Rocks, soils and minerals — the elements that make up the land we live upon — have no protection from the weather. They are struck by lightning, flooded by rains and baked by blistering sunlight. This natural process, which represents the gradual chipping away of the surface of our Earth, is called weathering.
Over the past two decades, and particularly in the past few years, public health researchers have been using this term in a different context: to describe a process they say occurs in the bodies of Black people who grow up in white American society.
The theory is gaining traction — data from 2021 found deaths due to Covid-19 were 2.8 times higher in Black/African Americans compared to whites, and studieshave linked this to weathering.
The term “weathering” was first used in the context of public health by Arline Geronimus, now a professor of Health Behavior and Health Education at the University of Michigan in the US. While facilitating research on teenage mothers in the 1990s, she came upon an unexpected finding: babies born to Black mothers in their 20s and 30s had more health complications than those born to mothers in their teens. This was the opposite of what was observed in white women, who tended to have better outcomes if they gave birth in their 20s and 30s compared to Black women.
