Does racism and a lack of access to healthcare explain why African Americans are allegedly suffering disproportionately from the coronavirus?
Or instead, do lifestyle choices—including diet, exercise, and obesity—explain this alleged disparity? What about the fact that certain disease (sickle cell anemia, for instance) affect blacks more than whites, and for reasons that have nothing to do with racism?
And does race even matter? Is it a good way or prism through which to understand and address COVID-19?
Sadly, there is no shortage of media reporting, editorializing, and political pontificating purporting to blame “racism” and “inequality” for alleged differences in how the coronavirus is affecting black and white communities.
Political Agendas. So-called progressives and other leftists in the media and Democratic Party are eager to use and exploit whatever crisis they can to advance their left-wing agenda, and this pandemic offers an especially appealing vehicle right now.
“Progressives” and leftists are eager to blame racism for all manner of problems: because then they can use said racism as an excuse or justification to push for racial reparations and government wealth redistribution programs that they claim will benefit African Americans, but which really will give the government more power and control over our lives.
But as Zaid Jilani observes at National Review:
We are still in the early stages of this pandemic, and the research on this topic is as novel as the virus itself. [So] it’s difficult to draw hard conclusions about the causal factors that explain who gets the virus and who succumbs from it.
Exactly. Relatively few Americans, in fact, have even been tested for the coronavirus. The United States has administered fewer coronavirus tests per million people than Germany, Italy, Canada, and South Korea, Vox reports.
Yet, the New York Times published an article Tues., Apr. 7, 2020, arguing that “Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States.” But as Jilani points out,
Ironically, on the same day the New York Times published [this] article… New York City revealed age-adjusted numbers showing that Latinos, not African Americans, had the highest age-adjusted coronavirus death rate.
Perhaps this will bring about calls that the Times have should have reframed its article around Latino death rates rather than black ones. Maybe another newspaper op-ed will call the virus a “Latino plague,” at least in New York City.
The city’s data also showed that, despite claims from New York City’s Public Advocate that “New Yorkers of more color” are disproportionately at higher risk, the Asian-American death rate is actually lower than that of whites.
One way to look at this data would be to scramble the racial hierarchy being assembled by liberal activists and the news media—Latinos actually have it “worst,” and Asians, another ethnic minority—have it “best.” But that would simply replace one form of distorted thinking for another.
Moreover, even assuming that racial disparities exist—which, again, is a premature conclusion, given that we don’t yet know enough about the prevalence of the coronavirus nor its effects within different demographic groups—it is far from clear that such disparities are caused by “racism” and “inequality.”
Correlation, after all, is not causation. Consider, for instance, sickle cell anemia. As M. Laurence Noisette, M.D. writes:
Sickle cell disease, an inherited disorder of the red blood cells, is more common in African Americans in the U.S. compared to other ethnicities—occurring in approximately 1 in 365 African Americans…
“Sickle cell trait,” likewise, “is an inherited blood disorder that affects approximately 8 percent of African-Americans,” notes the American Society of Hematology.
Unlike sickle cell disease, in which patients have two genes that cause the production of abnormal hemoglobin, individuals with sickle cell trait carry only one defective gene and typically live normal lives without health problems related to sickle cell.
Granted, COVID-19 is caused by a respiratory virus, the coronavirus; it is not an inherited blood disorder. So it seems very unlikely that genetic or biological factors would explain any racial disparities in either its incidence or effects.
But the point is that correlation can be explained any number of factors—including but by no means limited to the fact that different diseases sometimes affect various racial and ethnic groups differently.
Thus, seizing upon “racism” and “inequality” as explanations for alleged disparities is bad, sloppy, simplistic, and politicized thinking. And this is especially true when there are other legitimate and plausible explanations.
For example, as we reported here at ResCon1, and as the Washington Examiner’s Tina Lowe observed, “new data seems to indicate that obesity is itself a risk factor” for dying from the coronavirus.
Why does this matter? Because, according to the U.S .Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health:
- African American women have the highest rates of obesity or being overweight compared to other groups in the United States. About 4 out of 5 African American women are overweight or obese.
- In 2018, non-Hispanic blacks were 1.3 times more likely to be obese as compared to non-Hispanic whites.
- In 2018, African American women were 50 percent more likely to be obese than non-Hispanic white women.
- From 2013-2016, non-Hispanic black females were 2.3 times more likely to be overweight as compared to non-Hispanic white females.
- People who are overweight are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, high levels of blood fats, diabetes and LDL cholesterol—all risk factors for heart disease and stroke.
- In 2018, African Americans were 20 percent less likely to engage in active physical activity as compared to non-Hispanic whites.
Underlying health conditions that make the coronavirus more dangerous and more fatal—hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease, for instance—also are more prevalent within the African American community; and these, too, are caused in large part by obesity.
Does “racism” and “inequality” explain these disparities? I suppose to the racially obsessed, the answer is always yes.
But assuming that this overly simplistic explanation is even partially true, the reality is that, whatever racism exists, all of us—black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Jew, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, et al.—make daily choices in diet and lifestyle that dramatically affect our likelihood of being obese and of contracting high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease.
Disempowerment. And that is the biggest problem with obsessing over “racism” and “inequality” as politically convenient excuses for bad health outcomes: Doing so disempowers each of us and denies us agency over our own lives.
The truth is that all of us are in this together. We all face a pandemic that is truly international in scope, and which seriously threatens our very lives and economic well-being.
Dividing us up along racial lines to score cheap and unwarranted political points, while advancing a bad political agenda, is shameful and wrong. And it’s unsupported by the weight of the scientific evidence and data.
The coronavirus doesn’t discriminate; but all of us, certainly, should be more thoughtful and discriminating when it comes to blaming “racism” and “inequality” for the prevalence and effects of COVID-19 within different racial and demographic groups.
Feature photo credit: Data for Chinese COVID-19 deaths as of Feb. 11, 2020, Ruobing Su/Business Insider.
