Why Are Black Children Twice as Likely to Die During Childhood?

Black babies and children are more than twice as likely to die as white kids, and that gap has grown since the 1950s, a new study says.

Black kids died at a rate 2.15 times that of white children in the 2010s, researchers reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

That’s up slightly from the 1950s when the death rate among Black infants was 92 percent higher than that in white babies, researchers observed.

“Racial inequalities in infant and childhood mortality between Black and white Americans have not decreased in 70 years in the United States, with Black infants and children consistently having nearly twice the risk for death of white infants and children,” concluded a team led by senior researcher Soroush Saghafian, founder and director of the Public Impact Analytics Science Lab at Harvard University.

In all, 690,000 deaths among Black children — including more than 522,000 infants — could have been avoided during the seven decades in question if their death rates were the same as those of white children, researchers concluded.

For the study, researchers used federal data to track death rates and life expectancy for white people and Black Americans from 1950 to 2019.

They found that the gap in deaths among infants and children increased during that period, even as overall racial gaps in life expectancy and deaths decreased.

Life expectancy from birth rose 20 percent between 1950 and 2019 for Black Americans, and 13 percent for white Americans.

Likewise, the death rate was 23 percent higher for Black people than white folks in the 1950s, but by the 2010s was 18 percent higher.

However, in Black children, the mortality gap slightly increased between the 1950s and the 2010s, researchers found.

In fact, they estimated that life expectancy among Black Americans in the 2010s would have been five months longer if their death rates during childhood were similar to those of white Americans.

Medical conditions occurring shortly after birth caused most of the deaths among Black children under age 5, researchers found.

Among those between 5 and 19 years of age, the leading causes of death were all external – homicides, suicides, trauma and accidents.

“Our analyses underscore the large racial inequalities in childhood mortality that have been present since the 1950s in the United States,” researchers wrote.

“The underlying causes of the inequalities in mortality documented here are embedded in a history of race-based inequity and discrimination against the Black population of the United States,” the study said.

“Being Black in the United States is associated with less wealth, income, and education,” the team wrote, citing prior research that found “lower income, food insecurity, less education, and worse health insurance coverage” among Black Americans.

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