More heartening is the finding that black women without a high school diploma saw their life expectancy increase by a year from 73 to 74. In fact, they can now expect to live a year longer than their white counterparts.
The findings are from a study led by S. Jay Olshansky, a longevity researcher at the University of Illinois in Chicago, that looked at the disparities in life expectancy due to gender, race and education.
Published a year ago in the journal “Health Affairs” and funded by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on an Aging Society, the research is making headlines again after a poignant and provocative piece in “The American Prospect” this week titled, “What’s Killing Poor White Women?”
The article examined the case of Crystal Wilson of Cave City, Ark., who dropped out of school in the ninth grade to marry. No, she wasn’t pregnant at the time. But by the age of 38, when she died unexpectedly, she was a mom and a grandmother, overweight and suffering from diabetes. She didn’t drink or smoke. Her death was attributed to “natural causes.”
