When the New York Times writes about racial bias, again, and again . . . and again, it isn’t just that the eyes tend to glaze over at a subject of great importance which nevertheless resists reader interest. It’s worse. There’s a sense of outrage: what do you do about a paper that publishes a piece on what New Yorkers really miss during this pandemic, and quotes . . . race hustler Al Sharpton?
Even so, racial bias is an issue of great importance that we should take seriously. And so we should read on. The paper’s exhibit A for a recent piece on racial bias in medical care is a story about Reginald Relf, an African American who went to an urgent care clinic in Chicago, was sent home without being tested, and a week later was found dead in his mother’s basement.
The Times piece quotes his sister: “When I finally get him to go to seek help, he’s turned away. If he was a middleaged white woman, would they have turned her away? Those are questions that haunt me.” Fair enough? Maybe. For her.
But maybe not for us. It seems likely that dozens, and more likely hundreds or thousands, of people, of all races, have been turned away by clinics during this pandemic. That’s not something Relf’s sister is likely to think about just after he dies.
But we should—and the Times does: “Americans of all races may have experienced less than ideal care in recent months in an overwhelmed health care system, and it is not uncommon to hear stories of people who visited health professionals for treatment, only to be turned away.” That tends to take the punch out of Relf’s sister’s remark, raising the question, why did the Times include it?
The Times goes on: “So, should providers misinterpret or ignore coronavirus symptoms in black patients, there is a higher likelihood that the results could be grave, experts say.” But a likelihood “higher” than what? Presumably higher than the likelihood that the results would be grave for a non-black patient. Why is that?
That is because blacks tend to have medical conditions that make them less healthy than . . . people who don’t have those conditions: heart disease, diabetes, and lung disease—conditions that tend to afflict people who are poor.
Blacks may, and probably do, have those conditions in greater number because they tend to be poor, and poorer than whites.
So one question is, do blacks suffer from diseases including the Chinese Flu more than other people do because they are black or because they are poor? It is critically important to know the answer to that question, because we want to know whether there is rampant racial discrimination in our country or not.
Race hustlers like Al Sharpton make their living pushing the intentional discrimination line. But that’s an indictment of Americans we should not blithely accept.
“In previous studies,” the Times writes, “doctors have been found to have downplayed AfricanAmericans’ complaints of pain, given them weaker pain medication for broken bones and withheld cardiac treatments from black patients who needed them. Research suggests [emphasis not in original] that the decisions are the result of ingrained assumptions, cultural ignorance and hostile attitudes toward AfricanAmericans.”
So, the research makes no findings; it only “suggests.” And only one of the suggested reasons for the inferior care is “hostile attitudes toward African-Americans.”
The skeptical Times reader tends to think that if studies existed that clearly proved that racial bias was the cause of inferior care for blacks, those studies would have been cited in the piece instead of a study that only makes suggestions.
But here’s the real point: suppose racial discrimination is rampant in medical care, or at least sufficiently rampant seriously to disadvantage blacks, what are we to make of that? Those who are stuffy might say that racial discrimination can be expected, or at least is not surprising, in the “lower classes”; but would they expect to find it in the people who provide medical care?
We are now 155 years out from the end of the Civil War, sixty-six years from Brown v. Board of Education, and fifty-six years from the Civil Rights Act of 1964: if we still have rampant racial discrimination in this country, what might we conclude?
We might conclude that we are always going to have rampant racial discrimination in this country—that there is something innate in people that makes them not just prefer people of their own race, but actively discriminate against “the other.” If that’s part of human nature (original sin?), no anti-discrimination law or office of civil rights is likely to change it, unless it adopts methods inconsistent with the American tradition—and methods even more inconsistent with the American tradition than the Civil Rights laws already are (but on the civil rights industry’s telling, unsuccessfully), which deprive businessmen of the right to determine whom they will serve at their establishments. There is likely to be a limit to how much the American tradition, and American human nature, can be bent on the rack to conform to the woke liberals’ arc of history.
There is, however, an alternative conclusion: that the race hustlers like Al Sharpton, woke-liberal politicians, and the civil rights-Democratic Party-main stream media-complex are to blame for today’s sense of racial injustice. They fan the flames of discrimination in order to gain funding for the civil rights fire brigade. They call people who disagree with them “deplorables” who “cling to guns or religion.” Colleges support, with “federal” funds of course, armies of diversity counselors, multicultural advisors, cultural diversity advocates, and diverse populations experts, any one of whom could find racial discrimination in magnetic repulsion.
From morning till night they bang the racial discrimination drum. Everything is race and discrimination. In the schools. In the colleges. In business. All is racial discrimination. Whites are the root of all evil.
And who will prove otherwise? What researcher, setting out to prove that racial discrimination is not to blame for our ills, would receive a grant for that project? Or get published in the New York Times?
If blacks voted Republican overwhelmingly in just one presidential election, it’s a good bet that the racial discrimination scam would end. And then we, and especially children still forming their opinions about their country, could have a better image of America and what it’s done for the cause of justice in this world.
But the Democrats will do their best to see that that never happens: inter alia, by keeping the blacks on the public school plantation, where instead of learning reading, writing, and arithmetic, they study the race hustling New York Times’s 1619 Project and are taught that Whitey is against them.
Someday, maybe, a deliverance will come: come for them, and come for the rest of us as well.
And then, then our eyes can glaze over when the Times hustles other scandals.