There is abundant evidence of the continued existence of racial differences in health. Table 1 provides an example of the magnitude and trends of these inequities. It shows racial differences in life expectancy at birth for men and women from 1950 to the present. Gender is an important social status category and there is need for increased attention to how health is distributed by multiple social status categories simultaneously. The racial gap in health is large and persistent over time. White men and women outlived their black counterparts by 7.4 and 9.3 years, respectively in 1950. Although life expectancy has increased for all groups over the last half century, in 2006 white men still lived 6 years longer than African American men and white women had a 4 year advantage over their black peers. And as Du Bois (1899) noted over a century ago, the patterns are gendered. The racial gap in health is larger for men than for women and there have been larger reductions in the racial gap in life expectancy for women than for men over time,
