The Best Return on Investment
Achieving not only long life but good life in Black America
According to the 2023 Boston Public Health Commission Report, there is a 23-year difference in life expectancy between residents of the majority Black community of Roxbury and that of the majority white community, Back Bay. Life expectancy in Back Bay is 91.6 years, while it is 68.8 years for Roxbury residents.
On its surface, this information does not seem new. It is unimaginable but not appalling. It follows similar data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in 2015, where Black households were found to have a median wealth of $8, compared to the $247,000 wealth of White households in Boston. The difference is hard to even conceptualize, and at the same time, big enough to stir the pit in your stomach, like the panicky feeling in a near-miss car event, as a haunting reminder that things are not yet under control.
Twenty years. That’s the amount of time that spans just one generation. Just one generation marks the divide between Black and White Bostonian life expectancy. In one generation, less than a mile apart, a wisdom that is embodied in lessons learned over 70 or 80 years of life is lost for Black residents. In one generation, less than a mile apart, one middle-aged Black adult is consumed with dodging financial and health uncertainty, while a White adult is frolicking through self-awareness and legacy building. Without a remedy for the gap, educational, financial, and health outcomes will stubbornly persist. Though it is hardly a full picture, it is enough to confirm that the devastation for the Black community still looms large.
Healthcare access and healthcare outcomes have been areas of focus for narrowing this gap. This is where social determinants of health (SDOH) have become a mainstay. SDOH are the “non-medical conditions that impact a person’s health outcomes, quality of life, and functioning.” They include things like where people live, work, and are educated, as well as the systems that envelop each part of these life domains.
Efforts like reducing emergency room wait time, increasing access for more to see a doctor despite income, and ensuring that specialist services like mental health are embedded in healthcare centers have been critical in tackling the imposing effect of SDOH. Yet, the remaining disparity in life expectancy suggests there are other efforts untapped in closing the gap.
Within the same square mileage where Roxbury and Back Bay exist, there are at least two world-class health centers. This is to say that even if it meant busing people into the health centers, the 20-year lifespan difference would likely not change. There is something else that is needed to get at what determines longevity within Boston’s 1-mile radius. Access ain’t the only problem.
Life expectancy is determined by genetics (what you inherit physically), lifestyle (what you use to fill the controllable moments of your life), and environment (where, when, and how you live). The common denominator in all of these factors is the one thing with the largest potential for impact. YOU!
Any study of people who have surmounted obstacles is incomplete without a reference to the individual as the critical agent. Stories like that of late Reginald J Lewis, the Black business man and multi-million dollar investor or Josiah Henson, the man highlighted in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book that many attribute to sparking the Civil War and the end of enslavement in America (Henson has a long list of descendants one which includes Taraji P. Henson) are examples of Blacks who use inner power to overcome adversity or disadvantage. This is the real secret to bridging the distance between Black and White lives.
Too often, the notion that “black people who are educated, smart, articulate, poised, and basically every other positive adjective you can think of are atypical or rarities among the general black population” leaves many Black folk feeling unqualified to stand up against barriers for better life quality and life outcome. As Janice Gassam Asare, Ph.D, posits in her Forbes magazine article, the idea that “Black exceptionalism is often used to justify Black humanity” has been bought by many Blacks who believe their fate is tied to the perception of being below the fray. Many adopt the belief that just being black is a risk. This is the biggest problem.
In my own body of research, the results reveal that self-concept is integral to navigating financial, educational, and medical obstacles for Black individuals. The outcomes for children whose parents operate out of the confidence of self-definition differ greatly from children whose parents appear to have bought into the “minority” social narratives. And similar to the gap between Black and White Bostonians, the differences between self-defined Blacks break down comparably along academic, emotional management, and even, eventual employment lines.
Speaking of employment. Employment is not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but it is often a vehicle for tracking stability and flexibility that opens up options. This is likely why Brook Thomson, President and CEO of Associated Industries of Massachusetts, has incorporated HR solution practices in the core of her company. She states, “Your employees are your infrastructure. Their ability to come to work, to show up, to be productive…is the infrastructure of your business.” At the heart of showing up is removing anything that prevents mastery of a sense of self. Seeing Blackness as a risk handicaps that ability.
With a sense of self (and the removal of those things that interrupt it), Blacks, themselves, can design solutions for the problems of wealth, health, and longevity that currently plague Black life. Even when there are external challenges that appear seemingly unrelenting, self-determination and concept would disrupt the imposition of things like zip code, bank account balance, or physical appearance that try to dictate life outcomes. Maneuvering barriers would become a matter of course (much like surviving enslavement and the subsequent inconveniences), not a mission impossible.
When Josiah Henson escaped enslavement, he was welcomed and celebrated at the Canadian border. But instead of settling into a good life with fancy trinkets as any battleworn soldier would, he risked it all again and again to go back and liberate others. In his own words, he used his freedom well.
In this current social climate, mastering self-concept is the prescription for improving Black health, wealth, and happiness. It is the real key to longevity because, as I like to say, a life worth healing is only so if it is a life worth living. Investment in our truest self offers the biggest return on investment.