The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

by Gabor Maté

The racial differences, independent of genetics, defy economic categories: for example, the abovementioned breast cancer risk for Black women cuts across class lines. Around birth, Black mothers are dying at three to four times the rate of non-Hispanic white mothers. And their infants are at least twice as likely to die as white babies—another trend that holds across education levels and socioeconomic status. “Put simply,” warned a recent article in the magazine of Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health, “for black women far more than for white women, giving birth can amount to a death sentence.”[11] And how not to be startled at the finding that having a non-Black doctor doubles a Black baby’s risk of dying—the baby’s “penalty,” we might say, for the crime of being born while Black.[12] For white infants the race of the physician makes no difference. In short, it is “racism, not race itself, that threatens the lives of African American women and infants,” a recent review of multiple studies concluded.[13]