#arline t. geronimus

[gatheringbones]

[“For some of us, taking a deep breath and a moment to reframe or refocus our thoughts after an upsetting event will be enough to halt our physiological stress response. However, members of populations subject to weathering are rarely—if ever—responding to a single acute stressor. Their bodies are in constant biopsychosocial motion fulfilling their many and compelling responsibilities, which also steals their chances of having “me time.”

A 2004 ethnography of low-income mothers in Chicago (Black, white, and Latina) described the complex puzzle that many face to meet the basic daily necessities for their families. Mothers commuted up to five hours a day (and rarely less than two hours), facing severe weather conditions and patching together the meandering routes of their underfunded public transportation systems. Long wait times and limited hours of availability at public-aid offices meant missing meals in order to navigate their schedules successfully. Not only was their discretionary time scarce compared to their more affluent counterparts, but the consequences of missed obligations were dire. The investigators wrote, “Mothers who received TANF benefits [Temporary Assistance to Needy Families],” for example, “faced work requirements that often did not take into account changing circumstances. If they showed up late for work because of sudden illnesses or emergencies, they often were docked prime hours or even fired. Changing family circumstances had continuing repercussions because public benefits could be cut or terminated when employment was lost.”

All in all, these strangling time constraints meant drastically reduced sleep, less family time, and less time to unwind from the day—the cruel irony being that more-structured stress meant less time to decompress. Two-thirds of the study sample led such “highly challenging” lives. One participant averred she “could never get a break.” Another observed, “With working, the kids, and cleaning, […] you just ‘do’ until you can just sit in a chair and nod off.”

Another study of low-income mothers (Black, white, and Latina), using data from the same ambitious three-cities ethnography, exemplifies the kind of extraordinary stresses and choices faced in the communities most subjected to weathering. Francine, a thirty-year-old mother of three, had no time to attend to her own stomach cancer diagnosis because she had to attend to her asthmatic son, as well as her mother who recently suffered a stroke and heart attack at the age of fifty. Lourdes, a thirty-four-year-old mother with diabetes and glaucoma, was expected to comply with welfare work requirements because her doctor insisted she could still work despite partial paralysis and blindness. As noted, 80 percent of mothers studied suffered from chronic conditions (83 percent of whom were thirty-nine or younger) yet could not afford regular doctor’s visits, owing to either lack of income or “more immediate concerns,” such as the need to attend to their child’s health problems or their need to hold on to jobs that did not give them personal time off. It is hard to imagine a “more immediate concern” than an early-onset cancer diagnosis. That addressing it might not be an immediate priority reflects the constant juggling required in high-effort coping.”]

arline t. geronimus, from weathering: the extraordinary stress of ordinary life in an unjust society, 2023

[contentment-of-cats]

Text from the Washington Post

DYING EARLY AMERICA’S LIFE EXPECTANCY CRISIS STRESS IS WEATHERING OUR BODIES FROM THE INSIDE OUT

By Akilah Johnson and Charlotte Gomez Oct. 17 at 6:00 a.m.

Link to article here - paywall warning. Use 12.io or other paywall buster.

Physicians and public health experts have pointed to one culprit time and again when asked why Americans live shorter lives than peers in nations with similar resources, especially people felled by chronic diseases in the prime of life: stress.

A cardiologist, endocrinologist, obesity specialist, health economist and social epidemiologists all said versions of the same thing: Striving to get ahead in an unequal society contributes to people in the United States aging quicker, becoming sicker and dying younger.

Recent polls show adults are stressed by factors beyond their control, including inflation, violence, politics and race relations. A spring Washington Post-Ipsos poll found 50 percent of Americans said not having enough income was a source of financial stress; 55 percent said not having enough savings was also a source of stress.

“We should take a step back and look at the society we’re living in and how that is actually determining our stress levels, our fatigue levels, our despair levels,” said Elizabeth H. Bradley, president of Vassar College and co-author of the book “The American Health Care Paradox.” “That’s for everybody. Health is influenced very much by these factors, so that’s why we were talking about a reconceptualization of health.”

The Washington Post’s efforts to gain a deeper understanding of how stress can cause illness, disability and shorter lives led to a once derided body of research that has become part of the mainstream discussion about improving America’s health: the Weathering Hypothesis.

Stress is a physiological reaction that is part of the body’s innate programming to protect against external threats.

When danger appears, an alarm goes off in the brain, activating the body’s sympathetic nervous system — the fight-or-flight system. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is activated. Hormones, such as epinephrine and cortisol, flood the bloodstream from the adrenal glands.

The heart beats faster. Breathing quickens. Blood vessels dilate. More oxygen reaches large muscles. Blood pressure and glucose levels rise. The immune system’s inflammatory response activates, promoting quick healing.

Once the threat passes, hormone levels return to normal, blood glucose recedes, and heart rate and blood pressure return to baseline. That’s how the human body should work.

Life brings an accumulation of unremitting stress, especially for those subjected to inequity — and not just from immediate and chronic threats. Even the anticipation of those menaces causes persistent damage.

The body produces too much cortisol and other stress hormones, straining to bring itself back to normal. Eventually, the body’s machinery malfunctions.

Like tree rings, the body remembers.

The constant strain — the chronic sources of stress — resets what is “normal,” and the body begins to change.

It is the repeated triggering of this process year after year — the persistence of striving to overcome barriers — that leads to poor health.

Blood pressure remains high. Inflammation turns chronic. In the arteries, plaque forms, causing the linings of blood vessels to thicken and stiffen. That forces the heart to work harder. It doesn’t stop there. Other organs begin to fail.

Struggling and striving It’s part of the weathering process, a theory first suggested by Arline T. Geronimus, a professor and population health equity researcher at the University of Michigan.

Geronimus, whose book “Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society” published in March, started out studying the health of women and babies as a graduate student in the 1980s, having been influenced by two distinctly different jobs she had as an undergraduate: one as an on-campus research assistant, the other as a peer companion at an off-campus school for teen mothers.

Stress is weathering our bodies from the inside out At the time, she said, conventional wisdom held that the Black community had higher rates of infant mortality because teen mothers were physically and psychosocially too immature to have healthy babies. But her research showed younger Black women had better pregnancy and birth outcomes than Black mothers in their mid- to late 20s and 30s.

For this, she was criticized as someone arguing in favor of teen pregnancy, even though she was not. Shaken but undeterred, she continued trying to understand the phenomenon, which meant better understanding the overall health of the community these teens depended on for help. As she studied those networks, she recognized “people’s life expectancies were shorter, and they were getting all these chronic diseases at young ages,” she said.

But she hadn’t come up with a name yet for what she was witnessing. That happened in the early 1990s while sitting in her office: “‘Weathering’ struck me as the perfect word.”

She said she was trying to capture two things. First, that people’s varied life experiences affect their health by wearing down their bodies. And second, she said: “People are not just passive victims of these horrible exposures. They withstand them. They struggle against them. These are people who weather storms.”

People seem to instinctively understand the first, but she said they often overlook the second. It isn’t just living in an unequal society that makes people sick. It’s the day-in, day-out effort of trying to be equal that wears bodies down.

Weathering, she said, helps explain the double-edged sword of “high-effort coping.”

Over the years, Geronimus widened the aperture of her research to include immigrants, Latinos, the LGBTQIA community, poor White people from Appalachia. She found that while weathering is a universal human physiological process, it happens more often in marginalized populations.

Regulation of cortisol — what we think of as the body’s main stress hormone — is disrupted. Optimally, it should work like a wave with a steep morning rise followed by a rapid decline, which slows until reaching baseline at bedtime.

But existing research suggests that is blunted by repeated exposure to psychosocial and environmental stressors, such as perceived racial discrimination, which flatten this rhythm.

Stress-induced high cortisol levels stimulate appetite by triggering the release of ghrelin, a peptide that stimulates hunger.

The interplay between elevated cortisol and glucose is especially complex and insidious, eventually leading to obesity, fatigue, cardiovascular disease, poor immune and inflammatory functions, higher breast cancer mortality rates and other metabolic disorders. Dysregulated cortisol also increases depression and anxiety and interferes with sleep.

Weathering doesn’t start in middle age.

It begins in the womb. Cortisol released into a pregnant person’s bloodstream crosses the placenta, which helps explain why a disproportionate number of babies born to parents who live in impoverished communities or who experience the constant scorn of discrimination are preterm and too small.

During the coronavirus pandemic, pregnant women experiencing stress endured changes in the structure and texture of their placentas, according to a study published this year in Scientific Reports.

The toxic stream can persist into childhood fueled by exposure to abuse, neglect, poverty, hunger. Too much exposure to cortisol can reset the neurological system’s fight-or-flight response, essentially causing the brain’s stress switch to go haywire.

Too much stress in children and adolescents can trigger academic, behavioral and health problems, including depression and obesity.

Stress can change the body at a cellular level.

The effects of relentless stress can be seen at the chromosomal level, in telomeres, which are repeated sequences of DNA found in just about every cell.

Telomeres are the active tips of chromosomes, and they protect the cell’s genetic stability by “capping” the ends of the chromosomes to prevent degeneration. (Think of the plastic tips of shoelaces.)

Researchers have discovered that in people with chronically high levels of cortisol, telomeres become shortened at a faster rate, a sign of premature aging. The shorter the telomeres, the older the cell’s biological age. Shortened telomeres cause a disconnect between biological and chronological age.

‘A societal project’ “I don’t think most people understand weathering stress. Stress is such a vague term,” Geronimus said. “But it still gives us a leverage point to get in there and see a more complex and more frightening picture of what it does to people’s bodies and whose bodies it does it to.”

Changes in seven biomarkers in cardiac patients during a 30-year period showed Black patients weathering about six years faster than White people, a 2019 study published in SSM-Population Health found. Research also found that Black people experience hypertension, diabetes and strokes 10 years earlier than White people, according to a study published in the Journal of Urban Health.

The impact of repeatedly activating the body’s stress response is called allostatic load.

Research has shown that Mexican immigrants living in the United States for more than 10 years have elevated allostatic load scores compared with those who have lived here for less than a decade, and a study of Ohio breast cancer patients published in May in JAMA Network Open found that women with higher allostatic loads — who tended to be older, Black, single and publicly insured — were more likely to experience postoperative complications than those with lower allostatic loads.

“The argument weathering is trying to make is these are things we can change, but we have to understand them in their complexity,” Geronimus said. “This has to be a societal project, not the new app on your phone that will remind you to take deep breaths when you’re feeling stress.”

So, in short, social inequality causes stress, leading to shortened telomeres and, in turn, premature aging, disease and early death.

[tsmom1219]

The case that being poor and black is bad for your health

Read the full story in the New Yorker. The public-health professor Arline T. Geronimus has spent a forty-year career researching how inequality takes a “weathering” toll on the body.

[blacklifescience]

Intersectionality

In Weathering and Age Patterns of Allostatic Load Scores among Blacks and Whites in the United States, Geronimus, Arline T., et al. state, “the finding of larger racial disparities … among women than men, suggests that persistent racial differences in health may be influenced by the stress of living in a race-conscious society. These effects may be felt particularly by the Black women because of ‘double jeopardy’” (p. 830).

The following article gives an insight of Black Feminism and intersectionality experienced by them.

[fashiontrendin-blog]

How Racism Breaks the Human Body

http://fashion-trendin.com/how-racism-breaks-the-human-body/

How Racism Breaks the Human Body

Kaari Aubrey was in preschool when she tried to rub off her brown skin.

Her classmates at her school in Athens, Ohio, were passing a ball back and forth in the school’s playroom when Kaari noticed they weren’t including her. For a while, she pled with them to let her play, but when that didn’t work, she burst into tears. Moments later, a white girl who was playing announced that the others shouldn’t include Kaari because she was “dirty.”

“My hands were clean,” Kaari says, remembering that afternoon. “I didn’t think I was dirty.”

When her white classmate clarified, laughing, that it was Kaari’s brown complexion she considered dirty, Kaari escaped to her cubby, furiously rubbing her arm in an attempt to get the color off.

“It smelled like burnt clay,” Kaari recalls matter-of-factly. At 24, she’s now a teacher living far away from Athens in her Brooklyn apartment, but she still remembers the smell of the rug burn vividly. She also recalls being unaware of the gravity of the situation until she got home and her mother, Lisa Aubrey, began to ask questions.

Lisa is an Arizona State University professor who teaches African and African American studies and political science and splits her time between Arizona and Cameroon. “I saw her rubbing her skin, desperately, almost violently,” Lisa says. “I asked her what was going on. She told me she wanted to rub off her skin and that she wanted to look like the other girls.”

Lisa and Kaari both recall facing discrimination frequently when they lived in Ohio. Kaari remembers being called “a n*gger” on occasions and being asked if she “spoke African.”

Soon after the incident on the playground, two things in the Aubreys’ lives changed.

First, the mild eczema Kaari suffered from as a baby returned. Eczema is a skin condition that behaves like an allergy and can worsen with stress, so the condition came back more intensely and incessantly after being bullied by her classmate in the playroom.

Second, people in their community became intolerable. “They became patronizing and presumptuous and even started dropping by my house to ‘check’ on my parenting,” Lisa says. “As I reflect, some of the parents of Kaari’s schoolmates became more overtly racist as well and often didn’t even recognize their racism, I think.”

As a result, Lisa moved the pair out of Ohio to Arizona, and eventually to Ghana, where they lived for a six years.

In November 2017, NPR published an article about how racism can have physical implications for those subjected to it. “In studying black women, for example,” they reported, “[social epidemiologist Amani Nuru-Jeter] found that chronic stress from frequent racist encounters is associated with chronic low-grade inflammation — a little like having a low fever all the time.”

Nuru-Jeter and others found that the body’s natural reaction to stress can wear down those who experience that stress long-term. That same chronic stress actually changes the genes of the victims of racism, a fact that fits in with previous research finding that trauma can be passed down through generations.

Another study cited in the article by behavioral scientist Arline T. Geronimus found that after a 2008 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid in Postville, Iowa — which “saw more than a tenth of the town detained” and focused on people who “looked Latino” — some local Latina women started giving birth to smaller babies. A follow-up NPR piece also found that black mothers are more likely to lose their babies or deliver prematurely because of the stresses of racism.

When I interviewed Kaari about her experience on the playground in Athens, Lisa told me she had read somewhere that “being black is bad for your health.” After so many years of research on the topic, we now know that statement is true, at least in the U.S. The question that remains is how to solve this problem. What can be done to fix these disparities in wellness when the causes are so institutionalized? And why, after so many years of study, hasn’t more been done to change the way people of color are treated for illnesses?

Susanne Babbel is a San Francisco psychotherapist who specializes in trauma and is the author of the upcoming book Heal the Body, Heal the Mind: A Somatic Approach to Moving Beyond Trauma. She says that when a body experiences trauma — whether physical, emotional or verbal — it prepares to fight, flee or freeze. This means that when Kaari was in the playroom that day, not only was she emotionally traumatized, her body was also completing complex physical processes to solve the problem of her “otherness.”

Her heart rate may have sped up or slowed, blood may have moved to her limbs as she prepared to flee and hormones like adrenaline were fluctuating. Kaari’s body was preparing her for an act of survival. The problem for her and other people of color who experience racism is that there is no “solution” for blackness or brownness. Their bodies are preparing for a threat that will persist until the day racism ceases to exist.

Dr. Babbel says there are major health impacts when individuals face long-lasting, pervasive abuse like the name-calling and bullying that often dovetail everyday forms of racism, explaining that “we get stuck in a state of fight, flight or freeze. When we always have stress hormones, what does that do? It attacks the body. It hijacks the logical brain. The nervous system has to be addressed.”

Dr. Babble explains that when our nervous systems — the network of nerves that web throughout each of our bodies from our spines to our limbs to our brains and our skin, brown or otherwise — are worn down by chronic stress, we begin to think and feel differently. We experience symptoms like chronic pain, thyroid dysfunction and immune disorders. We can become depressed or hypervigilant.

“When people experience racism [or] when they are put down and humiliated [in general] … ,” she adds, “they disconnect from their bodies and themselves. There is a general disconnect.”

Christ-Shamma Matalbert, a 20-year-old student at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, remembers being teased mercilessly after she emigrated to the U.S. from Haiti due to the devastating effects of the 2010 earthquake on her home country. Learning English and adjusting to her new surroundings while being bullied sent Christ-Shamma (who goes by Shamma) reeling into anxiety, depression and what she calls “a lack of hopefulness.”

“I didn’t like going into the cafeteria because of all of the eyes that would be staring like I was an object,” Shamma says. “I felt like I was the only one and the world was against me. Even now, I feel like this in different circumstances.”

As a seventh grader, Shamma’s reaction was to distance herself — to write, to try to ignore how her classmates were treating her, and to freeze, as trauma victims sometimes do. But this year, when Shamma heard President Trump’s remarks about Haiti, she decided to fight. She took to Twitter to write about her accomplishments and her pride in her country. Mixed among the comments of support below the post are insults like “lowlife” and “human garbage,” but Shamma appears to be unbothered. “All of the foreign students were standing up and representing, so I made it my issue to do the same.”

In her 2003 book, Soothe Your Nerves: The Black Woman’s Guide to Understanding and Overcoming Anxiety, Panic and Fear, psychologist Angela Neal-Barnett points out that black women respond to stress in a way that is distinct from others. After finding common ground with other women and nurturing those around us (which is common among women of all races), black women eventually stuff down our pain and commit ourselves to rising above bias. Such is the making of what Neal-Barnett refers to as the “Strong Black Woman”:

“Rather than being seen as less than she [what] is supposed to be, a Strong Black Woman refuses to admit she is stressed and keeps her feelings and emotions bottled up inside while she helps everyone else. This strategy makes the Strong Black Woman an excellent candidate for the development of anxiety.”

In fact, when Dr. Neal-Barnett studied women who identified themselves as “strong black women,” the results of heart rate monitoring showed they experience as much stress as anyone else. The difference was that most of these women described themselves as some version of calm, even when their heart rates were spiking.

“Several said to me, ‘Baby, I don’t have time to think about that mess. If I did, I’d be stressed out about everything,’” says Dr. Neal-Barnett. “Yet taking the time out to acknowledge the stress and do something about it would go a long way toward preventing the development of serious anxiety and the health problems associated with it — chronic upper respiratory infections, hypertension, heart disease and obesity.”

Shamma, the Arkansas student who froze and later fought when faced with discrimination, admits to feeling depressed and anxious when she was bullied as a child, and talks of later dismissing the pain to speak up for other immigrants in a way that affirmed her strength. After exposing her feelings, though, Matalbert neatly packed them back up.

I can’t blame her. I do the same thing. I’ve found the narrative of strength far easier to share than the narrative of ongoing pain. We all want a happy ending.

Last month, while standing around my aunt’s kitchen table, my father recalled a hernia operation he’d had when I was a little girl. My father is now a full-time artist and part-time teacher at the Art Students League of New York, but back then, he worked full-time as a backstage carpenter at Lincoln Center in New York City and only part-time on his art.

Working as a stagehand was a physically demanding job that put him at constant risk of injury, so when he was diagnosed with a hernia, it shouldn’t have been a surprise. I cannot deny, though, that I was shocked when he returned home from the hospital, stumbling into the lobby of our apartment building and retching into one of the trash cans.

During our conversation in my aunt’s kitchen, I found out that my father had been refused pain medication when he’d requested it that day. He’d laid there in his hospital bed in excruciating pain, begging for the painkillers he wouldn’t receive until he threatened the supervising doctor with a lawsuit.

How can a patient trust a doctor whose racism may be contributing to their own illness?

In 2016, The Washington Post published a story revealing that black people are less likely to be treated for their pain because of the implicit biases held by medical students and doctors about their physical makeup. More than half of medical students and residents who were surveyed believed that “blacks’ skin is thicker than whites.” Others believed that black people have less sensitive nerve endings. “Doctors Don’t Always Believe You When You’re a Black Woman,” an article published in Vice in February of this year, recounts black women’s experiences with doctors who failed to trust them.

If black people like my father or the women cited in Vice’s piece are not believed when they describe symptoms as straightforward as post-op pain or headaches, what hope do they have of being treated for more complicated problems caused by pervasive racism? How can a patient trust a doctor whose racism may be contributing to their own illness?

Kaari, the teacher in Brooklyn who was viciously bullied in Ohio, tries to treat herself. “I tell myself, ‘You’re beautiful. Your skin is beautiful,’ [but] even now, to this day, I’m still self-conscious. I get eczema associated with that shame. [It] is amplified by stress that I’m causing myself. The more I get it, the more I’m frustrated with myself.” She asks herself, “’Why can’t you just deal with it? Why can’t you just get over it?’”

While Dr. Babbel says that talk therapy is a solution for individuals’ chronic stress, healing battered nervous systems is equally important. She tells me about the vagus nerve, located in the face, which is calmed by activities like humming. “That’s why people in church sing,” she says, “to have courage and to calm themselves down.”

For a second, I feel relieved. It’s inspiring that we’ve been working to heal ourselves all along. But then, the thought is sobering. I don’t think I’ll ever hear those psalms in church the same way again, knowing now, for certain, that these are the voices of people literally crying out for healing.

Collages by Louisiana Mei Gelpi; Art Direction by Emily Zirimis.

[gatheringbones]

arline t. geronimus, from weathering: the extraordinary stress of ordinary life in an unjust society, 2023

[gatheringbones]

arline t. geronimus, from weathering: the extraordinary stress of ordinary life in an unjust society, 2023

[gatheringbones]

[“My father died in his sixties of sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease that affects multiple organs in the body, including the lungs and heart. The physician who performed my father’s autopsy told me that his lungs, heart, spleen, and brain were so damaged that he must have had undiagnosed and untreated sarcoidosis for decades, and that, given the widespread damage to his vital organs, it was surprising he was even able to remain upright toward the end of his life. For years before his death, his body was a Jenga tower one move away from collapse.

Though this appeared nowhere in the official cause of death, one could certainly speculate that my father’s premature death was the result of unrelenting social pressure on top of childhood trauma—or, in other words, weathering. And there was a generational legacy of weathering to contend with, too—not just his own, but the weathering that was passed down to him from his family, whose uphill battles began in the shtetl and continued after their escape from persecution in Russia, when they came to America as poor immigrants and settled down to a difficult life in a working-class urban ghetto. Being targeted for genocide, and suffering the losses of two of her children and the slaughter of her parents, plunged my father’s mother into depression and left her desperately anxious about the health of her youngest son.

In current parlance, we would speculate that my father was affected by adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), a type of trauma that is associated with diminished health in later life. Examples of ACEs include losing a family member to death or to prison, being depressed or having a primary caregiver who is depressed, going hungry for long periods, and suffering neglect or abuse. Today, scientists have found evidence that if you were subject to ACEs during critical periods of your brain development, your brain architecture may be affected such that your threshold for physiological stress arousal is permanently lower (meaning it is triggered more easily). To the extent that you will live your life in similarly adverse circumstances, having this lower threshold can be adaptive. But what if the adversity you actually face is entirely different from the circumstances in which you were born?

Imagine what it would be like if your brain architecture was calibrated by a world rife with ACEs, yet, as you grew up, you entered an environment that contained none of the kinds of threats or stressors your brain had prepared you for. You went to school with, worked with, or lived next to members of communities whose neurological threshold for stress arousal was shaped by enjoying lives of privilege and safety. Your hair-trigger reactions to perceived threats could get you dismissed as uncivil, touchy, hot-tempered, a troublemaker, or a snowflake. Your more privileged classmates or coworkers or neighbors could feel superior as they patted themselves on the back for remaining civil and calm, letting verbal provocations roll off their back or, worse, being happily unaware that the substance of their civil discourse could, in fact, be a verbal provocation to race-conscious ears. They would not understand that your brain and body were adapted for responding to a world filled with threats and that you had been primed to be in a continuous state of vigilance. Or you knew that when the privileged performed civility, that alone did not imply they weren’t proliferating racist ideas.

This appears to have been my father’s lived experience as an adult. He probably lived in a permanently sustained or easily escalated state of physiological stress arousal, which over time weathered his body. For my father, achieving an advanced education conferred real material benefits and privileges. These were important prizes, and they offered my sisters and me a degree of financial security and opportunities he never had in his youth; yet, for my father, this alone was not enough to heal his early and intergenerational traumas, or to prevent the physiological damage that led to his early death.”]

arline t. geronimus, from weathering: the extraordinary stress of ordinary life in an unjust society, 2023

[gatheringbones]

arline t. geronimus, from weathering: the extraordinary stress of ordinary life in an unjust society, 2023

[gatheringbones]

best books I read in 2023:

sophie strand, the flowering wand: rewilding the sacred masculine

alex iantaffi, gender trauma: healing cultural, social, and historical gendered trauma

matthew desmond, evicted: poverty and profit in the american city

betty dodson, sex for one: the joy of selfloving

ching-in chen, andrea smith, jai dulani, the revolution starts at home: confronting intimate partner violence within activist communities

robin stern, the gaslight effect: how to spot and survive the hidden manipulation others use to control your life

nick turse, kill anything that moves: the real american war in vietnam

lori fox, this has always been a war: the radicalization of a working class queer

arline t. geronimus, weathering: the extraordinary stress of ordinary life in an unjust society

roxanne dunbar-ortiz, not a nation of immigrants: settler colonialism, white supremacy, and a history of erasure and exclusion

eyal press, dirty work: essential jobs and the hidden toll of inequality in america

rabbi danya ruttenberg, on repentence and repair: making amends in an unapologetic world

michelle dowd, forager: field notes for surviving a family cult

starhawk, the empowerment manual: a guide for collaborative groups

betty dodson, orgasms for two: the joy of partnersex

timothy snyder, black earth: the holocaust as history and warning

kidada e. williams, I saw death coming: a history of terror and survival in the war against reconstruction

judy grahn, another mother tongue: gay words, gay worlds

jennifer m. silva, coming up short: working-class adulthood in an age of uncertainty

susanna clarke, piranesi

megan asaka, seattle from the margins: exclusion, erasure, and the making of a pacific coast city

starhawk, truth or dare: encounters with power, authority, and mystery

laura jane grace, tranny: confessions of punk rock’s most infamous anarchist sellout

molly smith, revolting prostitutes: the fight for sex worker's rights

richard c. schwartz, you are the one you've been waiting for: applying internal family systems to intimate relationships

timothy snyder, our malady: lessons in liberty from a hospital diary

peter levine, trauma and memory: brain and body in search for the living past

kylie cheung, survivor injustice: state-sanctioned abuse, domestic violence, and the fight for bodily autonomy

timothy snyder, bloodlands: europe between hitler and stalin

joan larkin, a woman like that: lesbian and bisexual writers tell their coming out stories

cj cherryh, hammerfall

[blacklifescience]

"We further subdivided the Black and White samples according to the poverty income ratio (PIR), an income-to-needs variable measuring the ratio of household in- come to the US poverty threshold, which varies by family size and composition" (Geronimus, Arline T., et al. "“Weathering” and age patterns of allostatic load scores among blacks and whites in the United States.")

I was interested in finding out more about the Poverty-Income Ratio, specifically in regards to how it is calculated and how the government mathematically puts an individual or family into the poverty category. This website describes how it is done, as well as brings up interesting questions about how one calculates poverty.