A basic demographic fact about the United States is that, on average, White people live longer than Black people. But what, concretely, does this fact mean? Drawing from a diverse set of social science, health, and literary sources, this talk argues that social science research has three families of strategy for making sense of the size of mortality disparities — distribution-based, action-based, and meaning-based measures — and provides new empirical results in each vein that collectively aim to put demographic measurement onto a more human footing.