Weathering Quotes

“After almost forty years of research in public health and a lifetime of wrestling with questions of racial and class injustice, I have concluded that a process I call weathering, a process that encompasses the physiological effects of living in marginalized communities that bear the brunt of racial, ethnic, religious, and class discrimination, is critical to understanding and eliminating population health inequity.”
― Arline T. Geronimus, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society

“Weathering results from repeated or sustained activation of the physiological stress response over years and eventually decades. This means that a person’s health and life expectancy depend more on their experiences, their interactions with others, and the physical environment they live in than on their DNA signature or lifestyle.”
― Arline T. Geronimus, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society

“These are shocking figures, and people express surprise and puzzlement when confronted with them. They just don’t match up with the age-washing mantra that taking personal responsibility and making “healthy” choices will typically lead to a strong and vigorous life that could extend well into your eighties or nineties, or even past a hundred. We believe that given the state of our medical technology and scientific knowledge, anyone and everyone can live to grow old.”
― Arline T. Geronimus, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society

“So, why is it that from the start of the pandemic the young and middle-aged in marginalized groups, not just Black and brown but Indigenous groups and people in poor white rural communities, have been more likely to suffer severe COVID-19 and die from it than their white, more affluent counterparts? The answer is part of a broader question: Why are the largest health inequities between these groups and nationwide averages—whether in infectious disease or the early onset of chronic conditions of aging such as cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and diabetes—seen among those aged twenty-five to sixty-five?7 The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown these inequities into stark relief. It’s not just that Black Americans are nearly twice as likely to die of COVID-19 as white Americans.8 Consider these statistics (among the many, many more you will see in chapters to come): Black mothers die during childbirth at an overall rate that is nearly three times as high as the rate for white mothers.9 For Black mothers in their mid-to-late thirties, the figures are even more dire: They die at a rate five times higher than white mothers of comparable age.10 Yet, the working- and reproductive-age years are those we have been led to believe should be the healthiest, following the higher-risk periods of infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and before the most serious risks of aging set in.”
― Arline T. Geronimus, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society

“Hearing the stories of working-class Black people like Jason Hargrove, and learning the stark fact that Black Americans are more than twice as likely to die of the virus as whites, a broad swath of the American public was forced to take notice of something they had ignored until then.”
― Arline T. Geronimus, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society

“For the more affluent members of marginalized groups, the housing, education, healthy food, and health care their money can buy might reduce or mitigate the harmful impacts of weathering, but they cannot eliminate them.”
― Arline T. Geronimus, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society

“My research shows that pervasive racist and classist ideologies activate biological processes that wear out the physical and mental health of people of color across all economic classes, if to different degrees.”
― Arline T. Geronimus, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society

“Even Blackness and whiteness are fluid. Historically, the demographic groups welcomed under the umbrella of whiteness have evolved over time, which tells us much about how arbitrary their boundaries are. For example, Irish, Italian, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the United States in the early to mid-twentieth century were classified toward, and sometimes on, the “Black” side of the binary. It is equally well known that these groups were effectively reclassified toward the “white” side of the binary starting around the 1950s.”
― Arline T. Geronimus, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society

“Racialization is a powerful means by which the dominant culture sets groups apart as more or less deserving of, or entitled to, resources, esteem, or power; or, instead, as worthy of contempt, punishment, deprivation, stigma, oppression, and exploitation.”
― Arline T. Geronimus, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society

“And I will explain that our colossal failure to achieve anything resembling health equity is the inevitable by-product of our general lack of understanding of this fact: Race is not rooted in any meaningful biological categories. Race is a biological fiction, an invention that keeps some people, those deemed by those in power to fall on the “wrong” side of an arbitrary color line (or a religious, class, ethnic, gender, sexual-orientation, or gender-identity line), in their place. If we limit our ideas to reigning folk notions about race, we will never truly get to the roots of the problem, and such discovery is a prerequisite to promoting health equity. To understand”
― Arline T. Geronimus, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society

“Weathering is about hopeful, hardworking, responsible, skilled, and resilient people dying from the physical toll of constant stress on their bodies, paying with their health because they live in a rigged, degrading, and exploitative system.”
― Arline T. Geronimus, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society

“Study after study has found that individual behavioral patterns play at best only a small part in accounting for excess deaths in marginalized populations.”
― Arline T. Geronimus, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society