In this interview, Arline Geronimus talks about her long-time research on weathering among black Americans and its toll on their health – including the early years when her work was “pretty well dismissed” by many researchers in the medical and academic communities. She explains weathering as a product of living with the stress of racism and of high-effort coping: “Long-term exposure to cascades of stress hormones causes a lot of different health vulnerabilities, and it increases your susceptibility to infection but also the early onset of chronic diseases, in particular – hypertension, diabetes, morbid obesity.” She also mentions more recent developments charting epigenetic changes that accompany weathering.

More about Geronimus on pushing past early dismissal of her weathering hypothesis >