Our Status-Driven Culture May Be Shortening Your Lifespan

Imagine you got to choose whether to be born Black or born White in America. Here are a few health statistics that might inform your decision:

If you chose to be born White, your chances of dying of Parkinson’s disease would be twice as likely as if you chose to be Black. Your chances of dying from cirrhosis of the liver or Alzheimer’s disease would be 25 percent higher. As a White person, you’d also be two and a half times more likely to commit suicide.

Based on those facts alone, the decision to be born White might sound like a pretty bad idea. And sure enough, life doesn’t work out well for many millions of White people in America. But you might also consider that everyone has to die of something, and dying from these particular causes has some advantages.

As terrible as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are, for example, almost no one dies of them unless they’ve previously managed to escape death from other causes for 75 years or more. Cirrhosis of the liver tends to kill at younger ages, but you can still spend many decades of hard drinking before it catches up with you. Even for the chance to commit suicide, one typically has to have survived at least until one’s teens, and suicide is more common among those who have succeeded in growing old than it is among those who are still young.