Black Wellness Barriers
Understanding the Root Cause of Disease Vulnerabilities as a Pathway Towards Restoring Health
Black Wellness Barriers moves beyond explanations that place the burden of chronic disease solely on individual choices. Dr. Houston brings medicine, history, culture, and human behavior into one conversation to reveal how historical and present-day conditions shape stress, biology, and disease vulnerability in Black communities.
As the foundational text in Dr. Houston's broader body of work, the book provides the intellectual grounding for the Racialized Hierarchy of Needs™—her signature visual and teaching framework for understanding how disrupted human conditions can shape survival adaptation, health, and the capacity to flourish.
Grounded in scholarship and written for broad accessibility, the book helps readers understand how economic conditions, environmental exposures, cultural disruption, healthcare inequities, and the cumulative effects of racialized stress can become embodied across lives and generations. It also turns toward restoration—inviting readers to consider the personal, communal, institutional, and policy-level changes required to support more complete wellness.
- Connect history, lived experience, and biology
- Examine the cumulative impact of racialized stress
- Challenge narratives of individual blame
- Explore practical and collective pathways toward restoration
