a direct result of structural racism within American society and has nothing to do with genetic differences. In past eras, scientific racism sought to shift the blame to the supposed physical inferiority of people of African descent. Even today, medicine labors under false beliefs derived from nineteenth-century racial thinking, harming patients who are not of European descent.

Why Black People Die Sooner is a powerful and rigorous examination of the ways racism shapes health and disease. Joseph L. Graves Jr. demonstrates that the medical profession still fails to grasp basic facts about race, tracing how deep-rooted falsehoods have perpetuated the disparity between Black and white lifespans. He equips readers with the tools to dispel the fallacies and errors of racialized medicine, including an understanding of evolutionary biology and human biological variation. Graves also debunks common misconceptions about race and health on topics such as high blood pressure, sickle cell disease, the microbiome, infectious diseases, and cancer. Why Black People Die Sooner closes by offering a sweeping vision for dismantling medical racism, from professional training to clinical practice through biomedical research. Timely and bracing, this book reveals why medicine keeps misunderstanding race--and how we can make it change.

Joseph L. Graves Jr. is the MacKenzie Scott Endowed Professor of Biology at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. A fellow of the Council of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he received the Liberty Science Center’s Genius Award in 2024. His books include Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions (Columbia, 2021, with Alan H. Goodman), which received the 2024 W. W. Howells Prize for the best book in biological anthropology.