A growing body of research considers racial residential segregation to be a form of systemic racism and a fundamental cause of persistent racial disparities in health and mortality. Historical research examining the impact of segregation on health and mortality, however, is limited to a few studies with poor data and inconsistent results. In this study, we examine the association between racial residential segregation and child mortality in the South at the turn of the 20th century. We rely on the new IPUMS 1900 and 1910 complete-count databases to estimate child mortality in the 5 years before each census and construct segregation measures at the census enumeration district (ED), the lowest level of geography consistently available in the census. We calculate the proportion of households headed by Black individuals in each ED, and the Sequence Index of Segregation (SIS), which is based on the racial sequencing of household heads within each district. We construct models of child mortality for rural and urban areas, controlling for a wide variety of demographic and socioeconomic variables. The results indicate that proportion Black and SIS were strongly and positively associated with the mortality of Black children in most models and in both rural and urban areas. Proportion Black was also positively but more moderately correlated with the mortality of White children, while SIS was not correlated or negatively correlated. These results suggest that racial segregation was a long-standing fundamental cause of race disparities in health and mortality in the United States.

中文翻译：

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20世纪初美国南部的种族居住隔离和儿童死亡率

越来越多的研究认为种族居住隔离是系统性种族主义的一种形式，也是健康和死亡率方面持续存在种族差异的根本原因。然而，历史上研究隔离对健康和死亡率影响的研究仅限于少数数据贫乏且结果不一致的研究。在这项研究中，我们研究了 20 世纪初南方的种族居住隔离与儿童死亡率之间的关系。我们依靠新的 IPUMS 1900 和 1910 全计数数据库来估计每次人口普查前 5 年内的儿童死亡率，并在人口普查查点区 (ED)（人口普查中始终可用的最低地理水平）制定隔离措施。我们计算了每个 ED 中以黑人为户主的家庭的比例，SIS），它基于每个地区户主的种族排序。我们构建了农村和城市地区的儿童死亡率模型，控制了各种人口和社会经济变量。结果表明，在大多数模型以及农村和城市地区，黑人和SIS的比例与黑人儿童的死亡率密切相关。黑人比例也与白人儿童的死亡率呈正相关，但呈中度相关，而SIS则不相关或呈负相关。这些结果表明，种族隔离是美国健康和死亡率种族差异的长期根本原因。