ABSTRACT
Black men are simultaneously one of the most invisible groups in the United States and one of the most vulnerable in regard to social, economic, and health outcomes (Brown, Hargrove, & Griffith, 2015; Chetty et al., 2018; Thorpe & Halkitis, 2016). Black men bear a disproportionate burden of overall mortality and morbidity in the United States. There are myriad social and economic factors, including but not limited to deindustrialization, mass incarceration, and access to healthcare, that explain the high burden of ill health that Black men carry. Further, data indicate that disparities in intergenerational poverty are largely explained by the large number of Black men who wind up in poverty, as Black men are more likely to have low-income status as adults than Black women as well as White women (Chetty et al., 2018; Winship, Reeves, & Guyot, 2018). The human and economic toll of the disparities Black men disproportionately bear is substantial, as Thorpe, Richard, Bowie, LaVeist, and Gaskin (2013) estimate direct medical care expenditures for African American men to be $447.6 billion of which $24.2 billion is for excess medical care expenditures. However, the health inequities that Black men disproportionately experience are not immutable, biological factors that are ingrained into their genetic code (Braveman, 2006). Rather, health inequalities are largely products of social and economic factors (Braveman, Egerter, & Williams, 2011; Link, Phelan, Miech, & Westin, 2008; Williams, Costa, Odunlami, & Mohammed, 2008).
