Political correctness backfires and vicitmizes Blacks: research about how to improve black health care gets attacked and repressed. If optimal medical treatment differs by race, then researchers gets attacked. After all, race does not exist and is only a construct. And it is only skin deep.
Our comments about such nonsense are at race and intelligence and political correctness. Any forensic specialist can tell the race of a person from a few bones. (Is Race A Valid Taxonomic Construct?)
The "race does not exist dogma" and "all races are equal dogma" is an impediment to medical research and victimizes black people who are denied optimal medical treatment.
Why Racial Profiling Persists in Medical Research
Experts within the research community say a small but stubborn streak of racial profiling has long persisted in the medical literature, borne out in studies that attribute health disparities between blacks and whites not to socioeconomics or access to health care alone but also to genetic differences between the races — a concept that implies that a biological category of race exists. […]
Researchers said also that even after adjusting for patients’ socioeconomic status, the survival gap between black and white patients remained for three of the cancers studied: breast, ovarian and prostate. […]
That conclusion, critics quickly responded, was flawed. "Race is a sociological concept, not a biological category," says Otis Brawley, the chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. "But this study brings race into medicine as a biological categorization." […]
But even while Albain’s and other similar studies don’t do much to shift the prevailing medical opinion — that disparities in health are fueled mainly by socioeconomics and access to care — they remind us that antiquated and unscientific ideas about race are alive and well in medical research in America.
Now the author is a little concerned about being seen as attacking academic research.
To be sure, no one is accusing authors like Albain of racism,
oh, really?
and people on both sides of the debate want to save lives.
as long as saving lives would not violate the racial equality dogma, of course
But the treatment of race by some medical researchers continues to create a stir. Lisa Carey, a breast cancer specialist at the University of North Carolina, believes that biological differences may well contribute to differences in health, such as the one Albain found, but that any discussion of race turns automatically contentious. "The idea of differences between races has been fraught with misuse over the years, and not just in medicine. Everyone is leery that it could be misused again," she says. "So we have to be careful how we interpret it, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore it."
Dcotors are intimidated by political correctness dogma. Like Galileo was hampered by the Bible. But, medical and natural science is more realistic then anthropology racial dogmatism:
81% of doctors still believed race should be used as a biological basis for diagnosing disease.
It is true, if we found the corresponding genes for all health and medical problems, that would be even better:
For Albain’s part, she says race is a surrogate for unknown genes — which, scientists agree, play a significant role in health outcomes. "When we find out what the [genetic] ‘it’ is, we will be able to test everyone for ‘it’ and we will find some Caucasians who have it and some blacks who don’t and we won’t be talking about black and white anymore," she says.
But don’t forget, most effects are not single genes but complex interactions. So don’t be too optimistic. And in the mean time, while we find race as a good "surrogate" to optimze treatment, should we ignore this knowledge just because we don’t know better?
The general argument about racial differences is about averages. Anecdotal evidence dosen’t really apply.
However the above post dosen’t deal with that at all, it highlights that lives are lost due to race denial.
We are all human, but like breeds of dogs different races do differ from each other. Regardless of what you think of the IQ thing (and again the post isn’t about that) there are real differences, I’m sure you’re aware of sickle cell anaemia (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Sickle_cell_distribution.jpg) and how its frequency varies with ethnicity.
I’m also sure you’ve heard of the differing lactose tolerance rates of different peoples.
There are thousands of little things like this. We humans never stopped evolving and these things built up over time. Also we interbreed with other species and subspecies of man that are now extinct. Did you hear that Eurasians have 4% Neanderthall admixture? And recently some Denisovan (google:Denisova hominin) admixture was found in a different population. There is also some evidence that African populations have admixture from a third source. East Asians share anatomical similarities to late Asiatic Homo Erectus ect.
But we are still all human at the end of the day, we do share a strong common interest in the welfare of humanity. Admitting differences won’t change that, and in this particular field it would save lives.
opps, not Geometry but Geography…
Ok, the problem i have with this races aren’t equal thing is that people will then use this as an excuse to be racist.Racism is basically the belief that one race of people is better than other races. So according to you , black people are dumb, excuse me but i’m a sophomore in high school and i’m in accelerated English, and take AP Human Geometry and i’m in Accelerated Chemistry, so i highly doubt that i’m “dumb” just because i’m black. I mean, you are totally entitled to your opinions but those opinions are what usually breeds and justify racism.