In England, life expectancy at birth for men living in the most deprived areas is 74.1 years, compared with 83.5 years for men in the least deprived (a difference of 9.4 years). For women, the difference is slightly smaller, at 7.7 years
Between 2014 and 2016, men from the most-deprived tenth of areas in England were expected to live almost 19 fewer years in good health than people from the least-deprived tenth of areas.
Whats worse is none of this takes account of the last 3 years. The problem has been made significantly worse by the effects of the pandemic - both direct and indirect.
If you are non-White you are more likely to be poorer in the uk. That's an issue in its own right because of the knock on effects.
But if you are white and very poor your prospects aren't great either.
Certainly in the uk, the issue is about inequality and poverty first. If you improved that, you should improve health across the board. The secondary issue is the point that poverty affects non-whites more. That may not be down to race alone though. It could be a pattern relating to immigration and not speaking English as a first language which limits educational and job opportunities throughout life. If the pattern continues in the children of immigrates who were born here and their children then its even more significant. What we actually see in the uk, is non-White children are starting to perform better than poor white boys. Which highlights something else entirely. There are definitely issues over black kids getting harsher punishments for the same things as white kids and the way they are treated by teachers and police, but that isn't necessarily the driver of life expectancy issues.
There certainly are racist barriers at play - it's indesputible that pregnant black women are treated in a far worse manner than white women. Stereotypes are at play.
And we know that stuff like research is all heavily tilted because its most relevant to white males - cos that's the research template. We know that genetics come into play here - covid showed this up. It also showed up occupational differences where working class jobs were more likely to be amongst non-Whites (again relating to economics). However it also showed the areas of health that non-White doctors specialised were the riskier / less high status professional roles.
The whole thing does need to be properly unpicked and separated into socio-economic issues and racist issues because the danger is, if you only see the racism and not the socio-economic side of things you end up with a counter productive situation where there is a backlash and resentment from poor white backgrounds who have been overlooked. That doesn't help solve racism. It just produces it as a byproduct.
You move forward by looking at the whole picture and no producing blind spots to disadvantage because you only look at it through the lens of race or whatever else it happens to be.
There is definitely a problem for young black men. In the US even more so.
I can't help but think that saying black rappers dying early shows all black men have a problem is actually racist in itself. It suggests that all black men are into rap culture and the associated gang culture. Which isn't true and is a pretty awful stereotype. It suggests that black rappers are fully representative of all black men. That's nonsense. It's reductive.
Strangely enough even in the US, if you look at middle class black men you see different lifestyle patterns.
You run the risk of straying into the bollocks of Rupa Huq saying Kwasi Kwantang is only superficially a black man if you use black rappers to suggest they are representative of all black men. It is all about how black men are massively stereotyped. No Kwantang is a black man who is super privileged, but he's still a black man.
Which brings us back to the issues around economics and how what you should be talking about is why non-White people are more likely to live in poverty and how do we address this, rather than criticising those who break the stereotypes for, well breaking the stereotypes. And pretending that stereotypes are not stereotypes and are fully representative, when they are not.
If you don't want to be racist, you properly unpick this and don't pull examples selectively out of your arse. You use proper data and proper research. Research like the stuff that shows that survival rates for major operations are poorer or that black women are more likely to have still births because of preconceptions about black women. Or that genetic differences matter because of things like the availability of donors in certain communities are much lower. Or how confidence in non white communities in things like vaccination is much lower (and what those reasons are and how they may have historical reasons such as racist medical experiments). Some of these things are racist. Some of them are circumstantial. Some of them are cultural. Some of them are connected to greater mistrust of authority which relates back to racism (indirect effect of racism but not due to a direct racist event. Even if you were to eliminate all racism tomorrow, you would still have a hangover from racism in the past due to mistrust.)
I really do wonder about people shouting racism when they are using black male rappers as their gotcha to prove the point. It's actually part of the problem. How do black men break out of that cultural box of stereotypes? If they do they risk being called a racial traitor in someway or not being somehow black enough. How does that actually help?
Use data. The data tells the story without the stereotypes. If there's missing data, ask why its missing.