How epigenetic inheritance fails to explain the Black-White health gap

Evan Charney, William Darity and Lucas Hubbard

Social Science & Medicine, 2025, vol. 366, issue C

Abstract: Slavery, legal segregation, and ongoing discrimination have exacted an unfathomable toll on the black population in the United States, particularly with respect to the impact on health outcomes. In recent years, various researchers and activists have suggested that racial disparities in the modern era can be attributed directly to the trauma of slavery, postulating that these unspeakable traumas led to epigenetic changes in slaves—changes that have since been passed down to subsequent generations. Investigating those claims in this paper, we comprise a review of previous literature that considers the potential for transgenerational epigenetic transmission of trauma in humans. However, we find that there is little evidence to indicate the presence of transgenerational epigenetic transmission of trauma in humans. We find no prior evidence that supports (or is relevant to) the notion that the black-white health gap stems from the inherited trauma of slavery. We conclude that, given the ongoing traumas black Americans are exposed to in modern America, it is much more likely that present-day racial health disparities are due to more direct and current mechanisms than transgenerational transmission of slavery-era trauma.

Keywords: Epigenetics; Trauma; Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance; Slavery; Racial health disparities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.117697

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