Who Are We - Life Expectancy By Race

Life expectancy for whites and African Americans is shown in the graphic. The bars at the bottom show the difference between whites and blacks. In 1997, the last year for these series, whites had a life expectancy 6 years more than blacks. In 1900 the difference was 14.6 years. There are some points to be made before we attempt to report the explanation for these persistent differences between white-black life expectancy at birth.

Note that the curves for both populations have very similar overall patterns. Life expectancy rises and falls more or less in parallel. The impact of the 1918 flu epidemic has the same shape. Life expectancy for both groups rises over time. The gap between whites and African Americans narrows until about 1954. Thereafter it remains essentially flat, rising in the Vietnam years, dropping in the middle-1980s, then rising again to the levels of the 1950s.

Why is there a persistent gap between the life expectancies of these two groups? At a technical level, it is due to higher black age-specific mortality rates; these underlie life expectancy calculations. As mentioned in the first panel on this subject, life expectancy mirrors the death rate. Blacks have a higher mortality rate in every age category except the oldest, those 85 years old or older. This is shown on the next page for 1998.

Ratio: Black Death Rate to White Death Rate, 1998

The graph shows, for example, that African American male children less than 1 year old have a death rate 2.5 times the rate for whites of the same age. Females have just a slightly lower multiple of the white rate. Women in the prime child-bearing age of 25 to 34 have twice the death rate of white women in the same age group.

African Americans have a much higher rate of infant mortality. In 1998, for every white child who died before age 1 (in a group of 1,000 live births), 2.4 black infants died. Blacks have a much higher maternal death rate. In 1997, for every white woman who died in childbirth (in a group of 100,000 live births), 3.6 black women died. Please note here that early deaths have a disproportionate impact on life expectancy calculations.

African Americans experience more accidents and violence, as the following table shows:

Death Rates per 100,000 Population in 1998

Cause of Death	White Male	Black Male	White Female	Black Female
Motor vehicle accident	21.9	22.2	10.7	9.4
All other accidents	26.0	29.3	15.5	12.8
Suicide	20.3	10.2	4.8	1.8
Homicide	6.1	42.1	2.2	8.6

Bold items indicate categories in which African Americans have lower death rates than whites; they are less prone to commit suicide, and fewer black women die in auto accidents.

The African American population had a median household income, in 1999, of $27,910 — versus a median household income for whites of $42,504. The blacks' income was 65.7% that of whites. These are average incomes. Many, many households earned much less. The black population, on average, is poorer. The income differential is the most obvious overall explanation for the gap in life expectancy — because it translates into less disposable income available for the more expensive medical, nutritional, care-providing, and educational services that produce health, safety, and well being for the larger population of the U.S. It should be noted that per capita income differentials are smaller.

Source: Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. National Center for Health Statistics. National Vital Statistics Reports. Vol. 47. No. 28. December 13, 1999. Online. 2002. Available: www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr47/nvs47_28.pdf. Death rates due to accidents and violence are also from NCHS but were obtained from Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2001, Table 113, p. 86.