Framing Health Equity: Determinants of Health for Boys and Men of Color

I will use the life-course approach to examine the multiple factors that generate the decline in the numbers of African American men. Excess mortality and morbidity rates across all age groups, increased high-school dropout rates, decreased rates of college attendance, increased incarceration rates, higher unemployment and under-employment all contribute to the lack of marriageable African American men (Wilson WJ. The Declining Significance of Race: Revisited & Revised. Daedalus. 2011; 140(2):55-69), and the disappearance of black men from families and civic and community spaces. The factors listed above have their impact at various stages of the life course. This presentation will use routinely available surveillance data such as the natality, period-linked birth-infant death, and age- and sex-specific mortality, and survey data such as the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System data and the National Survey of Family Growth to examine the health-related aspects of the disappearance of African American men.