Nature readers last summer (Photo by Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images)
In Joe Biden’s first speech following his election victory, the future President assumed the role of the nation’s doctor. Pledging to “heal America”, he promised to “marshal the forces of science and the forces of hope” to combat two viruses. The first, of course, was Covid, which has killed more than 560,000 Americans and left many more unemployed and impoverished. The second, which arose almost in tandem, is equally pernicious, if not quite so deadly: the “racism virus”.
The outbreak of this second virus was confirmed earlier this month by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention, which issued a statement declaring racism an “epidemic” that posed a “serious public health threat”. Citing a “growing body of research”, the CDC director called on her agency — and America at large — to “confront the impact of racism”.
This is, on the face of it, a peculiar focus for America’s leading public health agency; one might think it would be preoccupied with the other pandemic ravaging the country. And yet the CDC’s statement was all too typical of today’s medical establishment. The American Psychological Association recently announced that America was “living in a racism pandemic”; the American Medical Association has called racism an “urgent public health threat”; and The Lancet has declared it a “public health crisis we can no longer ignore”.
It is easy to dismiss such rhetoric as “woke” nonsense, typical of “progressive” America’s obsession with race. But there is something striking — and troubling — about the way in which racism has evolved from a social problem into a medical one. For it is not simply a case of well-meaning medical practitioners parroting the language of social justice to “assuage their liberal guilt”, as a former member of President Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board put it. From a public health perspective, it has potentially fatal ramifications.
Take, for example, the “anti-racist agenda for medicine” recently published in The Boston Review by two Harvard doctors. In it, the pair argue that, because colour-blind solutions have failed to achieve racial equity in health care, they have had to introduce “race-explicit interventions” in their Boston hospital. These have culminated in a pilot programme of preferential care for black and “Latinx” heart failure patients, due to launch this spring; instead of triaging their patients according to the seriousness of their condition, race has become a mitigating — and deciding — factor.
In effect, it will mean that a black person with a less serious condition could be prioritised over a white patient on account of their skin colour. “Building on calls for reparations,” the two doctors explain, “we call this a vision for medical restitution.” Here, writ large at the heart of the medical establishment, was Critical Race Theory — the idea that the US is a fundamentally racist country and that race is a social construction designed to oppress and exploit people of colour.
In many ways, it was only a matter of time. As far back as 2010, the American Journal of Public Health published an article titled “Critical Race Theory, Race Equity, and Public Health: Toward Antiracism Praxis”, in which two Professors of Public Health argued that only a “race-conscious” approach to healthcare would be able to combat racial inequities. Based on “race equity and social justice principles”, they encouraged the development of solutions that “bridged gaps” in health, housing and employment.
In the years since, this medicalisation of Critical Race Theory remained purely academic, largely confined to Professors looking to rack up a few journal citations and bask in the warm glow of approval from fellow Left-wing academics. But after the death of George Floyd, that changed overnight.
As Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the country, politicians began likening the scourge of racism to a health emergency, calling it a “pandemic on a pandemic”. The mood was captured by Austin’s mayor, who cried out: “Racism is literally killing black and brown people. It’s a public health crisis, and it’s beyond time to treat it as such”.
Public health officials agreed. “While everyone is concerned about the risk of Covid,” said one infectious disease expert, “there are risks with just being black in this country that almost outweigh that sometimes”. Meanwhile Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to the President who had previously denounced anti-lockdown protests, was decidedly more equivocal about BLM: “It’s a delicate balance because the reasons for demonstrating are valid, but the demonstration puts one at additional risk.”
Soon after, America’s public health bodies began discussing racism in terms formerly only used to describe Covid-19. The American Medical Association, for example, recently announced that it wanted to increase funding into the “epidemiology of risks and damages related to racism”, while the CDC’s new Racism and Health Program seeks to “build a healthier America for all” by confronting racial and health disparities.
Yet the most striking feature of these statements is their similarity. Each one promises to “acknowledge” the damaging effects of structural and systemic racism and supports the “development” of policy to combat racism.
But what does this mean in practice? In New York, for instance, the City Department of Health, in an attempt to address low testing and high positivity rates among minority communities, launched a hyper-local testing programme. It proved a success and resulted in 8,730 tests across the two postcodes. So far, so sensible.
However, compare that to the approach of the Milwaukee Health Department, which, in order to “own the work of racism being a public health issue”, devised its own “health equity initiative”. Contained within a “three-step process”, it proposed the introduction of racial equity training, the development of “a racial equity framework” and the creation of safe spaces and a “welcoming, inclusive” organisation.
This latter approach is characteristic of Critical Race Theory, which disregards evidence-led specifics in favour of ideology-based generalities. But in the field of medicine, this is particularly dangerous. American medical insurance companies, for example, now attribute lower levels of depression among black people and Latinos to under-diagnosis, even though suicide rates among white people are three times higher. Yes, depression doesn’t always manifest itself through suicide, but it is strange, as Wesley Yang notes, that Blue Cross, which provides insurance to a third of Americans, “sees ‘not enough depressed black people’ as a problem that has to be fixed”.
Elsewhere, certain states are adopting race-prioritised vaccine rollouts — a move first mooted by the CDC last year. These states, including Vermont and Montana, claim that, even after controlling for income, underlying health conditions and other variables that potentially affect the disease, there is still a racial disparity.
Put to one side the disturbing historical parallels of dividing Americans by their skin colour — it is not even clear that this racialised approach to vaccines makes sense from a public health perspective. After all, there are a number of other issues — such as education, access and outreach — that are also hindering the vaccine rollout to non-white communities. Moreover, as one former Biden official warned, it could even have the opposite effect and deter uptake if minorities fear that they are being treated like “guinea pigs”.
In reality, all that has resulted from this policy is a racially distorted vaccine rollout that is likely to fuel resentment in an already divided country. Today’s doctors are, of course, doubtlessly well-intentioned in their attempts to cure America’s societal ills. But shifting attitudes on race is a long and difficult process — and not something that can be remedied with a three-step public health initiative.
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SubscribeChrist, I hadn’t realised that the descent into madness and hell was quite this far advanced.
It is probably now unstoppable without a violent reaction.
It’s bad here in the US. There’s definitely a 1930s Germany vibe going on. I’m seriously thinking about emigrating back to Europe before things get too crazy.
Just make sure you pick a nice, normal country. Those tend to be in a somewhat short supply these days – most are in the former eastern bloc where people developed a robust, long-lasting immunity against the socialist hogwash.
There you go – violence is justified, to prevent anyone different from you sharing rights that only you should have the power to bestow. Heil Jos!
When major political actors stop respecting long-established norms in their pursuit of unchallenged power, violence is virtually inevitable.
Long established “norms” that favor you, right? Hence they are “norms”? And still you have no shame about calling for violence? I am glad that your opinion is being exposed – by popular vote – to be on the minority side. And that the rule of law should deliver the proper answer to the violence you are calling for.
How on earth did you reach this bizarre conclusion from my comment?! Norms are, of course, meant to bind both sides. And, obviously, that means accepting certain results that don’t favour you. The problem is that when one side stops obeying the rules, the other side will correctly understand that clinging to norms that its political adversaries have since abandoned is tantamount to accepting permanent defeat. The logical result is that they will also abandon all norms. Pointing out the inevitably of political violence, which is nearly assured when conflict cannot be resolved through consensual participation in a process controlled by mutually binding norms, is not a call for violence. Quite the opposite, really! Finally, there is no magic in invoking the ‘rule of law’
In what society is it usual to set fire to the Cenotaph? It is the norm in every society to honour the dead . The fact that our political class together with the police force are alright with this destruction shows the moral vacuum at the heart of their group.
My initial of what Jos Haynes is saying is more of a prediction of what may happen rather than offering a solution. His point seems to be that people will eventually be fed up if they perceive themselves – rightly or wrongly – as unfairly treated, and the article gives some reasons why this might be the case. Resentment is a powerfully motivating force. BLM might be seen as just this kind of response. But are they right in seeing blacks as really being unfairly persecuted by whites? Are whites legitimately fearful that they are being treated unfairly merely because they are white?
One can disagree with his prediction as being overly pessimistic, but I don’t see him justifying violence. The “Heil Jos” seems to me unwarranted and needlessly inflammatory.
Thank you for interpreting my comment correctly and rebutting Andre Lower.
You mistake my prediction for my predilection.
My predilection is that you would admit your error and delete your post. My prediction is that your comment will remain.
There is not one news program or headline that does not include a racism angle be it interior decoration, food or medicine. I find myself more conscious of every ism in the book and more and more reluctant to discuss anything with friends other than spring flowers. I am tiptoeing around people I heretofore jwith whom I just had normal relationships. Things are much worse than I remember them being with no end in sight. I am hopeful that rural areas in the states are listening to country and western music and going about their business in ignorance of the rest of the country. They should be glad they live in flyover country.
I was broadly aware of that, and I follow the US press and many of the popular US podcasters such as Tim Pool, Jimmy Dore, Shapiro, Dave Rubin, Gothix, Officer Tatum and others. But I hadn’t realised they had reached the point of actually triaging for race in hospitals. This is grotesque beyond all imagination.
Barrie Weiss on Substack has an interesting column today with a funny quote from James Carville of all people plus interviews with people about systemic racism.
The gov has now shut down indoor dining again because two people in their 80s with underlying conditions died – 9 more people were in the hospital since Monday but two less in ICU since Monday. Even though St Fauci has said we can be outside without masks, there are still more than a few who are walking alone in the fresh air with a double mask on.
Reading the second paragraph I had to check it wasn’t The Onion.
Strange how these supposedly intelligent medical professionals believe that prioritising treatment of group A over group B is going to reduce racism in group B. Essentially they’re saying the solution to racism is to be racist in the opposite direction. Still, what do I know, I’m just an ignorant white working class male…
Mike, I do not think the intelligent medial professionals do believe that. Some willingly, some unwillingly, they are involved in a political game in much the same way as the medical profession would have been in Communist or Fascist regimes.
sadly, you are correct, the nazis co-opted large numbers of the medical profession into their murderous behaviours
The flaw in this CRT, BLM etc is that the assumption that race and culture are equivalent. However, I do not assert an equality between cultures or that there exists a necessary connection between culture and race. E.g. The culture of the American Indian was brutal, primitive, cruel, and pagan. There was nothing about it to admire, and there was no way it could co-exist with Western culture once Europeans discovered the New World. Those who feign to admire the Indian culture today have constructed a mythical noble savage with which to beat the West. They would not have lived four hours next to an actual Sioux tribe in 1840. But none of that has anything to do with the DNA of the American Indian. They didn’t torture a man to death over five days and then ritualistically eat his heart because of genetics. The issue facing the West is therefore much more of a cultural problem than a racial problem.
It really is that simple, if you treat people differntly becuase of your own, current (or even worse) historical predudices you are part of the problem, not the solution.
Choosing to tailor health care based on ethnicity to counter a historic wrong simple creates a new wrong which will need to be countered in the future..
“It really is that simple, if you treat people differently because of your own, current (or even worse) historical predudices you are part of the problem, not the solution.”
Prejudice is not a ‘problem’, as there is no such thing (except in a technical sense e.g. a court that refuses to hear evidence before condemning a prisoner). – therefore there is no ‘solution’, nor any need for one. Given that we already have laws against physical attacks (whatever the cause), the presence of ‘racism’ in the mind is irrelevant. There is no way of distinguishing a ‘racial’ murder, in terms of outcome, from murder for any other reason. And for centuries the law in the UK ignored motive, as not legally significant in the context of the crime. The Law proscribed ‘actions’ not ‘attitudes’.
Very true – judging on color or other physical characteristics is not only wrong but creates a perverse incentive. It is funny to see prince harry or megan markel pretending to be black or elizabeth warren pretending to be Cherokee. However its not much fun for poor black folks in the democrat housing projects or poor indios on reservations who have real problems to deal with, most of which are rooted in color and race prejudice.
“Institutions should be colour blind and treat everyone equally.”
I would qualify this by saying ‘All state (governmental/legal) institutions should be neutral with regard to personal characteristics’.
However I think it is absolutely fine for private institutions to be as ‘racist’, ‘sexist’, ‘classist’, unwoke, anti/pro-this or that as they wish to be.
Don’t like it? Well, set up your own institution.
It may be immoral, but as long as they are consistent and transparent about their racial/sexual/etc preferences, this is fine. But too often these motives are hidden and used selectively. This way the customer can choose whether to support an organization on this basis.
Do you include doxing, cancelling or smearing pigs blood on someone’s door. All three are in the anti-racist playbook and will eventually be adopted by the racist and classist communities.
A good explanation of how the proto-fascists are taking over the Western world
Another little known fact is that the plains Indians were among the worst destroyers of the environment, burning huge swaths of prairie to herd the animals into killing zones.
But they weren’t all savages, and their savagery was not much worse than some that went on in Europe. I’ve seen the torture mechanisms in the Tower of London. Europeans were more technologically advanced, but maybe not so much morally. Recall that on their way to the Crusades, the first thing some groups did was torch a Jewish village, as practice I guess.
Montaigne made a not dissimilar point in his essay on the cannibals in which he denounced the massacres in the European religious wars as worse than what was said about New World natives.
Yet today burn managers light fires to maintain prairie health. In fact fires are a normal part of prairie life, same holds true for forests.
Who’s culture? We are continuously told that no culture is better than another; to say so is the ultimate “you are a racist” magnet. Yet if one stops to consider the advances wrought by Western Civilization and culture, it serves as an explanation for the desire of others from different cultures to seek “refuge” in the West. Of course, my caucasian intersectionality is showing in this instance as my contexts are purely Western. They have nothing to do with freedom of thought.
So, you claim the natives of the Americas were more cruel, brutal and primitive than the Western “civilized” imperialists? I suggest you open a history book and begin to read, and do so with comprehension. The audacity of someone to claim imperialist Western nations aren’t vile themselves is truly a spectacle to behold. Epic ignorance. And the founders of our so-called Western “civilization” were pedophiles who had no compunction about raping the slave children or students in their “care”. Start from there and work your way up to two world wars, wars all over the globe to “spread democracy” to all those other “primitive cultures” when we have never had democracy ourselves. Clearly 25 other people need to crack open a history book right along with you. Maybe read aloud and question one another afterward?
The natives of the US were HERE as it was THEIRS and they were murdered by Western “civilized” imperialists well into the 20th century with government sanction. Unbelievable.
Regarding your last comment – Who is they? Cherokee? Apache? Sioux? Which part is theirs? Was there a particular tribe that owned that particular bit of land for time immemorial? Is there some part of their DNA that means they are entitled to that bit of land? Did those tribes all originate from the borders of what we would call modern day America?
Or were there different tribes who came and took each other lands often in very primitive ways?
Should we root out all Britons with Norman blood (see the harrying of the north) or viking blood (slavery, rape and god knows what else) or even Roman blood until we just get back to the Celts (but were they the original Britons? And just what is Britain?). Do we get rid of all the Japanese out of Japan? Do we route all the Mongolian blood out of Eurasia? Should we get modern day Turkey to apologise for its atrocities in Europe?
The history of the world has been ugly for the vast vast majority of people, filled with invasion, rape, slaughter, slavery & starvation as a weapon. With fear of the “other” being common to virtually all cultures. Land passing back and forth between tribes/peoples (with very different backgrounds and cultures) has been the norm for virtually every continent. The Atlantic slave trade was small in comparison with the Arabic slave trade. Of course there was brutality by many of the settlers in the US but it also sadly true that life in modern America is still better for slaves descendants than it would be in modern day Africa. However there was also benefits from settlers too – real medicine, transport, farming techniques that stopped mass starvations and the abolition of slavery (of course took far too long in the US) – which was policed. We should not have a rose tinted view of western expansion but nor should we have a rose tinted view of life before western settlers – as you say open a history book to see the reality of native american life and the atrocities that were taking place. As it is important to dwell upon the horror stories of slavery and military expansion it is important to consider the benefits too. John Jacob introducing irrigation in modern day Pakistan (countless lives saved) or John Lawrence who abolished the practice of suttee in his province of India. We just hear more about the former than the latter – why?
You seem to dislike the West but there are other alternatives – maybe try Russia or China and their political freedoms or perhaps the Middle East for their views on women and homosexuals or maybe Africa for living standards? Why are so many people quite so keen to escape to this terrible “Western civilization”? Maybe the rule of law, democracy, freedom of speech and property rights aren’t just white constructions but universal building blocks to build successful societies – hence why other developed countries in the far east have copied them.
excellent comment
The European culture of the post Dark Age through to Post Medieval period was mostly brutal, primitive, cruel and Christian. Does the fact of not being pagan exhonorate it?
And here you prove yourself of the same level of bigotry. The Sioux were not the Navaho were not the Paiute were not the Iroquois were not …
Different nations. Different cultures. In fact, some ideas in our Constitution came from the Constitution of the Iroquois confederation. Jefferson thought highly of them. They were primitive in that they hadn’t made the technological advances that we had. So what? Yes, they were pagan. So what? That makes them neither better nor worse as a people.
A whole lot of different tribes fit in to an area of 3,119,884 square miles and that doesn’t count the nations above and below our current borders.
“ In effect, it will mean that a black person with a less serious condition could be prioritised over a white patient on account of their skin colour.”
I truly hope for litigations to be directed towards the doctors and the hospital for enacting a policy that contradicts basic medical ethics and puts patients at unnecessary risk.
“It is easy to dismiss such rhetoric as “woke” nonsense…”
Indeed.
Never mind woke nonsense, it’s racist nonsense. Making skin color a factor in triage? Never mind racist that is the full apartheid nine yards.
it is reverse racism and is coming more and more into practice
Closer to home we have the weasel word Islamophobia promulgated by the Runnymede Trust which seeks to ‘medicalise’ any criticism of Islam as an irrational fear.
Nothing irrational in fearing a supremacist theocratic ideology that makes some staggeringly big claims for itself and assumes a similarly epic level of entitlement including the right to butcher unbelievers.
BLM = racist ideology
This organisation has put back race relations 30+ years in this country but at least it has shown the labour party as the anti white racists that they are just look at David lammy, dawn butler, Diane abbot, Nadia whittome etc
Keir starmer taking the knee, defund the police you were the dpp!
Social media has exposed you as the race baiters you are
Here in the UK we have medics regularly providing commentary on the news – People are naturally predisposed to trust the word of a Doctor, yet too many use a white coat and stethoscope as a way to disguise, when opining on political matters, they are not an objective, medical observer, so much as a partisan activist with an agenda.
The BBC and Guardian newspaper regularly seek the opinions of Dr Richard Horton, the editor of the Lancet. Given his medical credentials and his editorship of the world’s foremost medical journal, it is safe to say that his scientific, medical opinion carries quite some weight with members of the public.
He has been scathing of the UK Tory Govt’s response to Covid, yet neither the BBC nor Guardian ever posit the question as to whether he is simply putting out his unvarnished, scientific, medical judgement, or – just maybe – if he is allowing his years of blatant antipathy towards the Tory party, and his years as a Labour party activist, to colour his opinions.
To read his pieces in the press and hear him interviewed, there is little doubt he is more activist than purely neutral medical expert.
For example: He claimed in a Guardian article that the Govt’s handling was a “ national scandal” ” We knew in the last week of January that this was coming – the message from China was absolutely clear that a new virus with pandemic potential was hitting cities.”
No mention, of course, that in late January – when supposedly the picture was “absolutely clear that a new virus with pandemic potential was hitting cities” Dr Horton was busily tweeting “A call for caution please. Media are escalating anxiety by talking of a “killer virus” + “growing fears”. In truth, from what we currently know, 2019-nCoV has moderate transmissibility and relatively low pathogenicity. There is no reason to foster panic with exaggerated language.”
Even in the February edition of the Lancet, the magazine he edits, there seemed to be doubt. “2019-nCoV still needs to be studied deeply in case it becomes a global health threat”
So, how on earth can the Editor of the world’s most prominent medical journal expect the Govt to recognise the level of the threat when he had not yet identified it himself?
That is blatant bias, yet the BBC and other left-liberal media outlets are happy to offer him a platform from which to berate the Govt.
A few days after that article we had Helen Ward, Clinical Professor of Public Health at Imperial College London, similarly castigating Boris and his Govt for not following her advice. (Despite the fact that she works at the same institution as Neil Ferguson, whose advice the Govt was following to the letter.) Again, no warning was offered to readers and viewers that she was by no stretch a neutral actor in this.
Prof Ward is long-time and ardent Labour supporter – activist, even – who has been as vocal a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn as she has been a vocal critic of the Conservatives.
She describes herself on Twitter as someone who “cares about justice, equality and health. And that means kicking out the Tories, stopping Brexit, supporting Labour”.
It is beyond any honest doubt that if a right-leaning, Tory supporting Scientist was interviewed on the BBC that the editors would be sure that their expressed thoughts carried a “health warning” that highlighted their political stance – so viewers and listeners could judge their utterances in that light.
As a point of consistency and journalistic integrity I wonder why Dr Horton’s or Prof Ward’s comments, carry no such rider? I think we all know.
Dr Horton writes that what is at “stake here is not the fate of one political adviser or even of a government in crisis. It is the independence and credibility of science and medicine”
Surely he is doing more to undermine that independence and credibility than anything the Govt has done?
This, remember, is the same Doctor who had openly criticised a Govt for not knowing something that he – as a medical “expert” did not know himself, nor the Lancet, the medical journal he edits.
That cannot in any way be a fair criticism, then, can it?
The list goes on and on:
Prof Gabriel Scally, slammed the Govt for its Covid failings, without the BBC mentioning he is a long-time Labour donor and Keir Starmer supporter. Not to mention the fact that he is also a Regional Director of Public Health, a role for which he receives over £200,000 a year of taxpayers’ money. So no wonder he was keener to attack the Govt than the failings of the NHS. Never bite the hand that feeds you so well!
Plenty of doctors – certainly the majority of Doctors I know – are right of centre politically, yet the BBC never interviews such people, nor even manages to find a politically neutral doctor or medical expert, they all seem to be from Medical unions who are affiliated with the Labour Party, or are otherwise political activists from the left and hard left.
Panorama – supposedly the BBC’s flagship investigative reporting programme – set out to offer the viewer an in-depth examination of the response to Covid. With no information offered to viewers about the political stance of its contributors the show featured the following:
The BBC try to defend the OBVIOUS bias in their reporting, by hiding behind the white lab coats of scientists and doctors, claiming they are speaking out as a matter of principle.
Shamefully, rather than being a matter of high principle, it is more like low politics.
as a doctor who trained in Britain but left when it turned socialist and I saw no healthy future there, I am very disappointed and troubled to read how bad things are.
The Lancet is NOT the world’s premier medical journal, it is an ancient publication that has a history, but because it became politically corrupted, publishing extremely biased articles that had no medical foundation, it is no longer taken seriously by many.
This contribution focuses on the very obvious biases especially of the BBC, it doesn’t mention that another of Dr Horton’s biases was his virulent anti-Israel bias, publishing articles and letters that were untruthful or grotesque distortions, and had no medical value.
I am not sure why commentators say things like this. Its clear some are far from well intentioned. They are not stupid people they deliberately want to stoke division because they believe it will lead to revolution and communist utopia. the hypocratic oath doesn’t get a look in in comparison to their agenda. They should be struck off and viewed in the same light as Mengele.
I am not sure why commentators say things like this. Because human nature tends to give people the benefit of the doubt. It is a lot easier to say that someone had a bad idea or that the idea was poorly executed than to say that it is a horrible idea with predictable results and that pursuing it anyway suggests that those results are the goal.
You rightly point to this idea which has foreseeable consequences. Such consequences are not accidental, they are intentional. But look at how few people are willing to say so out loud.
Either way it is almost impossible to know someone else’s motives for anything.
that’s the question, are the people who push such ideas truly aware of the eventual consequences?
to a certain extent a knowledge of the history and economics of 20th century Europe should disillusion students that socialism/communism has any benefit – but is only seriously harmful, murderously so, to any previously civilized society.
But young gullible minds swallow the nonsense offered by biased poorly educated teachers, and become the uneducated ignorant masses of the next generation.
from that perspective I do believe that some – such people start off being well-intentioned.
The real problem is when they remain so fixated on the rotten ideas they swallowed in their gullible youth that they cannot give them up, that they may in their late 30’s, 40’s and 50’s and even older, be in positions where they can enact some of the stupidity.
the current US administration, apparently fixated on the notion that the dreadful obama presidency was a golden era for the US and that everything must be done to erase all the good that President Trump accomplished is an example of this need to go back and “prove” that “we were right after all”, and the US first, and then the rest of the world will suffer from this dreadful mistake.
the notion of “well intentioned” is to cover the also well-recognized tendency of being unaware of the eventual consequences of such notions, as summarized in the phrase “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”
In essence that has been the problem with blm, that the awareness that in the US there were a lot of problems within the black community, including a huge excess of single mothers abandoned by the men who made them pregnant, and a huge excess of back-on-black violence, and that so many black citizens and communities needed some sort of help – unfortunately became taken over by thugs, racists, hateful anti-American and anti-Jewish extreme leftists.
The attempts to “protest” the problems – as if government was supposed to resolve the problem of men abandoning young mothers, which is an internal family-role-modelling-values problem, have been so truly misguided and in the UK (and some other countries) copied by nasty similar anarchist thugs, and so many have been pandering to it – such as the truly odious loathsome kneeling before football games, that such behaviours as those of the “Harvard doctors” as not surprising, even though they are so misguided and harmful.
This is getting dangerous.
I think this anti-racism craziness is making me racist. Is that the goal?
Yes.
Let’s imagine that Black people were dying of heart disease at 10x the rates of Whites. Does that make racism a “pandemic”? Or an epidemic?
No, of course not. Those medical terms refer to infectious diseases, meaning a disease that one person can transmit to another person.
Can one person “infect” another with racism? No, of course not. Otherwise, Black people would be getting “infected” with racism too.
Even if Klan doctors were deliberately injecting poison into Black people in order to cause heart disease, that would still not be an epidemic even if it is demonstrably racist as hell.
Racism isn’t “infectious,” nor is it a “disease.” And it damn sure isn’t gonna be treated via medical means.
Why does medical science get stupider every year instead of smarter?
“Can one person “infect” another with racism? No, of course not. Otherwise, Black people would be getting “infected” with racism too.”
The current BLM etc shenanigans are indeed raising the racist outlooks of black people, just as designed. They are essentially trying to incite a race war, a la Charles Manson.
Studies indicate that blacks are more racist than whites, Asians and Hispanics, go figure.
These developments are scary – MLK is turning in his grave. As a scientist the woolly thinking involved in all of this is breath taxingly stupid – confusing correlations with causation and not considering the entire context of pontential causes and as a result end up with policies that will inflame, divide and probably be hugely counter productive with a large raft of horrible unintended consequences because what is proposed put simply is daft. I have no words for how stupid these proposal look to anyone with a bounce of connection to the real world!
Upvoted.
I suspect you meant ‘ounce’ not ‘bounce’ there, but I rather liked it.
I left the USA for the Philippines six years ago in part because of frustration with Obamacare during a year of ill health. I’m white. My cardiologist at Southern Philippines Medical Center treats me without prejudice. Apparently if I were in Boston, I might be shoved to the back of the line because of my race. I’d rather be a minority in my new homeland than a white man in. America.
If this is implemented, USA would have surpassed even the worst predictions of Enoch Powell for the UK, this is suicidal and extreme beyond reason.
There are two facts worth considering:
The fact is that non whites are lucky to be in USA and many would not last five minutes in Africa. Many people would die alongside their children to enter many of the countries of the Old Empire and USA.
The other fact is that Marxists would want to exploit any grievance to create a problem and then to solve it with Marxism, this group of people need to be traced and controlled. These people have real long term objectives and they are controlled in that way by organised foreign powers. Their problem is not the next general election, their problem is three or four next general elections.
I can’t believe what USA is doing to itself, it is like the Marxists of 1945 and the British Empire, I hope USA will find a way to survive with its identity as intact as is possible. Tensions like the ones described will split the country open or even end in a civil war, unrest can only grow if this isn’t nipped in the bud.
Hence more and more people are buying arms. Including some Dem voters.
Not sure about these “well-intentioned” doctors, surely what’s going on here is that some people in the US medical market are trying to capitalise out of the new anti-racism (by being racist) movement.
If doctors in the US are well intentioned how come so many of them are happy to snip off male foreskins?
It is estimated around a third of the global male population are circumcised for religious or cultural reasons.
(a bit of a mean sentence edited out, my apologies)
Sure, but it is striking that while 70% to 90% of US males are circumcised only 5% to 20% of Western European males are. Also striking that the highest rates of circumcision in the US are in non-Hispanic White males. So an unnecessary and mutilating procedure is being performed on large numbers of children either for cultural or religious reasons or because it’s a money spinner for the medics carrying it out.
Well I had’nt realised that, thank you and Mark Preston for drawing my attention to it.
One of the rare occasions I agree with you.
Circumcision is barbaric and an abuse of children. If people want it done for religious reasons wait until when they are consulting adults – then all is well and good (and stupid)
Circumcision, like the vast majority of religious prescriptions and proscriptions, had its roots in avoidance of disease and sickness. The problem is that the original message and reasons have become lost over hundreds or thousands of years and are now simply doctrine.
Was Christ circumcised during the Immaculate Conception, or shortly after birth?
Either way Ancient the Greeks and Romans abhorred the practice, which made the major cultural activity of visiting the stupendous Thermae / Baths as bit of a problem if you were unfortunate enough to be a “Roundhead “.
Roundheads and Cavaliers as ‘they’ used to say.
So, whenever I see statistics I see that white people live longer lives than black people. Obviously, we should prioritise the treatment of black people in hospitals. Easy!
Whenever I see statistics I see that women live longer lives than men. Obviously, we should prioritise the treatment of men in hospitals. Easy!
We need to look at other minorities, compare lives of gay and straight men, and prioritise accordingly. I suggest a league table with more points for shorter living minorities.
Unfortunately, the waiting time for treatment for white women has just become 10 years or more.
We can extend this to criminal justice too. Men are vastly over represented in our prisons, in order to correct this discrimination we need to lock up fewer men and more women.
Or just let the men out… that would save money as well.
<sarcasm>
In fact when you think about it – criminals are over represented in the prison population. maybe we should lock up more law abiding people to balance that out.
</sarcasm>
You jest, but in some Democrat states and cities they really are adopting your first suggestion en masse, and will adopt the second suggestion as the earlier opportunity.
However, from a feminist point of view there is no question of this disparity being discriminatory. The only issue is that there are too many women in prison
No, they are just in the wrong prisons. Unisex bathrooms, unisex prisons. Let the rape-fest begin!
(sarc)
Watch California where people since January are asked on entering the penal system which sex they identify with. Hundreds of men going to female prisons as we speak.
What ever happened to the mandatory ‘strip-search?
Rather like H.M. Submarines you mean?
Women were also massively underrepresented on the gallows, in the ‘good old days’ of Capital Punishment
(1066-1964).
Have you got a source for this, would be interested to see the stats?
All considerations of treatment to be determined by mandatory DNA tests, with priority given according to gradations of oppressed minority DNA. Of course.
Leveling up or leveling down, both valid tools in combating any inequality.
Biden is going for MMT, the theory a Central Bank cannot ever print ‘too much’ money. See, it owns its debt in its own currency, so can pay its self back by printing more currency, cool. Part two of MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) is you later tax back the excess money you printed and handed out to get the economy balanced, which is cool as it means you give out vast Trillions of money in, say, UBI, food stamps, housing, Obamacare, college tuition, SSI, Medicare, and then later tax it back. The problem is progressive tax means the ones getting the free, printed, money pay no income tax, so you raise tax on higher earners and corporations and imports, and energy, to pay for the entitlements.
This is cool because it is PROGRESSIVE TAX, REDISTRIBUTIVE, and STEALTH REGRESSIVE TAX, all at once! Tax the corporations and energy and imports and they pass on the tax to the consumers by increasing prices or going bankrupt = regressive. Tax the wealthy till they squeak and it = progressive, and it is redistribution as it is Government by Robin Hood who take from the rich, give to the poor, and everyone pays by increased prices, which is inflationary, so you raise the spending, tax back more, and again inflate prices, repeat till income disparity is a thing of the past.. But everyone knows how this works, it is Biden’s platform.
It is crime I wonder about. Some groups commit more than others. Women commit a vastly smaller amount than men. As it seems impossible to stop some committing crime it will be necessary to get the others to commit ‘Catch Up’ Crime, say just make something the law abiding do a lot of, illegal. Then Education, how can you level the education outcome? Well we all know that answer.
Then the Biggie – How To Fight Racism and Income Disparity on a NATIONAL LEVEL? How to make Africa as prosperous as China? How are you going to get Mozambique have the GDP of Poland? I am sure Biden has a plan, one involving MMT on a global scale. The new science discipline of “Racism Science” will figure it all out.
You seem to have neglected to mention the hundreds of billions of corporate welfare doled out annually in the US there Sanford, the ‘apogee’, at least pre-covid, being the 2009/10 state funded bailouts of ‘private’ companies, including banks.
An oversight on your part, is that just different or doesn’t it count?
“The new science discipline of ‘Racism Science’ will figure it all out.” Not that new. I’m sure there was a racism faculty at the university of Breslau 1933 to 1945. The research papers may still be available. Even one or two of the old students might still be around to help this exciting revival get under way.
Racism will always be with us – especially when ‘anti-racism’ is racist in and of itself. The racist pandemic is about as real as the Kardasian pandemic. While both are bad, they are a function of our own wasted lives and created by people who are getting rich by creating interest in something that is, at its essence, completely artificial but masquerading as real. People are being convinced that they are ‘unconsciously’ racist. I put that in the same category as ‘micro-aggressions.’ If they are too small for me to see them, I don’t really care. I worry more about macro-agressions like getting shot or driving into a bridge abutment. If your life is so easy that you only have micro-aggressions to concern yourself with, then count your blessings because you life is a lot easier than almost everyone else’s in the history of mankind. What next? After we cure cancer are we going to pledge billions to cure ingrown toenails? Just take the win.
Clearly if racism is an epidemic, that means the disease can be passed on with terrible effects for those infected.
I think all racists should be issued with a bell by the health services that they ring when walking outside, saying loudly Unclean! Unclean! to warn anyone approaching.
As I read earlier in Der Sturmer – sorry, the Guardian – that universities are institutionally racist, a start should be made by giving a bell to all lecturers.
Anti-racism taken to its logical conclusion. We treat everyone equally, but they do not end up turning out the same, therefore unequal treatment is required. It still won’t work of course but maybe we can make whites equally unhealthy to favoured demographic groups – progress.
Harrison Bergeron, MD.
Had to look that up, thanks Terry. Will give it a read.
None of this is going to go away anytime soon. There is too much money involved. Look at all the ‘advisors’, ‘consultants’, ‘trainers’ et-al that hire themselves out to companies, hold courses or write books on this gibberish. Look at all the jobs that have been created – particulalry in HR for ‘equality’ and all the other nonsense – not to mention the university courses, printers, flagmakers and T-shirt printers, to name a few. The whole thing has nothing to do with race relations or helping minorities, it has to do with money and/or power. Blm and that ilk, keeps black people as perpetual victims and white people as perpetual oppressors, and never the twain shall meet. They don’t want an end to racial tension, they want more to keep the money machine rolling. Same thing goes for the insane wokery that is infecting the world. All the time we are wringing our hands and pulling our hair out at the latest mind-boggling pronouncement from the useful idiots, someone somewhere is rubbing their hands together with glee.
I’m a doc in Canada. I can’t even read my medical journals anymore because they have titles more in keeping with being a women’s studies or black studies journal.
“Creating a Culturally-Safe Office Environment”, or my favourite recently “Midwives and Pregnant Men – towards inclusive pre-natal care”. I wish I was joking. We used to get articles about how not to miss pancreatic cancer, or how to use the newest diabetes treatments, but that seems to be gone now. If one wants to do “research”, there are infinite funding streams for the former type of “study”, and almost no funding for the latter.
Be very afraid, because the latest thing is admission to med school based not on merit, but on “adversity scores”. ie: you get points if you had a single mom, or a disability (could be self-proclaimed, like a personality disorder for instance), if you are not white, if your family was poor etc. So if you arrive at a physician’s office 10 years from now and see a one-legged, transgendered, indigenous physician with one eye, I would get a second opinion before filling that prescription!
It’s coming for all of us, and we ain’t seen nothing yet!
Crtitical Race Theory is already starting to spread across universities and the public sector in the UK. Students and lecturers badly need to practise some critical thinking rather than passively accepting yet more American cultural rubbish.
Disproportionately high death rates from Covid amongst minority ethnic groups are are being attributed to instititutional/structural racism by the lazy woke thinkers, when so far there is no hard evidence to back up this theory.
The scary thing is that here in the US, critical theory is often conflated with critical thinking. Many CRTists consider themselves critical thinkers because they criticize what they believe are racist Western values. They’ve uncritically swallowed what their CRT professors have taught them.
The death of Mr Floyd in police custody comes up again. Apart from Mr Floyd being black, and officer Chauvin being white, what evidence is there that that had any effect on the treatment of Mr Floyd by the police, 2 of whom were white, 1 asian and the other black? My Floyd was 6’5″ and built accordingly. The policemen were lightweights in comparison, officer Chauvin 5’9″ and 140 lbs. The evidence led at the trial was whether Mr Floyd died as a result of drugs or police mistreatment; at no time was any evidence led that officer Chauvin was influenced by the race of the person in custody. The race issue is only raised because it suits the political agenda of the race industry.
The idea that race is a construct to aid oppression isn’t unique to CRT. If anything, it’s counter to it. CRT tends to essentialise race.
Curable or not, it does not help that increasingly obscure things are branded as evidence of racism. At this point, the woke left treats any non-white as a curiosity at best and exotic wildlife at worst.
Today’s doctors are, of course, doubtlessly well-intentioned in their attempts to cure America’s societal ills. Are they? Because there is an old saying about paving a roadway with good intentions. Using race as the remedy to racism insults common sense and logic.
As some of Orwell’s characters would have put it – BLACK LIVES BETTER.
Or even- BLACK LIVES BITTER.
There was an argument in the Guardian – naturally – about brands of Tea, because Rishi Sunak, was pictured making a brew whilst prepping the budget. Yorkshire Tea was then bombarded by hateful twitter messages from the ever tolerant “progressive” left, suggesting that people should boycott Yorkshire Tea, because a Tory had been pictured drinking it.
I helpfully jumped into the fray suggesting that for social justice warriors the only acceptable tea was Assam Tea, because “Black Leaves Matter”.
The Guardian chose to moderate the comment, but not before angry left wingers accused me of being “Racist” … about tea?
You can never win an argument with TheGuardian or the SJW with humour or logic. They are impervious to both
So how about the Hypocritic Oath?
In the NHS, as ethnic minorities are significantly over-represented as a proportion of those who are of working age within their ethnic groups presumably we can expect the government to take urgent remedial action to tackle this hugely divisive, obviously unrepresentative, serious racial problem?
Worse still, across the pond, granted at the start of the 2014 season, but it gives you an idea of the hideous iniquity that faces us all, multibillion Dollar NFL surveys ‘even more shockingly’ revealed that the league was 68.7% African-American and 28.6% non-Hispanic white, with the remaining 4% comprising Asian/Pacific Islander, non-white Hispanics, and those preferring an other category.
For God’s sake when are the craven powers that be going to wake up to these glaring discrepancies and act?
In reality there is very little racism in developed societies for all sorts of understandable reasons. There is however and increasing, a great deal of imagined and fabricated racism, inflated by the power of the ‘woke’ culture.
Racism is still a problem in developing countries, particularly India and in many parts of the African continent, but as they develop and join the modern world, that too will change.
It is perfectly possible to invent enough racism to make people racist and from the look of it, we are well on the way.
Lies, damned lies and statistics needs to be remembered as does the phrase, ‘be careful what you wish for.’ If you want to find racism, believe me you will. What you look for is what you will see, such is the nature of the human mind. And, if finding racism brings profits and power, the motivation is so much more powerful.
This article seriously lacks balance.
That’s all very well, but what really troubles me is that breast cancer
kills far more women than men. If that isn’t institutional sexism I don’t know what is. How can we stop it? Who will join me in a march where we can smash things up and set fire to shops and houses?
Fine, if you are still worried about the racism thing, then as an intersectional feminist I am happy to concede that breast cancer kills far more women of colour than it kills white men, so this blight is not only caused by the patriarchy’s sexism, but also its racism.
Anyway, this march. I can do next Tuesday, but not any other day. On Monday I have a zoom with my organic aubergine recipe group, on Wednesday I simply must stock up because I have run out of
unpasteurised cheese, on Thursday I am having my hair done (Pierre finally relented and booked me in), and on Friday I am headed to our small but eye-waveringly expensive cottage in Mousehole with hubby and the kids for a long weekend because I am simply exhausted.
Carry on with this rubbish and America could have another civil war. Heart patient gets priority because of colour? Hell and handcart come to mind.
Check out this news article on the CDC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leom2fAop2E
With someone like that in charge, you can no longer take their word on anything.
The Republicans just put forward a Bill proposing that any University that discriminates against Asian Americans should have their funding removed, and every single Democrat voted against it……because they see it as anti Black Lives Matter !
This is going to ignite a race war, these policies are only going to create more racists, not diminish them
It is often said, and is often true – that what happens in America today, arrives here tomorrow.
I can contribute a suggestion: in my native Brazil, racism was criminalized under the famous Lei Falcão, which supports full-fledged lawsuits wherever blatant racism shows its ugly head.
As expected, it did not erase racism from Brazilian society. But it certainly worked to restrict the criminals’ freedom to act upon their abominable “instincts”, leading to a much healthier societal balance.
So yes, recognizing racism formally and stiffly punishing the crimes committed on its account is an option to consider if the US is ever to evolve from the current state of inequality.
For the record, the labeling of any anti-racism opinion as “woke” is diluting the real problem of woke excess, making this other can of worms much harder to combat than it should be.
The US is not Brazil.
And that is such a relief!
I trust you realize that racism is racism regardless of geographic location, right? Or perhaps you feel that USA citizens are so exceptional that they are entitled to get away with racism scott-free?
In case you are struggling to detect any racism, try to honestly imagine how would you feel when stopped by police in the US if (for the sake of argument) you woke up tomorrow in a black man’s body. Get it now?
Why is racism wrong? If one excises from consideration the famous historical excesses (of which modern anti-white anti-racism is one), racism unconceals itself as a negative reference for adaptive traits, the ethnic/racial group being the repository of same. We are all bound by nature to discriminate for evolutionary fitness. It is not and cannot be wrong to do so.
I don’t think you could be more wrong. Mercifully, little kids are taught “why racism is bad” in school. Looks like you missed this class, and your pitiful try at excusing yourself failed badly.
You cannot conceive of a world where all races are treated equally. The ideology you so clearly espouse requires one race to remain perennially locked in a dispute with all others, for a supremacy that exists only in your mind. And still you can’t recognize that your prejudice is the real problem.
There will always be in groups vs the others, it is universal.
The reason all this garbage is flooding the public discourse now is because Wuhan flu is a genetically engineered virus funded partly with American green, eugenicist dollars from Fauci, Gates et al in cooperation with the Chinese Communists, designed specifically to control the third world population.
China doesn’t want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but it is very good at population control. In the parts of the third world it has colonised it has promised the Davos darlings it will systematically reduce the third world population to first world levels. Of course it will take out other extraneous people too, the old and sick, the poor in other under developed slums with over stretched immune systems, none of them useful, high value workers.
So the intelligence and security agencies invented BLM and whipped up critical race theory and left wing green politicians decided to pretend their agenda was the exact opposite of what it is, an act of love, designed to achieve equity, rather than an act of eugenics and race based population control designed to make the world less crowded, over heated and generally more pleasant for the richest people on the planet.
Let’s hope you are correct.
Also, I hear that Klingons are in charge of the whole plot.
That’s just ridiculous – you know it’s the Lizardmen.
Klingons indeed. They are clearly made up, they are just people in rubber alien suits. The Lizardmen however are real!
Yes, of course, there has never been an evil, murderous regime consisting entirely of human beings. You always need some fictional aliens to account for the likes of Hitler, Stalin Polpot, Chairman Mao and friends, and history never repeats itself. All people who fancy themselves world leaders are benign and loving, holy people. All the evil in the world came about because of fictional aliens carrying out the imagined ideas of conspiracy theorists. How right you are. The intelligence and security agencies never drum up imaginary evil in order to bring about war or civil unrest. There were WMD and the Middle East is a blessed peaceful, democratic place now we’ve got rid of all those nasty dictators.
Yes, of course, there has never been an evil, murderous regime consisting entirely of human beings. You always need some fictional aliens to account for the likes of all the twentieth century mass murderers and dictators and history never repeats itself. All people who fancy themselves world leaders are benign and loving, holy people. All the evil in the world came about because of fictional aliens carrying out the imagined ideas of conspiracy theorists. How right you are. The intelligence and security agencies never drum up imaginary evil in order to bring about war or civil unrest. There were WMD and the Middle East is a blessed peaceful, democratic place now we’ve got rid of all those nasty dictators.
Precisely. It had to be the Klingons…
I always comment when I down vote…
I hope you were wearing your tin foil hat when you posted that, if not keep an eye out for the black vans… I’m sure they will be following you any day now.
Bertie, take the gift you are being given. Now you know whose posts you should skip when reading comments on Unherd…
Any evidence for that statement0?
If that was true, that would be first ever and only good thing communist China ever attempted to accomplish. Alas, everything points to that the polar opposite is true.
Woman, I think you’ve gotten into Dr. Leary’s stash again.