April 10, 2025

On March 19th, the UHC was honored to host Dr. Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a sociologist and demographer at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Wrigley-Field studies racial inequality in mortality in the historical and contemporary United States, specializing in finding comparisons and metrics that illuminate the human meaning of mortality disparities. Dr. Wrigley-Field's talk, “Three Ways of Looking at Black/White Mortality Disparities in the United States,” provided an in-depth analysis into the possible stories behind discrepancies in American life expectancy across racial lines.

A basic demographic fact about the United States is that, on average, White people live longer than Black people – by approximately 4 years (~5.5-6 years during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic). Dr. Wrigley-Field spoke to the UHC from a diverse set of social science, health, and literary sources, and argued that social science research has three families of strategy for making sense of the size of mortality disparities: distribution-based, action-based, and meaning-based measures.

She then went on to provide new empirical results in each vein that collectively aim to put demographic measurement onto this more human footing.

For example, a particularly significant observation she made in August of 2020 was that life expectancy for White Americans during the COVID19 pandemic became similar to that of Black Americans outside of the pandemic. This was expanded on in her paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled “US racial inequalities may be as deadly as COVID-19."

What’s more, she put forward various outcomes that could be empirically determined “if Black people lived as long as White people...” including:

• The U.S. having less of an electorate tilted toward White people,  
  
  
• The U.S. would have a richer collective memory of Black cultural traditions and political movements,  
  
  
• Black people having more time with their loved ones, 
  
  
• Fewer Black people experiencing proximity to violence,  
  
  
• And more. 

Registration is currently live for our next Invited Speaker Series happening May 7th, 2025, featuring Dr. Diana Hernandez, Assistant Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University. Learn more and register here.

Interested in learning more about the structural determinants of health, new opportunities for research, or recommendations for community action and policy? 

We're bringing together researchers, practitioners, and policy makers focused on health in cities this fall at our 2025 Urban Health Symposium to energize work on urban places and health, generate novel ideas for research, and stimulate debate on policy implications. 

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