New study tackles racism’s aging effects

A group of researchers from Rutgers and Michigan State Universities have launched a major study to examine the long-term effects of structural racism on cognitive aging, physical decline and frailty — particularly in Black Americans.A five-year grant from the National Institute on Aging, a division of the National Institutes of Health, will support the study under the direction of Danielle L. Beatty Moody, an associate professor at Rutgers University, and Richard C. Sadler, an associate professor at Michigan State.The research team plans to explore how lifetime exposure to structural racism in neighborhoods affects the aging process. The study will involve 800 Black and White participants from Baltimore who have been tracked for over two decades as part of a larger project on healthy aging in diverse neighborhoods.The long-term data will allow researchers to examine the cumulative impact of historical, enduring and contemporary markers of structural racism.In a news release, Moody and Sadler asserted that the study moves beyond traditional research focused only on residential segregation or redlining. “It’s not just redlining, and it’s not just segregation,” they said. “The patterns of racist, discriminatory practices go far deeper.“We need to comprehensively document the full array of tools used to entrench structural...