What is shocking about the FRONT PAGE NEWS coverage of the so-called “racial impact” of the coronavirus is, of course, that people could be shocked by it — by the disproportionate impact the disease has had on black communities. “Black Americans Bear the Brunt as Deaths Climb” was the meant-to-shock New York Times’s page-one headline on Wednesday.
According to The Washington Post, “In Milwaukee County, home to Wisconsin’s largest city, African Americans account for about 70 percent of the dead but just 26 percent of the population. The disparity is similar in Louisiana, where 70 percent of the people who have died were black, although African Americans make up just 32 percent of the state’s population.”
Some thought is required here. First, and perhaps most obvious but least likely to be considered, would we expect all groups to be affected absolutely equally? People turn out to be different, despite what the woke community says. Even the most obvious difference — male and female — is denied by woke activists. They are no doubt shocked by the statistics showing that more women get pregnant than men.
But there are other differences too — some subtle, others not. People come in only two sexes, but their blood comes in four varieties. There is evidence that people with blood types A, B, and AB are more susceptible to certain heart diseases than those having blood type O. In time we may discover that people with one blood type are more susceptible to coronavirus than people with a different blood type.
We already know that sickle cell anemia affects blacks almost exclusively — and although one assumes that the keepers of public morality have labored night and day to blame that discrepancy on discrimination by whites, there is so far no evidence of racial animus causing that medical finding.
So either the discrepancy in the effect coronavirus has on blacks is biologically determined (in which case it is an interesting datum but not a scandalous one) or the discrepancy is caused by something else.
We have no technical details yet, but one point seems obvious, if you’re a normal person—which leaves out much of the mainstream media: poor people, in general, are likely to suffer, from any and all hardships, more than non-poor people. That is true in all aspects of life, or at least in the ones we can measure. Why should it be different when it comes to how people are affected by disease, especially a pandemic?
In general, blacks in America are poorer than whites. Why is that?
It is fashionable in woke circles to blame all of blacks’ problems on white discrimination. That is really very tiresome and unimaginative — more than half a century after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. White racism is the gift that keeps on giving — or the gift that woke activists hope will keep on giving, giving them more government power to remake society in their own warped image.
We have known for years, probably for millennia, that children brought up in two-parent families do better than children brought up in one-parent families or in households (not “families”) where there is only a grandmother.
Whereas approximately 30 percent of white babies are illegitimate, 70 percent of black babies are illegitimate. That massive illegitimacy has consequences, but they are not consequences woke liberals are willing to recognize — in part perhaps, or perhaps only originally (i.e., before illegitimacy became so chic), because it was white liberal policies (Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society) that helped create the mess.
Poor people live in more crowded living quarters than non-poor people (more difficult to “social-distance”), their diets are worse, they probably can’t wash their clothes as often, and on and on and on.
According to The Washington Post, in Chicago, blacks have died from the coronavirus at a rate six times that of whites. But in the last year, black homicide victims outnumbered white homicide victims by … six times.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and yes, richer people have better lives, in general, than poorer people.
But the collapse of the black family, first midwifed by liberals and now defended by them, is likely to be the cause of the racial discrepancy in coronavirus mortality rates. But when will woke liberals ever learn that?
When will they ever learn?
Daniel Oliver is Chairman of the Board of the Education and Research Institute and a Director of Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. In addition to serving as Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Reagan, he was Executive Editor and subsequently Chairman of the Board of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.
Email Daniel Oliver at Daniel.Oliver@TheCandidAmerican.com.