Last week, the Huffington Post put out an article about the gap between life expectancy for women and men who are White and women and men who are Black in the United States. It’s hardly news that there is a lack of equity in health for different racial/ethnic groups in our country, but this particular article was especially disturbing.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, something happened in 2009. Something other than the fact that gross numbers of Americans were unemployed and had begun experiencing a new level of poverty that we as a country had not seen in decades. One year after the Wall Street debacle, the average life expectancy for all Americans moved from up to 78 years and 2 months. However, Black Americans “saw no improvement in life expectancy, remaining at 74 years and 3 months.”

The Huffington Post succinctly explains why Black Americans saw no growth in life expectancy in 2009: “Some experts construe this unanticipated widening of the black-white life expectancy gap as a product of the Great Recession. The recession extracted brutal economic costs from nearly every slice of American society, particularly from African Americans. Nearly two years after the recession’s official end, black unemployment remains at 16.1 percent compared to the 8 percent of white Americans unable to find work. And it’s the stress that can come with a job loss that some experts say may explain the new size of the life expectancy gap.”

Experts are anxious to see 2010 data concerning job loss, unemployment, race/ethnicity and life expectancy rates. But in the meantime, Kofi Kondwani, an assistant professor in community health and preventative medicine at the Morehouse School of Medicine, says, “We should regard this one year data as an alarm…. In a country where there are already multiple measures of health that show vast differences between the black and white population, any increase in the life expectancy gap may be an indicator that our efforts to deal with health disparities may not be working.”

To read more about this gap of life expectancy between White Americans and Black Americans, please read the Huffington Post’s article “Black-White Life Expectancy Gap Expands, Recession May Be To Blame.”

-Katie Barnett