"The United States has the most advanced medical technology in the world and spends more on health care than any other country, yet the health outcomes of Black Americans are by several measures on par with those of people living in far poorer nations. In Under the Skin, award-winning journalist Linda Villarosa explains how racism--not race--drives these numbers. She draws on the gripping human stories and meticulous research that are her hallmark as a writer to create a portrait of Black American lives shaped by inequality. Villarosa begins in Montgomery, Alabama, where she meets the Relf sisters, Mary Alice and Minnie Lee, sterilized against their will as children in the 1970s. In New Orleans, she is at the bedside of Simone Landrum as the young woman gives birth just a year after losing her stillborn daughter to medical neglect. She describes Danielle Bailey's struggle with brain cancer, the legacy of the North Carolina lake she swam in as a child, unaware it was poisoned by coal ash. And she grieves with the family of Mark McMullen, whose life ended when his untreated mental illness was met with police violence in Boston. She connects these lives shaped by illness and suffering to a range of factors: medical ignorance and discrimination, environmental racism adn government neglect. She describes the breakthrough work of Dr. Arline Geronimus, whose theory of weathering explains how coping with racism ages Black people prematurely. And as Villarosa's understanding of racial disparities grows, so does her recognition of the role racism has played in her own family history." --Provided by publisher.