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Notes -
NYT implies racism is responsible for Black babies dying in childbirth (contrary to the very evidence they present)
https://archive.is/LuD27
Years back there was a popular news item that black babies were more likely to die in delivery than white babies. Intelligent minds disagreed on the cause, and the NYT blamed racism. There was a good discussion in it on the_motte. Newly published research now shows that the wealthiest black women also have high infant mortality rates, which does not trend down as income trends up as it does for whites. More strikingly, and not mentioned in the article but obvious in the graph, the poorest Hispanics have 25% less than the infant mortality of whites, and the poorest Asians have 50% the infant mortality of whites. (Theirs, too, trends down by income).
That’s an extraordinary piece of information: our poorest immigrant populations have wildly low infant mortality rates. Rationally, we should conclude that multigenerational Americans are struggling hard, both white and black. That should be the focus of the article. It’s not. But my takeaway is that the immigrant populations are healthier or (in the case of Hispanics) having younger babies. The idea that racist hospital workers or general ambient racism is selectively allowing black people to die and immigrant babies to thrive is obviously ridiculous when there is no accompanied evidence. Any hypothetical racist structure would harm the recent Chinese and Honduran as much as the African American except for most picky of racists.
There are two possible reasons for the plight of black mothers. The first is that their behaviors are bad. There is some evidence that black behaviors are worse on average, in particular that even the wealthiest black families have higher crime and obesity rates than expected. But it may also be that intelligent black women are being swooped up by corporations at a higher rate, and if they are marrying black men (or becoming single mothers) then they may be the breadwinner of the family. The added stress of being a working mother may lead to the increased infant mortality rate which is not found among white mothers.
Comments below describe some concrete ways you could actually do it, but this quote really stood out to me:
If that's the case, then why is the NYT simply refusing to describe or cite any of those data which controlled for biological factors? Instead, every piece of data the NYT shows is controlling for SES or particular hospital. This is absurd to the point of literally being evidence for the opposite of their quote. Controlling for SES probably mostly correlates with things like "the environments where we live, where we work, where we play, where we sleep". Controlling for particular hospital likely eliminates much room for outright racism in medical treatment. (It is stupidly unlikely that every hospital, or even a large majority, considering the political make-up of their employees, are just blatantly racist. If you look at specific hospitals and some are just atrocious on this score, while others do mostly fine, you can maybe go look to see if there is some racism there, but if everyone basically has similar gaps, it seems implausible.)
They're not even trying to bring data which shows the thing they're claiming it shows. (Obvious disclaimer that a genuine attempt to do this very well may show that racism is a likely explanation. I'm only claiming that this isn't even a genuine attempt.)
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