Place, Not Race, May Better Explain America's Health Disparities

National statistics routinely show almost shocking health disparities between white and minority populations in the U.S. Nationally, African Americans have higher rates of obesity, heart disease, hypertension and certain cancers, a pattern public health officials have struggled to understand and reverse (and that, in fact, has been a major focus of health initiatives under the Obama Administration).

“When I talk to people who are not in the health profession, people talk about why would there be racial disparities,” says Thomas LaVeist, who directs the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions. “People would say things like ‘it’s really an access-to-care issue,’ or there is this idea that there’s some kind of genetic effect, that black people are just genetically different from white people, and it’s producing these differences.