NIH gives $3.7M to Rutgers and Michigan State to explore effects of 'structural racism' on aging

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded nearly $4 million to two public universities to explore the effects of “structural racism” on cognitive aging. 

Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing and Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey both received a $3.7 million, five-year grant from the NIH’s National Institute of Aging. Rutgers Associate Professor Danielle Beatty Moody and MSU Assistant Professor Richard Sadler will lead the team of researchers. 

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“The researchers said this examination is essential for developing appropriate strategies to address racial inequities in accelerated aging, particularly in communities where Black Americans live and desire to age in place,” a Sept. 20 press release from the Rutgers School of Social Work states.

“Beatty Moody and Sadler shared that lifetime exposure to historical, enduring, and contemporary structural racism in one’s neighborhood across the life course promotes greater cognitive and functional declines and increased frailty among adults, particularly for Black Americans,” the statement continues.

In the press release, both Moody and Sadler indicate that “collectively, our work seeks to call out and disentangle the vast array of tools used to entrench structural racism in the neighborhood environment – past, present, and future.” They suggest that, “[o]ne drum we have been beating is that ‘it’s not just redlining and it’s not just segregation.’”

Sadler and Beatty Moody will study 800 black and white men and women who were born and live in Baltimore, and are between the ages of 30-64. 

Baltimore, which has a black majority population, was selected as the location in order to help researchers consider the “study of cumulative lifetime exposure to historical, enduring, and contemporary markers of structural racism.” The city is also home to the “longest history of legalized BSE-based [built and social environment] structural racism,” according to the project’s researchers.

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In addition to teaching a course on “Diversity & Oppression,” Beatty Moody serves as the Rutgers “Chancellor’s Scholar for Inclusive Excellence in Multilevel Racism and Life Span Health and Aging.” Beatty Moody’s university biography states that the “ultimate objective of her work is to inform, promote, and collaborate on multilevel interventions and policy transformation to mitigate entrenched social and health ills in marginalized communities.”

Similarly, Sadler’s work involves the “recognition of historical processes of discrimination which have exacerbated spatial and health inequalities,” according to his university biography.

Campus Reform has reached out to Danielle Beatty Moody and Richard Sadler for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.