In This Issue

uses mortality statistics to shed light on two important topics: racial disparities in the United States and this country's comparatively poor performance on various measures of mortality. These two themes are brought together in an unusual and rich analysis in "Mortality of White Americans, African Americans, and Canadians: The Causes and Consequences for Health of Welfare State Institutions and Policies," by Stephen Kunitz (with Irena Pesis-Katz). Their article presents two arguments. The first concerns the interactions among race, public policy, and disparities in the health status of white and black Americans. Kunitz describes how the legacy of slavery affected welfare state policies in the United States. The lengthy disenfranchisement of African-American citizens in the post-Civil War South and the long-lasting influence of conservative, white Southern congressional committee chairmen led to social welfare legislation that disadvantaged African Americans. For example, in the original Social Security Act of 1935, agricultural laborers and domestic servants-the only two occupations in which African Americans predominated in the South-were excluded from the Old Age Insurance program.