Update of 8/17/2026: Of course, the lefty Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health would pick up this junk science in a news article! "Historical U.S. slavery has been linked to contemporary health disparities and the mortality gap between Black and white Americans today"
This article reeks of junk journalism and junk science! More horrible demagoguery spread by the AAAS and this time also by the National Academy of Sciences! Shame on them!
The term "racial disparities" is ideological and racist! A sign of junk science! This article published in the PNAS seems to be pure ideological junk science! It should be retracted!
What about individual lifestyle of black Americans v. white Americans with similar lifestyles or black Americans who moved away from formerly slave holding counties and so on! What about the age structure between white and black Americans in those counties?
Caveat: I did not read the article.
"... researchers studying racial health disparities in the United States today. A new study finds slavery still casts a long shadow on the country’s well-being, worsening the health outcomes for Black people in certain locations more than 150 years after abolition. ..."
From the significance and abstract:
"Significance
Black–White mortality disparities remain a persistent form of inequality in the United States. This study provides evidence that the proportion of enslaved people across U.S. counties in 1860 [???] predicts contemporary Black–White mortality disparities.
Counties with greater reliance on slavery in 1860 [???] have higher contemporary mortality rates for Black Americans but lower rates for White Americans. The association persists in analyses designed to address confounding from unobserved historical factors and in tests of alternative explanations. Structural inequalities [???] in segregation, economic conditions, and educational access emerge as key pathways linking historical slavery to contemporary mortality disparities [???]. This work underscores the need for interventions [???] that address not only proximal determinants but also the historical and structural foundations, of racial health disparities.
Abstract
We tested whether contemporary Black–White mortality disparities in the United States may be rooted in the historical legacy of slavery and perpetuated through structural inequalities.
Linking county-level data on the proportion of enslaved people in 1860 with structural inequality indicators from 1990 to 2000 and mortality outcomes from 2010 to 2020, we find that historical slavery is robustly associated with contemporary racial mortality gaps.
Our model estimates ~22 additional deaths per 100,000 among Black Americans relative to White Americans for every 10% increase in the 1860 enslaved population.
Path analysis models showed that segregation, economic inequality, and racial disparities in poverty and education statistically mediated this effect.
We test the plausibility of a causal pathway using an instrumental variable analysis and explore the robustness of our theoretical model in multiple supplemental analyses.
Our analyses held even after controlling for a comprehensive suite of historical and contemporary covariates.
These findings are consistent with a model wherein slavery’s legacy continues to shape present-day Black–White racial health disparities via enduring structural inequities."
Historical slavery predicts contemporary disparities in mortality between Black and White Americans (open access)
What a garbage Chart (reminds of the infamous Hockey Stick chart)!
Fig 1 Figure displays the estimated relationship between the proportion of enslaved population in 1860 and Black and White mortality rates (2010–2020).
