Under the Skin

From an award-winning writer at The New York Times Magazine comes a landmark book that tells the full story of racial health disparities in America, revealing the toll that racism takes on individuals and the health of the nation.

In 2018, Linda Villarosa's New York Times Magazine article on maternal and infant mortality among Black mothers and babies in America caused an awakening. Hundreds of studies had previously established a link between racial discrimination and the health of Black Americans, with little progress toward solutions. But Villarosa's article exposing that a Black woman with a college education is as likely to die or nearly die in childbirth as a white woman with an eighth-grade education made racial disparities in health care impossible to ignore.

Now, in Under the Skin, Linda Villarosa lays bare the forces in the American health-care system and in American society that cause Black people to 'live sicker and die quicker' compared to their white counterparts. Today's medical texts and instruments still carry fallacious slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies. Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment and outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism and neglect from all levels of government. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes the new understanding that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely.

Anchored by unforgettable human stories and offering incontrovertible proof, Under the Skin is dramatic, tragic, and necessary reading.

'Villarosa's empathic and sharp-sighted journalism is as astute as it is groundbreaking, as brilliant as it is timely. Let the conversations begin!'
-Jacqueline Woodson, New York Times bestselling author of Red at the Bone

'Linda Villarosa, one of our fiercest and most cutting-edge journalists, has given us a classic for the ages. Through engrossing stories of people's real experiences and her signature rigorous reporting, she reveals the biggest picture in American life - that racism has done us all in, and produced a nation so steeped in white supremacy mythology that we cannot take care of ourselves or each other. This book is a gift, a map and a necessity, relevant for every reader who wants to understand their own time.'
-Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show

'In Under the Skin, Linda Villarosa has written a book that will transform how you understand the relationship between race and medicine, one that makes clear the connection between our history and our health. This is a book filled with indispensable research, but also filled with humanity. Villarosa tells us important stories, and also becomes part of the story herself. I'm so glad this book exists, I will be thinking about it for a long time.'
-Clint Smith, New York Times bestselling author of How the Word Is Passed