Linda Villarosa has spent nearly four decades illuminating how racism harms the health of Black Americans. As a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and author of the Pulitzer Prize-finalist book “Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation,” she has transformed how Americans understand racial health disparities.
Beginning in the 1980s as health editor at Essence Magazine, Villarosa initially attributed Black health problems to poverty and individual behavior. A pivotal conversation with Dr. Harold Freeman changed her perspective when he showed that Black men in Harlem lived shorter lives than men in impoverished Bangladesh—regardless of economic status. This revelation pushed her to investigate deeper structural causes.
Her groundbreaking 2018 Times Magazine cover story on maternal mortality revealed that college-educated Black women face similar childbirth death risks as white women with eighth-grade educations, awakening the nation to how discrimination literally wears down Black bodies through a process called “weathering.” She has also exposed medical myths dating to slavery, environmental racism in communities near pollution sources, and the COVID-19 pandemic’s disproportionate toll on Black Americans.
As a professor at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, Villarosa trains the next generation of health journalists to report honestly about systemic racism’s health impacts. Her work consistently combines rigorous data analysis with compelling human stories, making invisible disparities impossible to ignore and pushing for systemic solutions beyond individual behavior change.
Additional Resources:
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/06/14/1103935147/linda-villarosa-under-the-skin-racism-healthcare (NPR interview)
https://www.journalism.cuny.edu/faculty/linda-villarosa/ (Faculty profile with article links)
https://www.pbs.org/video/linda-villarosa-yo9p0k/ (PBS “Tell Me More” video interview)
