Structural Racism, Discrimination and Epigenetics: How Social Inequality May Become Biologically Embedded

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between structural racialisation, discrimination, social inequality, and epigenetic processes, with particular attention to the concept of biological embedding. Rather than conceptualising race as a biological characteristic, the analysis treats racialisation as a socially constructed process through which historical, institutional, economic, and environmental conditions can generate unequal exposures across populations. Social epigenetics provides a potential framework for understanding how socioeconomic disadvantage, neighbourhood conditions, environmental hazards, unequal healthcare access, racialised discrimination, and chronic psychosocial stress may influence physiological regulation, including DNA methylation and measures of epigenetic ageing. The available evidence suggests associations between adverse social conditions and epigenetic measures of biological ageing, although findings vary across populations, exposures, methodologies, and epigenetic clocks. Consequently, epigenetic differences observed between racialised populations should not be interpreted as evidence of inherent biological differences; rather, they may reflect differential exposure to socially structured environments. This perspective shifts the analytical focus from presumed biological differences between populations towards the processes through which racialised social environments create unequal biological exposures and potentially divergent health trajectories. Particular caution is required regarding intergenerational and transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. Although historical racialisation, enslavement, colonialism, socioeconomic inequality, and other forms of adversity can produce consequences extending across generations, current human evidence does not justify assuming that such effects are routinely transmitted through inherited epigenetic modifications. Intergenerational persistence can instead occur through family relationships, socioeconomic resources, neighbourhood environments, cultural memory, institutional arrangements, continuing discrimination, and renewed exposure to adversity in each generation. Epigenetic processes may contribute to these pathways but should not be presumed to constitute their principal mechanism. This article therefore advances a non-deterministic interpretation of social epigenetics: social inequality can become biologically embedded without becoming biologically predetermined. This framework has important implications for research and policy because it locates potential biological inequalities not in racialised populations themselves, but in the unequal social, economic, institutional, and environmental conditions to which populations are differentially exposed.