According to a new study from scholars at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, U.S. counties that had a greater reliance on slavery in 1860 are more likely to have higher contemporary mortality rates for Black Americans and lower mortality rates for White Americans.
Among the analyzed counties, the authors found that the estimated mean modern-day mortality rate was 974 per 100,000 for Black Americans and 894 per 100,000 for White Americans. Using census data from 1860 and mortality data from 2010–2020, the authors found that as the proportion of enslaved Black Americans in 1860 increases, the 2010–2020 Black mortality rate increases and the White mortality rate decreases.
In counties with the lowest proportion (0 percent) of the population enslaved in 1860, the authors estimated that there are 11 additional deaths per 100,000 people in the contemporary Black population compared to the White population (898 versus 887). However, in counties with the highest enslaved population (92 percent) in 1860, there were 214 additional deaths per 100,000 for Black Americans compared to White Americans (1,023 versus 809). The authors estimate that for every 10 percent increase in the proportion of enslaved people in 1860, there are 13.6 additional deaths per 100,000 Black Americans and 8.5 fewer deaths per 100,000 White Americans in 2010–2020. Even after controlling for many contemporary demographic, agricultural, geographic, and economic county- and state-level factors, the authors still found slavery was significantly associated with modern Black-White disparities in mortality.
“Our findings support the view that current racial disparities in mortality are the result of long-standing and consequential policy decisions,” the authors conclude. “We focused on the historical policies allowing enslavement, but other policies explicitly created racial disparities through Black Codes, sharecropping, lynching, Jim Crow laws, sundown towns, redlining, employment discrimination, and mass incarceration. Scholars have identified these policies as pivotal in maintaining and deepening structural disadvantages, shaping the social determinants of health that continue to drive racial health disparities today. Future research should examine how the timing, emergence, and co-occurrence of these policies contributed to today’s inequities. Our results suggest that these racially discriminatory policies built a society that broadly advantaged White Americans and disadvantaged Black Americans.”
