From NBC News:

Study reveals staggering toll of being Black in America: 1.6 million excess deaths over 22 years

Although the nation had made progress in closing the gap between white and Black mortality rates, that advance stalled. Then Covid hit.

May 16, 2023, 8:09 AM PDT
By Liz Szabo | KFF Health News

Research has long shown that Black people live sicker lives and die younger than white people.

Now a new study, published Tuesday in JAMA, casts the nation’s racial inequities in stark relief, finding that the higher mortality rate among Black Americans resulted in 1.63 million excess deaths relative to white Americans over more than two decades.

Because so many Black people die young—with many years of life ahead of them—their higher mortality rate from 1999 to 2020 resulted in a cumulative loss of more than 80 million years of life compared with the white population, the study showed.

Although the nation made progress in closing the gap between white and Black mortality rates from 1999 to 2011, that advance stalled from 2011 to 2019. In 2020, the enormous number of deaths from Covid-19—which hit Black Americans particularly hard—erased two decades of progress.

Authors of the study describe it as a call to action to improve the health of Black Americans, whose early deaths are fueled by higher rates of heart disease, cancer, and infant mortality. …

High mortality rates among Black people have less to do with genetics than with the country’s long history of discrimination, which has undermined educational, housing, and job opportunities for generations of Black people, said Clyde Yancy, an author of the study and chief of cardiology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

Black neighborhoods that were redlined in the 1930s—designated too “high risk” for mortgages and other investments— remain poorer and sicker today, Yancy said. Formerly redlined ZIP codes also had higher rates of Covid infection and death. “It’s very clear that we have an uneven distribution of health,” Yancy said. “We’re talking about the freedom to be healthy.”

In 2021, non-Hispanic white Americans had a life expectancy at birth of 76 years, while non-Hispanic Black Americans could expect to live only to 71.

What are the life expectancies of Hispanics and Asians?

Why would you want to know that?

All you need to know is that vampire-like white people are stealing the lives of blacks.

Much of that disparity is explained by the fact that non-Hispanic Black newborns are 2½ times as likely to die before their first birthdays as non-Hispanic whites. Non-Hispanic Black mothers are more than 3 times as likely as non-Hispanic white mothers to die from a pregnancy-related complication.

Racial disparities in health are so entrenched that even education and wealth don’t fully erase them, said Tonia Branche, a neonatal-perinatal medicine fellow at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago who was not involved in the JAMA study.

Black women with a college degree are more likely to die from pregnancy complications than white women without a high school diploma. Although researchers can’t fully explain this disparity, Branche said it’s possible that stress, including from systemic racism, takes a greater toll on the health of Black mothers than previously recognized.

It’s possible. Of course, it’s more likely that there are medical and possibly genetic reasons.

Death creates ripples of grief throughout communities. Research has found that every death leaves an average of nine people in mourning.

Black people shoulder a great burden of grief, which can undermine their mental and physical health, said Khaliah Johnson, chief of pediatric palliative care at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Given the high mortality rates throughout the life span, Black people are more likely than white people to be grieving the death of a close family member at any point in their lives.

“We as Black people all have some legacy of unjust, unwarranted loss and death that compounds with each new loss,” said Johnson, who was not involved with the new study. “It affects not only how we move through the world, but how we live in relationship with others and how we endure future losses.” ….

KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

Okay, so what are life expectancies for Asians and Hispanics. Also from KFF Health News:

Key Data on Health and Health Care by Race and Ethnicity

Latoya Hill, Nambi Ndugga, and Samantha Artiga
Published: Mar 15, 2023

Provisional data from 2021 show that overall life expectancy across all racial/ethnic groups was 76.1 years (Figure 14). Life expectancy for Black people was only 70.8 years compared to 76.4 years for White people and 77.7 years for Hispanic people.

Why are Hispanics oppressing whites into dying younger?

It was highest for Asian people at 83.5 years and lowest for AIAN people who had a life expectancy of 65.2 years. Life expectancies were even lower for Black and AIAN males, at 66.7 and 61.5 years, respectively. Data were not available for NHOPI people. Overall life expectancy declined by 2.7 years between 2019 and 2021, with AIAN people experiencing the largest life expectancy decline of 6.6 years, followed by Hispanic and Black people (4.2 and 4.0 years, respectively), and a smaller decline of 2.4 years for White people. Asian people had the smallest decline in life expectancy of 2.1 years between 2019 and 2021.

These declines largely reflect an increase in excess deaths due to COVID-19, which disproportionately impacted Black, Hispanic, and AIAN people.

As did homicides, car crashes, and drug overdoses. (For the first 15 years of this century, drug overdose deaths were mostly rising among whites, but then fentanyl arrived in the big cities around 2015.)

By 2019, Hispanics enjoyed 3.1 more years of life expectancy than non-Hispanic whites.