Does race make a difference or does it not make a difference?
I remember a time, a simpler time, long ago, when the common wisdom was that the solution to the problem of racism was to achieve a color-blind society - a society in which a person's skin color made no more difference to anyone than the color of his eyes. We seem to have lost our way at some point, deciding that we, as a society, believe that race does make a difference. As another example of this fact, the AMA has recently apologized for racial disparities in the provision of health care in this country.
I have to wonder, do they really understand what they've done? A perfectly analogous situation would be if the justice department were to apologize for the disparity between the number of blacks and whites on death row. Can you imagine the public outcry if that happened? I mean, we already knew that there way more blacks were convicted of murder but we didn't realize that you guys were preferentially convicting them on purpose! Why were you doing that? And if that's what you're doing, don't apologize, just stop doing it!
Likewise, the AMA's apology amounts to an admission of racism. They have apparently been intentionally giving inferior care to their African American patients. Again, rather than apologize, why not simply stop doing it? The answer, of course, is that they really aren't responsible. With rare exceptions (the Tuskegee experiment, comes to mind) you won't find any doctor who makes it part of his practice to provide one level of care to members of one race and another level of care to another race. Nor are any such health care policies in place, nor has the AMA issued any such guidelines. Are there disparities in the levels of care that blacks and whites receive in this country? Absolutely, there are! Just as there are huge disparities in income, level of education, crime etc. But for the AMA to say, "Yeah, sorry. These disparities exist because we fucked up. We've been giving shitty care to blacks while giving excellent care to whites, " is obviously ludicrous. If this were the case then the solution, as I have said, would be simple - STOP DOING IT! But, even though the AMA has apologized for these disparities, I'm pretty confident they will persist - at least for the short term. Which means that either a) the AMA was never responsible for these disparities in health care to begin with or b) they were responsible, but are going to choose to go on providing disparate care based on their patient's race.
We need to put aside this issue once and for all. The simple existence of racial disparity would not be a problem if race made no more difference to people than hair or eye color. Can you imagine anyone studying whether blue-eyed people received the same level of health care as brown-eyed people? If there are systematic ways in which our society is treating whites differently from blacks the solution is to seek out these injustices and to fight them. But the simple existence of these disparities does not necessarily point to any such injustice. And, if we are serious about achieving a color-blind society, the question of racial disparity is one that we need to stop asking.
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