Three Ways of Looking at Black-White Mortality Differences in the United States

Abstract

Everyone agrees that US Black deaths happen earlier than white deaths on average, but it is surprisingly challenging to find the best ways to summarize, quantify, and compare this gap. This review argues that there are three main strategies for doing so, falling on a spectrum of more conventional (though with many novel variants) to unexpected. Distributional approaches quantify population death rates or lifespans, and there is a proliferation of new, creative distributional measures. Comparative approaches benchmark Black excess deaths against other deaths; some versions can be normatively powerful but rest on normative assumptions that are open to challenge. Meaning-based approaches attempt to measure losses - to decedents, their survivors, and the world - that follow from excess Black deaths. These losses range from lost votes and cultural production to traumatic proximity to death to lost chances for reconciliation. Each approach offers new empirical and theoretical opportunities to better understand unequal lifespans.