Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American LIves and on the Health of Our Nation

From an award-winning writer at the New York Times Magazine & a contributor to the 1619 Project comes a landmark book that tells the full story of racial health disparities in America, revealing the toll racism takes on individuals & the health of our nation.

In 2018, Linda Villarosa's New York Times Magazinearticle on maternal & infant mortality among black mothers & babies in America caused an awakening. Hundreds of studies had previously established a link between racial discrimination & the health of Black Americans, with little progress toward solutions. But Villarosa's article exposing that a Black woman with a college education is as likely to die or nearly die in childbirth as a white woman with an eighth grade education made racial disparities in health care impossible to ignore.

Now, in Under the Skin, Linda Villarosa lays bare the forces in the American health-care system and in American society that cause Black people to “live sicker & die quicker” compared to their white counterparts. Today's medical texts & instruments still carry fallacious slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies. Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment & outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism & neglect from all levels of government. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes the new understanding that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely. Anchored by unforgettable human stories & offering incontrovertible proof, Under the Skin is dramatic, tragic, & necessary reading.

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LINDA VILLAROSA is a contributing writer at the NY Times Magazine, where she covers the intersection of race & health.