Illuminating the role of historical structural racism in the neighborhood exposome and modern-day child mental health

ABSTRACT Disadvantaged neighborhoods are important predictors of internalizing and externalizing behaviors (INT/EXT) in children, including depression, anxiety, ADHD, and conduct problems. Critically, however, neighborhoods are neither static nor unidimensional. Rather, they evolve and change over time, and may do so differentially across built, social, and toxicant domains. What’s more, although

neighborhoods are virtually always considered as endogenous variables, they are themslves active products of human investment and selection, among other forces. In an effort to address these complexities, researchers argue for the importance of quantifying the neighborhood ‘exposome’ across multiple sources and types of data (e.g., sensors, geographic information systems, remotely

sensed imagery, and conventional surveys), and to do so taking into account the emergent qualities of neighborhoods over time as well as their historical antecedents. With this call in mind, we hypothesize that historical structural racism (i.e., redlining, higway construction, blockbusting) has had cascading

effects on the neighborhood exposome which, in turn, influences modern-day child INT/EXT. To date, however, virtually no studies have examined the effects of historical structural racism on either the neighborhood exposome or on child INT/EXT. The proposed R01 aims to fill crucial gaps in our knowledge base, augmenting two well-characterized and independent datasets with state-of-the-

science geospatial data collections and analytic techniques to evaluate i) historical structural racism’s legacy for neighborhood trajectories over time, ii) the role of historical structural racism in modern-day child INT/EXT, with a focus on children of color, and iii) the linkages between historical structural

racism, the neighborhood exposome, and child INT/EXT. Our first sample consists of ~3800 children identifying as Black or multiracial and residing in (sub)urban areas across Michigan, as well as roughly 10,000 additional children residing in rural areas and/or identifying as White. Our second sample consists of ~1,000 intensively assessed child families that were specifically oversampled to

reside in economically disadvantaged neighborhood contexts. As part of the proposed grant, we will collect geospatial assessments of historical structural racism (1930-1980) and the neighborhood exposome (2000-2020) in Michigan, and link these data to existing child INT/EXT data in our two datasets. The core question we will answer is: What are the modern-day consequences of

historical structural racism for neighborhoods and their youngest residents?