Highly public anti-Black violence and preterm birth odds for Black and White mothers

Reply to McCrain, Adams, Nix, and Del Pozo (2024), "Reconsidering a prominent finding on the spillover effects of police killings of unarmed Black Americans"

“…It is true that a large literature has proliferated in the wake of BVWT, with independent out-of-sample tests of the same hypothesis. To a substantial extent, this literature has confirmed our hypothesis that officer-involved killings of unarmed Black people-as well as differential exposure to policing more generally-negatively affects other Black people on multiple measures of mental health (30)(31)(32)(33)(34)(35)(36)(37)(38), as well as other measures of health (39)(40)(41)(42)(43)(44)(45)(46). These studies use different datasets, different geographies of exposure, different outcomes, and different analytic approaches; and some, which use different approaches, have addressed various potential limitations in our analysis (while other studies have limitations that our study does not).…”

Why Causation Matters

“…These two pathways are by no means exhaustive, and the complexity, various mechanisms, and epidemiologic underpinnings by which anti-Black racism negatively affects the health and well-being of Black women are being examined across disciplines and diverse fields of medicine. [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] Simultaneously, the use of Black "race" as a risk factor in medicine is being challenged across various health outcomes. [18][19][20][21] Accordingly, the intention of this article is to encourage a paradigm shift in our causal frameworks, one that embraces anti-racist thinking and praxis by recognizing the harm and limitedness of maintaining a race-based paradigm that labels Black "race" as the risk factor and instead names anti-Black racism as the root cause of these persistent disparities, thereby revealing important and highly treatable pathways (Fig.…”

Dual pandemics? Assessing associations between area racism, COVID-19 case rates, and mental health among U.S. adults

“…Similarly, prior research documents that racially traumatic events can spillover to affect the health of Black individuals. For example, highly public anti-Black violence is associated with higher odds of preterm birth ( Curtis et al, 2022 ) and more poor mental health days ( Curtis et al, 2021 ) for Black Americans. Moreover, Thomeer and colleagues (2023) show that symptoms of depression and anxiety spiked after the murder of George Floyd by police for Black adults, but not for White, Hispanic, or Asian adults.…”