More Hypocrisy at the New York Times
The question is how to balance the rights of this parent with the welfare of this child.
Global warming has nothing on the pollution of the ubiquitous charges of racism rising to the skies from the left-wing fever swamps. Everything now is racism. How dull.
An example of the never-ending focus on race is a recent op-ed in the New York Times entitled “Race in the Pediatric E.R.” (Next week: “Racism in Public Toilets.”) The author, Jessica Horan-Block, is described as a supervising attorney at the Bronx Defenders.
Her opening paragraph tells you where the story is going: “When a child experiences a mild head injury and a parent seeks medical attention, what happens next in New York City seems to depend on the ZIP code and the color of the parent’s skin.”
Predictably, the white mother and father in the story were met with compassion and sympathy at the hospital. The black mother, obviously, was met with “suspicion, interrogation and accusations of child abuse, even after explaining to the hospital staff her 9-month-old daughter’s accidental head bump with her brother.” It was determined that the child had suffered two minor skull fractures with a small underlying bleed.
What happened then seems inexcusable: the baby, who was still nursing, was not allowed to go home with her mother; and subsequently, the mother was accused, without any evidence of wrongdoing (we have only Ms. Horan-Block’s word for this, but for the story’s sake we have no reason to doubt it), of child abuse by intentionally causing the child’s skull fractures.
The story, heart-rending of course, suggests egregious error on the part of hospital personnel. But what is the larger message? What is the general point we are supposed to take from the particular facts? Probably—especially given the story’s title and the publication that ran it—that evil racism is everywhere, even in your local hospital. Is that fair?
Probably not. In 2014, a report in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) titled “The Prevalence of Confirmed Maltreatment Among American Children, 2004–2011” found that black children had the highest risks of maltreatment, at 20.9 percent, followed by Native American children at 14.5 percent, Hispanic children at 13.0 percent, white children at 10.7 percent, and Asian/Pacific Islander children at 3.8 percent. In other words, the risk of black children being maltreated was found to be almost twice that of white children.
The Annie E. Casey Kids Count Data Center has different numbers: it found that the rate of children confirmed by child protective services as victims of maltreatment in the United States in 2017 was: Hispanic, 23 percent; black, 18 percent; white, 5 percent; and Asian, 1 percent. In that study, black children were more than three times as likely to be maltreated as white children.
Horan-Block writes: “New York City must grapple with how and why it has permitted a system to hurt children by believing some parents but not others.” But we know why: the numbers have told us.
If you’re a hospital worker, you may not have read those studies, but you probably know their gist, which is likely common knowledge in the hospital’s corridors and cafeteria.
When a black baby comes in with a head wound, what are you to do? You know nothing about the circumstances other than what is told to you by the parents, about whom you also know nothing except their race. What is your responsibility? Or perhaps the question that should be asked is, to whom are you responsible? The mother or the child?
In her op-ed, Horan-Block is pulling a fast one: she knows, she says (and we are compelled to believe her), the cause of the skull fractures. But the hospital staff didn’t know the facts she describes to us. She should have spent some time telling the story from the staff’s perspective: this child is black and black children are abused more frequently than white children. It would also be interesting for us, and presumably Horan-Block too, to know how many children with injuries consistent with parental abuse had been seen by those staff members that day, or that week, or that month—and how many were confirmed to have been caused by parental abuse.
Of course, that complicates the story: but that is the real story, and the real dilemma. Are some hospital staff members racists? Almost certainly—original sin not yet having been abolished—but the persistence of original sin is not usually the stuff of Times op-eds.
But for those hospital staff members who are not racists, the question is how to balance the rights of this parent with the welfare of this child? The question for the rest of us is, are we going to sacrifice the welfare of children in order to avoid being called racists by the PC-racism police?
Of course, instead of asking the tough questions, it’s easier just to bang the racial injustice drum, which it would seem is what Ms. Horan-Block has done. How dull of her.