It is no secret that a longer life is a white privilege in the U.S. In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that white men lived more than four years longer than black men, and white women lived more than three years longer than black women. The main reason for the racial mortality gap is heart disease. “There’s a huge number of years of life lost because some people have the black life expectancy and not the white life expectancy,” Kaufman said. “It’s killing people prematurely on the basis of race.”
To understand if there is any genetic reason for these deaths, Kaufman’s team reviewed six years of genome-wide studies of cardiovascular disease. Having crawled across the genome for every possible variant that could trigger deadlier disease, they only found three that fit the bill—and two of them suggested that whites, not blacks, should be on the suffering side of the disparity. “We’re spending a huge amount of money on these studies,” he said, “but if you are interested in understanding disparities, all this money that’s been spent has come up with basically nothing.”
Maybe this finding isn’t entirely earth-shattering. After all, it is almost universally agreed that race is a social construct. In 2005, only two years after the sequencing of the human genome, the editors of Nature Biotechnology put it like this: “Pooling people in race silos is akin to zoologists grouping raccoons, tigers, and okapis on the basis that they are all stripey.” Perhaps, then, the better question is: Why do we continue to search for a connection between race and genetics to explain health disparities?
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Read full, original article: Genes Don’t Cause Racial-Health Disparities, Society Does
