Arline Geronimus was once called the biggest threat to youth in the US. But her theory of how injustice affects our health is more influential than ever
When Arline Geronimus arrived at Princeton University in the late 1970s to study politics, she entered a world of entitlement and privilege that she never knew existed. The college was “marinaded in testosterone, and upper-class generational Wasp wealth”, she says from her office at the University of Michigan, where she is a professor of health behaviour and education. At Princeton, she was a double minority, a woman and a Jew. Women had only just been allowed and there were complaints about a quota of Jews each year (something Princeton denied). That didn’t apply to Geronimus, she tells me with a laugh, because she wasn’t “the good kind” of Jew – the “good kind” being German or western European, not from eastern Europe or Russia like her.
Her profound sense of being othered at Princeton oriented her towards seeing something that others didn’t see – how people’s experiences of marginalisation affect their health. “I was born about 10 years after world war two,” she says. “The Holocaust was very much in Jewish people’s minds … my parents and grandparents had suffered incredible oppression in Russia and had to become political refugees. I heard horror stories from them about what they went through to establish a life.”
