A basic demographic fact about the United States is that, on average, White people live longer than Black people. But what, concretely, does this fact mean? Drawing from a diverse set of social science, health, and literary sources, this talk argues that research has three families of strategy for making sense of the size of mortality disparities — distribution-based, action-based, and meaning-based measures — and provides new empirical results in each vein that collectively aim to put demographic measurement onto a more human footing. Implications for thinking about redress for racial harms will be discussed.
Learning Objectives: After this webinar, attendees will be able to:
- Summarize the size of Black/White mortality and lifespan disparities in the United States.
- Critically analyze the meanings of those disparities.
- Think creatively about what kinds of measurements can capture the real, human meaning of a life lost too early.
Resources:
- Wrigley-Field, E. (2025). Three ways of looking at Black–White mortality differences in the United States. Annual Review of Sociology, 51, 311–333.
- Wrigley-Field, E. (2024). Stolen lives: Redress for slavery's and Jim Crow's ongoing theft of lifespan. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 10(2), 88–112.
This is an event of the Office of Academic Clinical Affairs (OACA), hosted by the Center for Bioethics, and co-sponsored by the following U of MN Units: Business Advancement Center for Health (BACH), Minnesota Carlson; Center for the Study of Political Psychology, College of Liberal Arts; Community-University Health Care Center (CUHCC); Department of Sociology, College of Liberal Arts; Human Rights Center, University of Minnesota Law School; Medical School; Minnesota Population Center; Program in Health Disparities Research, Medical School; Rural Health Research Center; School of Dentistry; School of Nursing; School of Public Health.
Speaker(s)
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, PhD, is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota. A sociologist and demographer, she studies racial inequality in mortality in the historical and contemporary United States, and specializes in finding comparisons and metrics that illuminate the human meaning of mortality disparities. She has extensively researched the COVID-19 pandemic in Minnesota, where she also co-founded an award-winning community vaccination organization (the Seward Vaccine Equity Project). She is also a demographic methodologist, developing models designed to clarify relationships between micro and macro perspectives on population processes. She was until recently the Associate Director of the Minnesota Population Center and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.