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 Lead researcher Debra Umberson imagines the grieving children and
the far-reaching repercussions of their losses when looking at her
study’s broader findings: compared to white individuals, black
people born between 1900 and 1984 had to cope far more often with
the deaths of their parents, siblings and even their children,
earlier and throughout their lives.
“It’s a national crisis,” she said in a phone interview. “The
effects of these deaths reverberate throughout these communities.”
Umberson, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at
Austin, and her team compared national statistics for blacks and
whites between 1900 and 1965 and between 1980 and 1984. The findings
point to the “the spiraling damage” of racial disparities, the
authors write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences.
Blacks born from 1900 through 1965 were twice as likely as whites to
have lost their mothers and 50 percent more likely to have lost
their fathers by the age of 20, the study found. By age 60, they
were nearly twice as likely to have lost a spouse and 50 percent
more likely to have lost a sibling.
“I’m almost 60. I have never lost anyone,” said Umberson, who is
white.
One of the statistics that startled her most was the racial
disparity for child loss. Blacks born in the 1980s were two and a
half times more likely to have lost a child by age 20 than whites,
the study found. Blacks born from 1900 to 1965 were more than three
times more likely to have lost a child between the ages of 50 and
70.
“All of these losses are very scarring. It’s parents losing
children; it’s children losing parents, and it’s altering the
families these people come from,” she said.
Jocelyn R. Smith Lee, a psychology professor at Marist College in
Poughkeepsie, New York, has seen the toll of grief and loss on young
men she interviewed in Baltimore.
“The study echoes and affirms what young black men have been
communicating to me is happening in their daily lives,” she told
Reuters Health.
They grapple with the loss of their relatives and friends, and they
so often see death that they fear for their own lives, Lee said.
A 19-year-old man in East Baltimore told her: “It’s a lot of work to
keep your life.”
The news media have reported on the disproportionate number of black
men killed on the streets, Umberson said. But blacks die even more
frequently from illness.
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“I think it’s extraordinarily important that we draw attention to
the race difference in homicide,” Umberson said. “Violence is a
leading cause of death.”
“It’s a big deal, but others are even bigger. Cancer, diabetes,
heart disease, perinatal conditions contribute to more of the race
difference in life expectancy than homicide,” she said.
Previous studies have shown that mourning increases the risk for
mental and physical illness, and the consequences may be
particularly rough and lasting for grieving children and young
adults, the authors write.
Often, when children return to school after experiencing the death
of a mother, father, sister or brother, their teachers have no idea,
Umberson said.
“The kid just comes back and starts acting out,” she said.
Umberson and Lee both called for programs to help teachers, doctors
and others to identify children who are in grief and to provide
needed support.
Some of the young men Lee interviewed in Baltimore told her she was
the first person who talked to them about the violence they confront
daily.
One youth told her he expected to die before he turned 25. When she
interviewed him again, he had passed the milestone.
He rolled up to meet her in a wheelchair. He’d been shot in both
legs during a robbery just past his 25th birthday.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2jKJLYI Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, online January 23, 2017.
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