Embedded racism: Inequitable niche construction as a neglected evolutionary process affecting health

Area of Science:

• Evolutionary Medicine
• Social Epidemiology
• Public Health

Background:

• Racial health disparities are a significant public health crisis.
• Structural racism's impact on health is increasingly recognized.
• Evolutionary medicine has historically overlooked the social construction of race in health outcomes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present an alternative biological framework for understanding racialized health disparities.
• To explore niche construction theory as a lens for analyzing racism's biological and behavioral impacts.
• To demonstrate how ecological models can explain health harms stemming from racial discrimination.

Main Methods:

• Integrating niche construction theory with human evolutionary and social history.
• Analyzing phenotype-genotype modifications influenced by racism.
• Applying ecological models of niche exclusion and exploitation to racialized health.

Main Results:

• Racism functions as an evolutionary mismatch, driving inequitable disease disparities.
• Discriminatory processes, embedded in social constructs of race, lead to health harms.
• Socially defined race is poorly understood in relation to evolutionarily relevant disease and life-history processes.

Conclusions:

• Scholars must recognize racism as a pathogenic process affecting health outcomes.
• There is a critical need to address the neglect of racism in evolutionary and biomedical research.
• An evolutionary-ecological framework offers insights into the biological embedding of social biases causing disparate health.