Ike Turner Jr., the son of Ike Turner, the music producer and executive whose definitive public image is likely owed to the star performance of Lawrence Fishburne in the seminal biopic turned Oscar darling What’s Love Got To Do With It? died on Oct 5, at the age of 67 after succumbing to kidney failure.
As TMZ reported, the news of Turner’s death was confirmed by the niece of music icon Tina Turner, Jacqueline Bullock, who told the outlet that Ike Turner Jr. had battled “severe heart issues for years” in addition to recovering from a stroke he suffered in September.
Although Turner was not Tina’s son, he did briefly work for her as a sound engineer
after she was able to escape her abusive marriage to his father, but over time, the two drifted apart. The younger Turner was the biological son of Ike Turner and Lorraine Taylor, and later won a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album in 2006 as a producer of his father’s album Risin’ With the Blues.According to Cleveland.com, Bullock noted in a statement announcing Turner’s death that she regarded him as more of a brother than a cousin. “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of my cousin, Ike Turner Jr. ‘Junior’ was more than a cousin to me, but rather a brother, as we grew up in the same famed household together.”
According to the National Kidney Foundation, Black Americans are more than 3 times as likely to have kidney failure compared to white Americans due to the prevalence of economic, structural, and social determinants of health that have disproportionately impacted Black Americans.
As they note, the way in which kidney disease was traditionally diagnosed also served to help underestimate the severity of the disease among Black populations, which in turn, delayed important interventions to help preserve kidney function.
As BLACK ENTERPRISE previously reported, in
2024, when a racially biased test and healthcare algorithms were adjusted, 14,000 Black people on the national kidney transplant list were moved up in an effort to help compensate for the systemic disparities.According to J. Kevin Tucker, MD, like Sickle Cell Disease, the APOL1 risk alleles that often predict a person’s susceptibility to kidney failure were initially developed to protect people of African descent from other diseases. In this case, it was a particular parasite that causes African sleeping sickness, in much the same way that mosquitoes are known carriers of malaria, which sickle shaped red blood cells evolved to combat.
However, he also
noted that, “While we now understand more about the genetics and biology of kidney disease in African Americans, they play a relatively minor role in their excess risk. Social determinants of health, race, and racism are equally — if not more — important in explaining the excess risk of kidney disease in African Americans relative to white Americans.”RELATED CONTENT: Black People With Kidney Issues Face Barriers, Will Eliminating An Allegedly Racially-Biased Test Help?