Playing the Race Card During a Pandemic

In recent days national news reporting on the coronavirus pandemic has focused upon the race of those dying from the disease as proof of structural racial bias in the American health care system.  In an article published in today’s American Greatness, Manhattan Institute Scholar Heather MacDonald cites news stories across the country reporting that the fact blacks and Hispanics are dying from the virus at a higher rate than their proportion of the population is clear evidence of racial bias.  Responding to this disparity the Chief Equity Officer of the American Medical Association went so far as to assert the “widely known history that American health institutions were designed to discriminate against blacks.”

In a March 27 letter to the President Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), and Corey Booker (D-N.J.), joined by Representatives Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Robin Kelly (D-Ill.), suggested that blacks may not be tested for COVID-19 because of the “implicit biases that every . . . medical professional carr[ies] around with them.”   This must include Dr. Jerome Adams, the U.S. Surgeon General, and the brain surgeon serving as Secretary of HUD, Dr. Ben Carson, both of whom are black.  MacDonald notes that the outrage by the media and Democrat politicians does not extend to the wildly disproportionate number of blacks who are murdered every year, primarily by other blacks.  While black New Yorkers, which are 22% of the city’s population, make up 27.5% of corona virus deaths, blacks account for 62.6% of the city’s murder and manslaughter victims.  In Chicago, where blacks are just under 1/3 of the population, they make up 68% of the corona virus deaths and 83% if the city’s homicide victims.   No media or politician outrage about that, other than endlessly parroting the “police are racist” narrative.   “Talking about black victimization would mean talking about black criminal offending, ” notes MacDonald.  Something that liberal politicians and their lapdogs in the media don’t want to discuss.