Medicine, Math Illiteracy and Race
Another clip about passing as White which I haven't watched in full yet. If gender identity is a social construct, and I believe it is, then surely racial identity is as well. If this weren't true, how do we even have the concept of passing?
I tripped across this clip about race based medicine that criticizes the practice. It's basically a Black guy saying this is all bad, all the time.
I'm assuming he's American but the reality is Blacks the world over are generally poorer etc than others.
I never completed my BS in Environmental Resource Management. But in one class, we covered a legal case where, I think, some state wanted to make it illegal to send trash to their state and a business that recycled trash objected because it would kill their business.
So it's all bad, all the time, until you find someone in your state benefiting from it. Oops
If you look at an issue and feel "X is just clearly all bad all the time" you're probably missing something. I write sometimes about race based medicine trying to suggest solutions to some of the issues experienced by Black Americans and Native Americans. If you made a strict law saying you can't have anything anywhere for any reason that is about "race based medicine" you are potentially outlawing that kind of approach.
What he's objecting to is really the mistreatment of people like him and that mistreatment doesn't occur because of race per se. Race is a social construct and there's a lot of factors there, from the weight of history to the way the human mind uses shortcuts and tricks to classify things.
People will fail to recognize someone they know up to half the time if met in a different context. I've written about that elsewhere.
So let's start with my usual disclaimer: I hate labels, but I use them as a necessary evil for trying to communicate with people via words on the Internet.
In the eyes of the world, I'm a White American woman and for much of my life was middle class but I don't click with a lot of White middle class Americans. My mom was a German immigrant and my father was part Cherokee and I tend to get along better with foreigners and Latinos and other demographics.
So skin color or ethnicity gets used as a proxy for a lot of things including culture and lived experience and it isn't always accurate and I know that from firsthand experience.
I recently saw a clip that I can't seem to find again. It's apparently from a TV show called New Amsterdam (season 3, episode 8 “Catch”) and it's about a Black birthing rights lawyer wanting vaginal birth after Caesarean (VBAC).
I found this clip and this one which covers the same story from that episode but I was looking for a clip where Dr. Goodwin explicitly says "If changing her race gives her a better score, maybe it's a racist tool."
It’s difficult to know where to stand on this. Evelyn obviously insists that determining the lives of people of color using statistics deprives them of their humanity, which is a fair point, but the counter-argument, presented by Karen, is that cultural trends aren’t inherently racist and tend to be actually based on tangible data. What Max did – manipulating Evelyn’s VBAC “score”, determining the chance of success, by saying she was white – made for a cool moment but possibly a bad medical decision.
The medical industry is extremely focused on defending their decisions in court. I know insider information on that aspect of the American medical industry.
I was friends with a doctor who told me the high cost of malpractice insurance and fear of being sued put pressure on physicians to make decisions to cover their own ass legally rather than worrying first and foremost about the desires and best interests of the patient.
I worked in insurance and was explicitly told to look out for the customer first and then quality control gave me a black mark for doing exactly that. I paid a claim without a specific date of service because it was a benefit we paid only once a year, I had proof the procedure occurred and a six week window in which it occurred, all in the same calendar year. So I paid it rather than waste company resources on acquiring more medical documents and delaying payment to the customer.
Also, I was a math geek in my youth and inducted into a college level math honor society in high school. I gave my math phobic homeschooled child a CHOICE between the usual algebra -geometry-trig high school track or statistics and didn't mention statistics is generally seen as harder. He chose statistics.
So in addition to scoring 107 in college statistics after they curved the grade, I taught statistics to my kids. One of our books was called How to Lie With Statistics.
The short version while trying to be respectful: YOU PEOPLE are illiterate as all hell about math, mmmkay?
The problem isn't "statistics." It's how that information gets used and misused, how it's collected and what it gets used to say that it doesn't really support.
A LOT of "statistics" used for decision making us about kike saying "Just how far is he? What does he weigh?" "I have no idea but he fit through our fat doorway and not our skinny doorway!"
Yeah.
So my ex kicked ass and took names as a career soldier and while on special duty as a recruiter, the INSURANCE guy told him "All you soldiers are overweight according to our civilian tables."
Why? Because they have to pass a PT test and muscle weighs a lot.
In the military, when some guy is a bodybuilder and can't make weight because he looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger, they do a tape test to document he's not fat.
So FUCK YOU and your idiotic tables of "averages" on Americans who aren't exactly the fittest people on the planet.
I read once that some ASSHOLE physician ROUTINELY delivered Black babies via forceps because he couldn't be arsed to WAIT on those babies.
I cannot tell you how angry that makes me.
Whatever the hell a VBAC calculator looks at, I can tell you that when it SAYS "Latina and Black women are at greater risk...blah blah blah" what those STATS are documenting is the consequences MEDICAL ABUSE, among other things.
I'm all for race based medicine and I strongly advocate that if you are a pregnant woman of color, you assume the WORST about White medical providers on the slightest excuse and consider options like a Black midwife over letting some upper class racist classist sack of shit with ZERO respect for you get within ten feet of you while pregnant or delivering and I am extremely pro "We NEED a special class of medical personnel TRAINED to do right by this population and don't have it."
Because head trauma at birth fucks you up for LIFE and you probably will never be diagnosed with a head injury if it's from a forceps birth.
Footnote
Related writing by me: