A community forum on the racial disparity in the infant mortality rate and the screening of “When the Bough Breaks,” part of the PBS documentary series “Unnatural Causes … Is Inequality Making Us Sick?”

The forum is one of dozens across the country focusing on inequality and health since the series aired. The documentary first crisscrossed the country investigating the stories and findings that are shaking up conventional notions about what makes us healthy or sick.

For more than a century, African American infants have died at twice the rate of white infants. For whites, four out of 1,000 babies die. For African Americans, 10 out of 1,000 babies die.

Although birth outcomes are generally better for those with higher education and income, black women with college degrees are still more likely to give birth prematurely than white women who haven’t finished high school.

Some researchers believe the chronic stress of racism can become embedded in the body, taking a heavy toll on African American families and on children even before they leave the womb.

USC experts will explore why patterns of health and illness reflect underlying patterns of economic and racial inequality. This growing "health equity" movement is reframing the national debate over health, focusing attention on the underlying social and economic conditions that render zip codes and household wealth even stronger predictors of health outcomes than personal behaviors, germs or genes.

More than 100 studies have linked racial discrimination to worse health, according to “Unnatural Causes.”

WHO:
• Dr. Tyan Parker Dominguez, assistant professor in the USC School of Social Work, featured in the PBS series “Unnatural Causes.”
• Dr. Jack Turman, director, Center for Premature Infant Health and Development, USC Keck School of Medicine
• Dr. Lavonna Blair Lewis, clinical associate professor in the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development

Photo from Andrew D. Miller