Giving Compass' Take:

• The disparity between white and black adults has not gone away completely, there are still nuances in the data that illuminate the disparities but only when specifically comparing white and black adults of the same sex and age. 

• What are some potential factors or reasoning behind these disparities?

• Read about how black mothers are also significantly more likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes than white mothers. 

A just-released report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows some good news: black death rates and white death rates decreased overall from 1999 to 2015. Furthermore, the main figure suggests that for people ages 65 and older, the historical black-white disparity in death rates has disappeared.

But the real story on mortality trends, including disparities by race, is much more nuanced. As we show below, what appears to be little or no difference in black-white mortality for people ages 65 and older in 2015 is actually three differences that are not apparent when looking at the larger picture.

  1. When comparing people of the same sex and age, blacks continue to have higher death rates than whites.
  2. Among adults ages 65 and older, the average age of blacks is lower than the average age of whites (meaning within this age group, blacks are younger than whites).
  3. More black people ages 65 and older are women, compared with whites in this age group.

By 2015, the death rate of blacks ages 65 and older was no longer higher than the death rate of whites in the same age group and even appear to be a bit lower. But these results combine the death rates of all people ages 65 and older and of men and women.

When we look at death rates separately by exact age and by sex, black-white differences in mortality are again apparent. At almost every age, black women still have a higher death rate than white women, and black men have a higher death rate than white men.

When comparing people of the same sex and age, blacks continue to have higher death rates than whites. The CDC report contains much to celebrate, but we should not overstate the progress in reducing disparities by race. We still have a long way to go.

Read the full article about death rates for African-American adults by Steve Martin and Laudan Y. Aron at The Urban Institute.