Legislating Inequity: Structural Racism In Groups Of State Laws And Associations With Premature Mortality Rates

Most evaluations of health equity policy have focused on the effects of individual laws. However, multiple laws’ combined effects better reflect the crosscutting nature of structurally racist legal regimes. To measure the combined effects of multiple laws, we used latent class analysis, a method for detecting unobserved “subgroups” in a population, to identify clusters of US states based on thirteen structural racism–related legal domains in 2013. We identified three classes of states: one with predominantly harmful laws (�=29), another with predominantly protective laws (�=15), and a third with a mix of both (�=7). Premature mortality rates overall—defined as deaths before age seventy-five per 100,000 population—were highest in states with predominantly harmful laws, which included eighteen states with...