Three Ways of Looking at Black/White Mortality Inequality in the United States

A basic demographic fact about the United States is that, on average, White people live longer than Black people. But what, concretely, does this fact mean? Drawing from a diverse set of social science, health, and literary sources, this talk argues that research has three families of strategy for making sense of the size of mortality disparities — distribution-based, action-based, and meaning-based measures — and provides new empirical results in each vein that collectively aim to put demographic measurement onto a more human footing. Implications for thinking about redress for racial harms are discussed.

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, PhD, is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota. A sociologist and demographer, she studies racial inequality in mortality in the historical and contemporary United States, and specializes in finding comparisons and metrics that illuminate the human meaning of mortality disparities. She has extensively researched the Covid-19 pandemic in Minnesota, where she also co-founded an award-winning community vaccination organization (the Seward Vaccine Equity Project). She is also a demographic methodologist, developing models designed to clarify relationships between micro and macro perspectives on population processes. She was until recently the Associate Director of the Minnesota Population Center and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.