Rutgers, Michigan State Awarded $3.7 Million Grant to Research Long-Term Impact of Structural Racism on Aging, Health, and Well-Being

A group of researchers led by Rutgers University and Michigan State University have launched a study to understand how lifetime exposure to structural racism in communities affects cognitive aging and physical function decline, and frailty.

The study will be led by Danielle L. Beatty Moody, an Associate Professor at the Rutgers University School of Social Work and lead multiple principal investigator alongside Richard C. Sadler, an Associate Professor at Michigan State, and is funded by a five-year grant expected to total $3.7 million from the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health.

The researchers said this examination is essential for developing appropriate strategies to address racial inequities in accelerated aging, particularly in communities where Black Americans live and desire to age in place.

The research also will:

• Explore differences based on social and demographic factors, including whether non-Black residents in these communities are affected
• Examine the role of personal experiences with discrimination
• Identify biological and social factors that influence risk and resilience

It will be the first project to fully address and combine these goals, said Beatty Moody and Sadler.

Beatty Moody and Sadler shared that lifetime exposure to historical, enduring, and contemporary structural racism in one’s neighborhood across the life course promotes greater cognitive and functional declines and increased frailty among adults, particularly for Black Americans. Understanding how that happens is critical to the development of appropriate strategies to disrupt racial inequities in accelerated aging in communities where Black Americans live and age, the researchers said.

Evidence shows that Black people endure earlier onsets and greater rates of aging-related cognitive and physical function decline and frailty relative to other racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. Elements of structural racism – the systems and processes that create and maintain race-based inequities – are posited as the fundamental drivers of disparate health and accelerated aging for Black people specifically, with residual impact on other racial and ethnic groups now living in these environments. Drawing on prior reports, the research scholars argue that structural racism in the neighborhood environment has unfairly and systemically shaped the communities where Black people reside, learn, work, shop, and recreate – and these negative externalities wind up harming everyone in their wake.

To date, most research examining structural racism in the neighborhood environment has rested upon an almost singular focus on either residential segregation or historic redlining. Yet, a rich and fuller complement of practices have been used to erect and sustain structural racism in the neighborhood environment, that not only created historical structural racism strategies but continue to shape enduring and contemporary structural racism practices in the neighborhood environment as well. As detailed in the grant, together, these practices comprise an ample and diverse collection of documented methods and means that remain virtually untapped in social sciences research, and especially in detailing and achieving health equity.

When asked about the significance of this project Beatty Moody and Sadler shared, “collectively, our work seeks to call out and disentangle the vast array of tools used to entrench structural racism in the neighborhood environment – past, present, and future. One drum we have been beating is that ‘it’s not just redlining and it’s not just segregation.’ The patterns of racist discriminatory practices in the landscape go far deeper and are more insidious than these singular practices. We need to comprehensively document what the full constellation of tools, tactics, and strategies look like in our urban landscapes to better contextualize why racial inequities emerge and persist across numerous health endpoints, for which all Americans ultimately suffer, but for which Black Americans consistently take the largest hits.”

The research team will work with 800 Black and white men and women who were born in Baltimore and continue to live there. These individuals are participants in a larger, ongoing study, Healthy Aging in Neighborhoods of Diversity across the Life Span, and have been followed from the ages of 30 – 64 years across multiple waves of data collection over up to 20 years. This will allow detailed study of cumulative lifetime exposure to historical, enduring, and contemporary markers of structural racism across Baltimore neighborhoods through the development of lifetime residential histories and contemporary activity spaces, obtained by interview, local archival resources from over the past 100 years, as well as commercial data from LexisNexis. 

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County will serve as the primary data collection hub, led by Professor Shari R. Waldstein, in close collaboration with Beatty Moody and Sadler.

Once available, the study findings will be freely accessible and shared with participants and key local stakeholders. This will support ongoing advocacy and policy efforts aimed at transformative health equity changes in the neighborhood environment, with a particular focus on housing.

The funding described in this press release from the NIA, is under award number R01AG078675. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and doesn’t necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.