A recent study on mortality rates between different races offers politicized deceptions instead of scientific inquiry.
A recent study on mortality rates between different races offers politicized deceptions instead of scientific inquiry.
W oke ideology isn’t corrupting just our children’s education and our political discourse. Just as troubling is its destructive impact on scientific inquiry — the foundation of progress in virtually every field of life. In medical research in particular, woke ideology has become so dominant that honest and accurate inquiry is disappearing altogether. This doesn’t bode well for patient health or public policy.
A case in point is a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association that appears to relay some troubling statistics. The authors report that between 1999 and 2020, “disproportionately higher mortality rates in Black males and females resulted in 997,623 and 628,464 excess deaths, respectively, representing a loss of more than 80 million years of life.” Dig a little deeper, and the authors identify “structural racism, unmet social needs, and systemic bias as root causes.” The results of the “study” were uncritically parroted by CBS and ABC, among others. The ironically named Scientific American meanwhile labeled the results a “call to action” for sweeping social and political changes.
Not so fast. Previous research offers up a less politically charged explanation. It turns out that almost all the racial gap in life expectancy is statistically explained by other factors, specifically family income, education, occupation, unemployment, urban residence, home ownership, and marital status. The authors of the latest study simply assume that these are all racially determined.
Other factors besides racism are likely at play, but studying them would require swapping politically fashionable preconceptions for true medical research. Consider: African Americans are significantly more likely to be hypertensive. A 2017 study revealed that group differences in regular exercise appear to contribute to the disparity. Meanwhile, a 2018 study estimated that the “Southern dietary pattern” accounted for half of the excess risk for hypertension among black men, while a 2019 study suggests that genetic risk factors might also play a role.
The researchers consider none of this, transparently because they have a woke axe to grind. Yet their findings — published in a prestigious medical journal — cannot properly be called scientific research. The black/white paradigm through which they view the world proves vulnerable to nuance that they refuse to consider.
It also requires looking beyond the black/white binary to the real world. According to the National Institutes of Health, Asians and Latinos had a higher life expectancy than whites in 2019. In fact, the Asian/white disparity is larger than the black/white disparity. If group outcomes are a product of racism, then Asians have become so cozy to the white power structure that they have supplanted whites as its primary beneficiaries. Woke logic leads to this inescapable conclusion, but since it doesn’t mesh with basic woke presuppositions, it’s ignored altogether.
The research team’s preferred narrative that mortality is a measure of discrimination is further complicated by research demonstrating that “the fraction [of the population that is] black increases mortality rates for blacks.”
Of course, none of this context matters for race hustlers or their allies in public health. “Anti-racist” activist Ibram X. Kendi famously opined, “When I see racial disparities, I see racism.” For Kendi and his acolytes, differences in life expectancy and diet are proof of racism. The grift sustains itself on being unfalsifiable.
The new JAMA study is emblematic of the expert class’s obsession with radical theories about gender and race and its willingness to eschew rigor in the pursuit of political goals. Like other works of woke fiction, it’s also harmful, most of all to the populations that the worldview victimizes and infantilizes. Disparities in mortality can be ameliorated with commonsense remedies such as diet, exercise, preventive screenings, and regular visits with a primary-care provider. Instead, public-health experts prescribe learned helplessness and hopelessness, cloaked in the guise of “science.”