To be Black in America is to literally feel greater pain than non-Hispanic white people and Latinxs do — at least if the pain is being inflicted by a white man wearing a white coat, if it’s happening in a lab, if it follows years of racial discrimination, and if the findings of a sobering study reported on Monday are correct.

Despite the persistence of the slavery-era myth that African Americans are less sensitive to pain than people of other backgrounds (as a large fraction of white laypeople, medical students, and hospital residents in a 2016 study believed), the science is unambiguous. African Americans, and in some studies Latinxs, report more pain from the identical stimulus (being touched with something very hot, for instance) than non-Hispanic white people. Yet somewhat surprisingly, when it seems that every mental and emotional experience has been analyzed with brain imaging, the neurobiological mechanisms for that heightened pain sensitivity have been unclear.

Hoping to remedy that, neuroscientist Elizabeth Losin of the University of Miami set out to examine brain activity when people of different ethnic backgrounds experienced the identical pain-inducing stimulus. She persisted for eight years, through funding denials (the National Institutes of Health said she’d never be able to find enough Black participants), journal rejections (they worried that her study, like others involving race and biology, would spark controversy), and a 2,000-mile move (she started the research at the University of Colorado).