Drinking the Kool-Aid

In her latest Washington Post column Megan McArdle tries to explain why she believes that the reason that blacks are dying of COVID-19 in numbers disproportionate to their number in the population:

Why is covid-19 killing more black people than white people in America?

For many on the left, the answer is easy: “systemic racism.” That answer drives conservatives bonkers. Covid-19 comes from a virus; it does not care whether victims are white or black and, indeed, doesn’t have eyes to distinguish.

Conservatives, I understand why you feel this way. But on this issue, the left is, well, right.

In the balance of the column she makes a number of points in which it is rather clear she does not see the fallacies:

Let’s start with what “systemic racism” is, which is not “systems full of racists.” Black people aren’t dying in such numbers because all or even most white people around them hate them and want bad things to happen to them. But they probably are dying because we enslaved their ancestors.

I say “we” even though my personal ancestors never, as far as I can determine, enslaved anyone or even set foot in the South. But I am a U.S. citizen, and the United States legalized slavery, even to the extent of helping some whites pursue runaways into free territory. “We,” as a nation, did that. They, as a people, suffered.

That’s true as far as it goes but it does not go far enough in several ways. If you’re going to assert collective guilt, you necessarily ascribe it to both blacks and whites. That sounds absurd and it is. I gather from the balance of the column that she imagines some sort of ledger in which the guilt of blacks for slavery is balanced by the slavery itself and Jim Crow afterwards. The problems with this line of reasoning is that some whites were slaves, too, not all whites benefited from black slavery, some but not all whites sacrificed greatly to end slavery, and some blacks in the U. S. are not the victims of the legacy of U. S. slavery.

Not recognizing the sacrifices that were made to end slavery is an error common to the descendants of more recent immigrants. The majority of my great-great-grandfathers fought to end slavery and at least two of their families suffered for it: two of them died young of the privations they experienced while serving in the Civil War. That was in the era when men were the primary breadwinners. Those deaths blighted those families right down to the present day.

Yesterday I was speaking with a black colleague of mine (born in the U. S. and reared mostly in Nigeria) whom I like and respect quite a bit. He volunteered that he had never experienced overt racism in the United States but he had in Europe.

Also, being black is not dispositive for poverty and misery in the U. S. 8% of millionaires are black and 1% of billionaires. You cannot explain that while holding to the belief in the implacable racism our our system without special pleading.

Finally, I have already linked to the NBER study which found that even controlling for age, geography, income, and occupation, there is still a discrepancy between the prevalence of COVID-19 among blacks and whites in the U. S. Said another way, systemic racism is not an adequate explanation. There may be other behavioral explanations. There are even plausible explanations for why blacks may be more susceptible. Wouldn’t providing Vitamin D supplements be worth a try for goodness sake?

I am not claiming that racism isn’t real. I have no doubt that it is or that it is not easier to be white than black in the United States. What I am saying is that when you are trying to solve a problem, address the issues that are easiest and give you the most bang for the buck rather than trying to fix those which will be most difficult or may even be impossible to solve.