The experience that inspired Arline Geronimus’s life’s work and altered the way many Americans think about health, opportunity, race, right and wrong occurred when she was young.

A teenager.

This was long before she was the author of “Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society,” a penetrating study of the ways structural racism and other persistent inequalities shatter people’s health and lives. It also was well before she became a respected public health professor at the University of Michigan.

It was in the 1970s, when she was a young student at Princeton University. She had two part-time jobs.

One had her working at a school for pregnant teenagers, most of whom were Black and poor.

“They were my age,” Geronimus tells me over the phone. “I started college when I was 17.”

The juxtaposition of seeing the pregnant Black teens at work and her healthy, privileged classmates at Princeton lived made her curious. A child of working-class parents who pushed herself to get into Princeton, she had not been exposed to the extremities of American society before.

“To me, the way that internal dissonance played out was that I had no idea just how inequitable life in our country was,” she says.

Geronimus and I are talking because she will be coming to Indianapolis on Oct. 17 for a community conversation convened by Women on a Mission that I will moderate. You can register to attend here: A Conversation with “Weathering” Author Dr. Arline T. Geronimus Tickets, Tue, Oct 17, 2023 at 7:00 PM | Eventbrite.

Her epiphany about inequity expanded because of her second part-time job. She also worked for a Princeton professor who researched teen pregnancy.

“I don’t want to speak ill of him,” Geronimus says. “He was a nice man and good to me, but for him being a teen mother was just an academic experience.”

Her work with the pregnant Black teens taught her that the lived experience was more complex than the prevailing thought suggested.

“It was part of a social and intellectual construct that makes no sense,” she says.

When she realized that, she started on a quest “to put all the pieces together.” Originally, she planned to become a civil rights lawyer, but her focus shifted to public health.

It was when she was in graduate school at Harvard that the pieces began to come together.

The data she studied showed how the ongoing stresses of coping with racism and other forms of discrimination eroded the health of people who belonged to marginalized groups.

She used a word—“weathering”—to describe the corrosive effect dealing with these burdens had on human beings. She chose that word with care. She wrote in her book that she settled upon it because it has “opposite meanings”—in that it can describe being beaten down or of enduring and soldiering on.

When Geronimus began to publish her findings 30 years ago, she was pilloried. The reaction was visceral, even though the numbers she assembled were irrefutable.

“No one ever engaged with the data because there really was no way to refute the data,” she says. “Instead, they tried to pick apart the methods or anything else they could think of.”

I ask why the opposition to her findings was so intense.

“We all want to think our success is deserved,” she says, measuring her words. “It is difficult to acknowledge that at least some of it might be a product of privilege.”

The angry reception to her research three decades ago made her hesitant to publish her book earlier this year. She was afraid she would encounter the same anger, but felt, particularly with the tremendous inequities in health outcomes the pandemic produced, she had a duty to present the facts.

The book has received a far friendlier reception than its author did all those years ago.

“We know much more about structural racism now and are more comfortable talking about inequities than we were,” she says.

When Geronimus worked as a college student with those pregnant Black teenagers all those years ago, that was not the case.

“We did not talk about how we could achieve equity when I was in college,” Arline Geronimus says. “Equity wasn’t even a word we used back then.”

Now, her book makes clear, it is not only a word we use, but a moral challenge we must meet.