“On Sunday, April 22, The New York Times led its front page with a story revealing that infant death rates were rising in the South, particularly among African Americans. To sociologist David Williams, that was hardly news. Williams is one of the world’s leading scholars on racial disparities in health. Now the Norman Professor of Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health, he has wrestled intellectually and morally with such dismal statistics for more than a quarter century. Yet having authored scores of journal articles and book chapters, he’s still left with more questions than answers. … ‘Health disparities,’ as they are popularly termed — the gap in physical and mental well-being between the most privileged people in society and the most disadvantaged — launched the modern public health movement in the nineteenth century. Today in the United States, these gaps endure, especially along racial lines. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation report published in January, the infant mortality rate — one of the most sensitive indicators of population health — is more than twice as high among African Americans as among whites. Death from heart disease is highest among African Americans, as is mortality from breast, lung, and colorectal cancer. Even sudden infant death syndrome strikes black babies at higher rates than it does infants from any other groups.” (04/27/07)